Great post. Was especially cool to see you mention this –
> “I know that this is a hand,” Moore says at one point.
> “What an odd use of ‘I know’!” Wittgenstein muses.
> Looking at a tree on a nature-walk, one might say, “I know that this is an elm.” Perfectly sensible.
> But, “I know that this is a tree”? That would only be expected if one were speaking about something that looked ambiguous between being a shrub or a tree. In short, in our ordinary usage of language, “I know” is reserved for situations where one might not know.
This something I've been pondering for a while, but have not known how to articulate week. Namely, that by declaring some fact, you are somehow also admitting to the possibility of that fact not being true.
How does this intersect with the situation where people's base narratives of reality or so so different? Atheism and theism (and the varying origin stories that can go with them) can be abstract higher-level questions about how cow's got their 4 stomachs, but when an indigenous American (Christian or not) sees the deer as a cousin because it is given life by the same creator, I can begin to feel a little more presuppositionalist, because the common sense of the indigenous human is so different from the (detached) modern mindset.
Great question - I think the question is whether the indigenous American would have anything to say to the detached, modern person. Is there anything he or she could point to to indicate that the world is not soulless raw material? Is there any common experience she could invite the modern man to have and to experience the unity of life?
"Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?" :)
Would Wiggenstein differ from Bahnsen/VanTil by arguing that the philosophically correct starting point is that humans are universally narrative-driven beings, instead of requiring a particular narrative to make sense of the human experience?
Hm, I'm thinking of Peterson's elaboration of that in Maps of Meaning. He argues that even the simplest human action or plan is represented in our mind as a story, narrative structure. Some of our stories are as simple as, "I'm trying to get to school right now." They're not worldviews. But that alone is sufficient to argue that the scientific mode of knowledge - pure facts - is not the most fundamental kind of cognition to the human mind.
Wittgenstein doesn't make the point as much about narrative, but about our human form of life, in which those stories arise. And I think the difference with Bahnsen/Van Til would be that these do not differ between believer and unbeliever or between worldviews. All human beings share aspects of our form of life, though there are indeed cultural differences. And these are the inescapable starting points of human thought. Implicitly, the Van Til assumes that our starting point is a Cartesian ego looking for God to secure the possibility of sense-knowledge.
This is intriguing, but I worry that doubts about common sensical claims--or claims that "stand fast for us", or "foundational beliefs", or our shared human understanding, or our animal principles--arise precisely because common sense (or whichever version one goes in for) is a bit of a mess. Philosophical puzzles, such as they are, arise because our basic assumptions about the world turn out to be in conflict with one another. In Knowledge & Lotteries, John Hawthorne puts it like this: "The whole point of our puzzle is that common sense pushes us in different directions. A war of words deploying the ‘It is common sense that’ operator seems to have no clear victor." And this sort of puzzle is where the task of justifying those fundamental/foundational/common sense/shared/animal judgments gets a grip, because it forces us to reject at least some aspect of common sense. What should stay and what should go? (For what it's worth, I don't think saying that makes one a dogmatist in any sort of problematic sense.)
Some people do not like the word “dogma.” Fortunately they are free, and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men—so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell’s chapel. “I say God is One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was his “temperament”), and he would turn up later with three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other than before.
I am sorry, but this is not remotely convincing. It denies the very purpose of philosophy, which is to escape the merely human, to get to the view from nowhere. This may be impossible, but the philosopher seeks it anyway. To escape mere appearances and reach solid ground. The whole talk of language games is pure sophistry which refuses to acknowledge any of the difficulties which have always assailed philosophy. It is Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley by kicking a rock, when Berkeley's position made sense of Johnson's experience just as well as naive realism. To me it seems obvious that the world is a shadow, that experience is but a passing phantom, that the ultimately real world (if there is one) is one we do not see. Is this an irrational and inhuman perspective? Perhaps. But if Plato is irrational, then I will be proud to bear that title too. Wittgenstein's position reminds me of logical positivism in its attempt to rule out certain questions as meaningless which are clearly not meaningless. The question "Is there an external world" is grammatically well-formed. Its meaning is as clear as the meaning of any other sentence. Thus, it can be true or false and therefore it can be doubted.
"When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses."
