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Locating Wittgenstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2010

John W. Cook*
Affiliation:
Chico, California

Extract

Wittgenstein wrote ‘While thinking philosophically we see problems in places where there are none. It is for philosophy to show that there are no problems’. He meant that the ‘problems’ philosophers grapple with are of their own making. In a related remark he said: ‘This is the essence of a philosophical problem. The question itself is the result of a muddle. And when the question is removed, this is not by answering it’. Even more explicitly he said: ‘All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols’. As he understood his job, it was not to produce or construct something; his job was entirely destructive. (He compared it to destroying houses of cards.) This is how Wittgenstein thought of philosophy when he thought about it in the abstract, and I share this view of philosophy. I believe that when we see how to dispose of all philosophical categories, our job is finished. For example, in epistemology our job is not to argue that it is possible to know such-and-such because so-and-so; rather, we undermine all those ideas that make it seem as though we could not know such-and-such. Undermining philosophical ideas takes the form: When we philosophise, we are tempted to think so-and-so, but if we consider that idea, and do so while remaining free of all philosophical jargon, we find that we cannot make sense of it.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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References

1 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 47.

2 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Occasions, eds. Klagge, James C. and Nordmann, Alfred (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), 366Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 171.

4 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations, eds. Anscombe, G. E. M. and Rhees, R., trans, Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford, Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar, §118.

5 For illustrations of this method see chapters 4 and 15 of my Wittgenstein, Empiricism and Language (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999).

6 Ebersole, , Meaning and Saying (Washington, D. C., University Press of America, 1979), ixGoogle Scholar.

7 Harré, ‘The Complexity of Wittgenstein's Methods’, Philosophy 83, 255–265. Page references in the text that are not otherwise identified are references to this article.

8 He cites two recent articles of mine: ‘Did Wittgenstein Practise What He Preached?’ Philosophy 81, 445–462 and ‘Did Wittgenstein Speak with the Vulgar or Think with the Learned? Or Did He do Both?’ Philosophy 82, 213–233.

9 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961)Google Scholar 5.631.

10 See my ‘Human Beings’ in Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Peter Winch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).

11 The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed, gen. ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge University Press, 2005) declares: ‘Hume was a neutral monist’ (686).

12 Wittgenstein, , Notebooks, 1914-1916 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1961), 89Google Scholar.

13 See above.

14 Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 49.

15 Wittgenstein, , Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge 1932–35, ed. Ambrose, Alice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21Google Scholar.

16 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rhees, Rush, trans. Hargreaves, Raymond and White, Roger (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar, §57.

17 Wittgenstein, , The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford University Press, 1958), 67Google Scholar.

18 Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, ed. P. T. Geach (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 47.

19 Wittgenstein, , Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, eds. Anscombe, G. E. M. and Von Wright, G. H., trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar, §317.

20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, op. cit., 94.

21 This Humean rejection of the Cartesian self or ego had several corollaries which Wittgenstein spelled out in his writings and lectures. One of these he expressed in such phrases as ‘Nothing is hidden’ and ‘Everything is open to view’, where he meant to include, as being open to view, the ‘mental life’ of other people (see Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books. op. cit., 6). Another he expressed by rejecting the idea that some things are in the mind and others outside. Thus, in his 1932 lectures he said, ‘This simile of being “inside” or “outside” the mind is pernicious’ (Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge 1932–35, op. cit., 25). And later: ‘The “inner” and the “outer”, a picture’ (Wittgenstein, Zettel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), §554). In his last writings on this subject, in 1950, he wrote: ‘The “inner” is a delusion’ (Wittgenstein, , Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2, (Oxford University Press, 1992), 84Google Scholar).

22 Harré's point about indexicals is not new to philosophy. In 1918 Russell made the same point, although his terminology was different. He spoke of a class of words which he called ‘emphatic particulars’, amongst which he explicitly included ‘this’ and ‘I’. These words, he said, ‘pick out certain particulars from the universe by their relation to oneself’ (Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), 222Google Scholar; emphasis added). So Russell and Harré are agreed that in such cases as ‘I am in pain’ the first person pronoun has a referential function. They are both opposed to Wittgenstein's three claims, regarding the cases in question: that (i) our use of ‘I’ is misleading except in references to a body, that (ii) Lichtenberg was right to compare ‘I think’ to ‘It is raining’, and that (iii) saying ‘I am in pain’ is like groaning, in that in neither case is a person mentioned or alluded to.