You move from the idea that if something is meaningful that it must therefore be either true or false, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein is disputing. Language creates the possibility of truth or falsity, but not all utterances are playing that game. It's important to realize when we're doing something else with language, i.e. something other than asserting a truth claim which could be verified to the satisfaction of or using the methods of the historically located discourse called the scientific method. Language has other ways of making meaning.
All indicative statements are playing that game. That is what it means to be making a statement, as opposed to an imperative or interrogative statement. I do not buy the language game framing. The linguistic obsession of contemporary philosophers is not healthy. Philosophy of language is important as a branch of epistemology, since we reason using language, but it is not the center or core of philosophy.
What you miss is that language's meaning-making function cannot be reduced to the signs which make up the utterance, but must also include the subjective position of the one making the utterance. When someone says to you, "I'm lying to you," (an indicative statement) this gap between the enunciation and the enunciator is revealed -- we realize that we cannot make sense of this event without taking into account the desire of the other ("why are you saying this?"). Lacan goes the furthest in drawing this out, but I think it's absolutely vital to realize that the truth of language speaks in ways which a binary game of verification often cannot make sense of.
I suppose this is true to some extent (and I won't deny that there are nuances to some indicative statements), but is it really true when I am doing philosophy? At that point I am making statements about objective reality, which are the same when anyone utters them. For example, 2+2=4 has the same meaning when I say it and when you say it. The same is true of any statement made about the world as it is. Why you are saying something may matter in day-to-day life, but it is irrelevant in philosophy.
I don't see why this would make them irrelevant. The fact that there that something doesn't matter in philosophy and does matter in daily life does not tell us anything about whether philosophy matters in daily life. Does grammar matter in making a sandwich? Does the Iliad effect how we built steam engines? And even if I assume that you are correct that this would make philosophy irrelevant to daily life it wouldn't matter. The ultimate ends of human life transcend human life. Auden said that poetry does nothing, and he was right. The highest philosophy is equally useless to our day-to-day lives, because that which is of ultimate value is beyond and behind all these phantoms of the changing world. Truth is valuable because its contemplation leads one to the eternal and unchangeable Good. The day-to-day is passing, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are eternal. Philosophy is concerned with these things.
Great post. Was especially cool to see you mention this –
> “I know that this is a hand,” Moore says at one point.
> “What an odd use of ‘I know’!” Wittgenstein muses.
> Looking at a tree on a nature-walk, one might say, “I know that this is an elm.” Perfectly sensible.
> But, “I know that this is a tree”? That would only be expected if one were speaking about something that looked ambiguous between being a shrub or a tree. In short, in our ordinary usage of language, “I know” is reserved for situations where one might not know.
This something I've been pondering for a while, but have not known how to articulate week. Namely, that by declaring some fact, you are somehow also admitting to the possibility of that fact not being true.
How does this intersect with the situation where people's base narratives of reality or so so different? Atheism and theism (and the varying origin stories that can go with them) can be abstract higher-level questions about how cow's got their 4 stomachs, but when an indigenous American (Christian or not) sees the deer as a cousin because it is given life by the same creator, I can begin to feel a little more presuppositionalist, because the common sense of the indigenous human is so different from the (detached) modern mindset.
Great question - I think the question is whether the indigenous American would have anything to say to the detached, modern person. Is there anything he or she could point to to indicate that the world is not soulless raw material? Is there any common experience she could invite the modern man to have and to experience the unity of life?
"Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?" :)
Would Wiggenstein differ from Bahnsen/VanTil by arguing that the philosophically correct starting point is that humans are universally narrative-driven beings, instead of requiring a particular narrative to make sense of the human experience?
Hm, I'm thinking of Peterson's elaboration of that in Maps of Meaning. He argues that even the simplest human action or plan is represented in our mind as a story, narrative structure. Some of our stories are as simple as, "I'm trying to get to school right now." They're not worldviews. But that alone is sufficient to argue that the scientific mode of knowledge - pure facts - is not the most fundamental kind of cognition to the human mind.
Wittgenstein doesn't make the point as much about narrative, but about our human form of life, in which those stories arise. And I think the difference with Bahnsen/Van Til would be that these do not differ between believer and unbeliever or between worldviews. All human beings share aspects of our form of life, though there are indeed cultural differences. And these are the inescapable starting points of human thought. Implicitly, the Van Til assumes that our starting point is a Cartesian ego looking for God to secure the possibility of sense-knowledge.