23 See Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books, op. cit., 66; Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1932–1935, 21 and Philosophical Occasions, op. cit., 101. He also treated differently what ‘I’ means to the speaker and what it means to the hearer. For example, he wrote: ‘Remember that whatever the word “I” means to you, to the other man it draws his attention to a human body…’ Ibid., 228).

24 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. §410.

25 In the appendix of Wittgenstein, Empiricism and Language I cite numerous instances in which Wittgenstein is reacting to something Russell had said.

26 ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’ reprinted in Mysticism and Logic, op. cit., 1951, 224 (originally published in 1910).

27 Philosophical terminology changes from time to time, and here we have a case in point. Whereas in 1910 Russell, Moore, and others spoke of a ‘constituent of a proposition’, they would later use the more understandable phrase ‘constituent of a fact’. I have chosen to use the latter phrase.

28 ‘On the Nature of Acquaintance’ reprinted in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 164.

29 Bouwsma, Oets, ‘The Blue Book’, reprinted in Philosophical Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press: 1965) 189Google Scholar.

30 To be fair to Bouwsma, I must add that he discussed at length in this piece Wittgenstein's account of how one falls into – and can escape from – philosophical muddles. But he discussed this only in the abstract and did not review what Wittgenstein did in particular cases.

31 Just how one is to recognize those misleading forms of words is not clearly spelled out by Wittgenstein, but I have given an account of this in my book ‘The Undiscovered Wittgenstein’ (Amherst, Humanity Books, 2005), 65–75 and in “Bouwsma on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Method,’ Philosophical Investigations, 31:4, 302–310.

32 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. I, op. cit., §666.

33 Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge 1932–1935, op. cit., 21–22.

34 ‘Notes on Logic’ in Notebooks, 1914–1916, op. cit., 93.

35 For detailed criticisms of the philosophical notion of a body, see the following two articles by Long, Douglas C.: ‘Descartes' Argument for Mind-Body Dualism’, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. I, No. 3 (Spring, 1969), 259273Google Scholar, and ‘The Bodies of Persons’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol LXXI, No. 10 (May, 1974), 291–301.

36 Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge 1932–1935, op. cit., 119.

37 Ibid., 61.

38 The Big Typescript (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 360.

39 Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, op.cit., 365.

40 Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, op. cit., 36.

41 In my book Wittgenstein, Empiricism and Language I devoted chapters 7, 8 and 9 to expounding Wittgenstein's concept of criteria and showed (77–90) that the concept is governed by seven rules.

42 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., 178.

43 The Blue and The Brown Books, op. cit., 73.

44 Ibid., 23 and 49.

45 §283. This passages continues, rather surprisingly, as follows: ‘… or, if you like, of a soul which some body has. And how can a body have a soul’. Why does Wittgenstein introduce here a soul, or, in his words, ‘a soul which some body has’? One cannot be sure, but consider the following. If you are going to hold that it is unthinkable that a body should have a pain, why should it be more thinkable that a soul has a pain or that a body has a soul? I suspect that Wittgenstein meant that dualists should find themselves embarrassed by such questions.

46 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2, op. cit., 66–67.

47 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1969), §4.

48 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, §1063.

49 The only philosopher I know of who consistently and successfully conducts his philosophising in a way similar to the way I have tried to describe here is Frank Ebersole. See his books Things We Know (Xlibris, 2001), Meaning and Saying (Xlibris, 2002), and Language and Perception (Xlibris, 2002).

50 He also regards as philosophically essential a distinction between first-person avowals and third-person descriptions of what is thought, felt, etc. I think that this is a thoroughly bogus idea. Sometimes, of course, we react to pains by groaning or saying ‘Ouch’, which Harré thinks of as ‘expressions of pain’. But when I go to a doctor and describe for him the aches and pains in my lower back and the tingling in my feet, I may say, for example, ‘It feels like a mild electric shock’. Is that not descriptive? We should also ask how the idea of expressive language is to apply to cases in which one says, for example, ‘My after-image has gone from pink to green’ or ‘I am thinking about your tax problems’. Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians never bring up such examples when discussing this subject; they invariably talk about pains. This constant use of pain as a paradigm is an obvious case of a one-sided diet of examples. So let us hear no more about that supposed distinction.

51 ‘Moore's Defence of Common Sense’ in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. Paul Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1952), 316.