This is intriguing, but I worry that doubts about common sensical claims--or claims that "stand fast for us", or "foundational beliefs", or our shared human understanding, or our animal principles--arise precisely because common sense (or whichever version one goes in for) is a bit of a mess. Philosophical puzzles, such as they are, arise because our basic assumptions about the world turn out to be in conflict with one another. In Knowledge & Lotteries, John Hawthorne puts it like this: "The whole point of our puzzle is that common sense pushes us in different directions. A war of words deploying the ‘It is common sense that’ operator seems to have no clear victor." And this sort of puzzle is where the task of justifying those fundamental/foundational/common sense/shared/animal judgments gets a grip, because it forces us to reject at least some aspect of common sense. What should stay and what should go? (For what it's worth, I don't think saying that makes one a dogmatist in any sort of problematic sense.)
GK Chesterton:
Some people do not like the word “dogma.” Fortunately they are free, and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men—so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell’s chapel. “I say God is One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was his “temperament”), and he would turn up later with three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other than before.
I am sorry, but this is not remotely convincing. It denies the very purpose of philosophy, which is to escape the merely human, to get to the view from nowhere. This may be impossible, but the philosopher seeks it anyway. To escape mere appearances and reach solid ground. The whole talk of language games is pure sophistry which refuses to acknowledge any of the difficulties which have always assailed philosophy. It is Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley by kicking a rock, when Berkeley's position made sense of Johnson's experience just as well as naive realism. To me it seems obvious that the world is a shadow, that experience is but a passing phantom, that the ultimately real world (if there is one) is one we do not see. Is this an irrational and inhuman perspective? Perhaps. But if Plato is irrational, then I will be proud to bear that title too. Wittgenstein's position reminds me of logical positivism in its attempt to rule out certain questions as meaningless which are clearly not meaningless. The question "Is there an external world" is grammatically well-formed. Its meaning is as clear as the meaning of any other sentence. Thus, it can be true or false and therefore it can be doubted.
"When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses."
Pascal, Blaise. Pascal's Pensées. Tribeca Press. Kindle Edition.
You move from the idea that if something is meaningful that it must therefore be either true or false, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein is disputing. Language creates the possibility of truth or falsity, but not all utterances are playing that game. It's important to realize when we're doing something else with language, i.e. something other than asserting a truth claim which could be verified to the satisfaction of or using the methods of the historically located discourse called the scientific method. Language has other ways of making meaning.
All indicative statements are playing that game. That is what it means to be making a statement, as opposed to an imperative or interrogative statement. I do not buy the language game framing. The linguistic obsession of contemporary philosophers is not healthy. Philosophy of language is important as a branch of epistemology, since we reason using language, but it is not the center or core of philosophy.
What you miss is that language's meaning-making function cannot be reduced to the signs which make up the utterance, but must also include the subjective position of the one making the utterance. When someone says to you, "I'm lying to you," (an indicative statement) this gap between the enunciation and the enunciator is revealed -- we realize that we cannot make sense of this event without taking into account the desire of the other ("why are you saying this?"). Lacan goes the furthest in drawing this out, but I think it's absolutely vital to realize that the truth of language speaks in ways which a binary game of verification often cannot make sense of.
I suppose this is true to some extent (and I won't deny that there are nuances to some indicative statements), but is it really true when I am doing philosophy? At that point I am making statements about objective reality, which are the same when anyone utters them. For example, 2+2=4 has the same meaning when I say it and when you say it. The same is true of any statement made about the world as it is. Why you are saying something may matter in day-to-day life, but it is irrelevant in philosophy.
Then you have just admitted that philosophy is irrelevant to the day-to-day.
I don't see why this would make them irrelevant. The fact that there that something doesn't matter in philosophy and does matter in daily life does not tell us anything about whether philosophy matters in daily life. Does grammar matter in making a sandwich? Does the Iliad effect how we built steam engines? And even if I assume that you are correct that this would make philosophy irrelevant to daily life it wouldn't matter. The ultimate ends of human life transcend human life. Auden said that poetry does nothing, and he was right. The highest philosophy is equally useless to our day-to-day lives, because that which is of ultimate value is beyond and behind all these phantoms of the changing world. Truth is valuable because its contemplation leads one to the eternal and unchangeable Good. The day-to-day is passing, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are eternal. Philosophy is concerned with these things.