Wittgenstein

John Perry
Hello, I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Coming up after the news, it’s Philosophy Talk.

John Perry
Our topic today: the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Oneof the 20th century’s most influential, controversial, and quotable philosophers.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Ken Taylor
“Philosophical problems arise from language gone on holiday.”

John Perry
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

“The limits of my language are the limits of the world.”

To understand the history of modern philosophy, one needs to understand Wittgenstein’s influence: the Tractatus on the logical positivists and his second book, the Philosophical Investigations, on ordinary language philosophy.

Though Wittgenstein was neither a positivist nor an ordinary language philosophy himself.

To learn more about Wittgenstein, his impact on modern thinking, and why it’s so important in the 21st century, we’ll be joined by Juliet Floyd from Boston University.

Ken Taylor
When philosophy talked continues—after the news.

John Perry
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of 91.7 KALW—local and innovative public radio for San Francisco.

Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the lovely Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
And from that oasis of thought we migrate to this oasis of the air and via our blog to the internet,, where I’ve already weighed in on our topic today. The topic is Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Now, John, I know you were raised at Cornell by a bunch of Wittgensteinians. Isn’t that right?

John Perry
Well yes. So when I was at Cornell, two of Wittgenstein’s students, Max Black and Norman Malcolm, were the big guns. Very Wittgensteinian place.

So you imbibed a lot of Wittgenstein. What do you think about Wittgenstein?

Well, I divide Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his influence into the good, the not so good, and the ugly.

Ken Taylor
I kind of like that. The good, the not so good, and the ugly. Tell me about the good. What do you think? What’s the good?

John Perry
Well, I like a lot of his first book, The Tractatus. Itstarts with the observation that the world is a totality of facts, not of things, right? That’s a very deep insight. You can list all the things in the world Ken Taylor, John Perry, Juliet Floyd, and you won’t have the world. You need to say what they’re like and what they’re doing.

Right, Ken Taylor was drinking water or something like that, right? Truer words were never spoken. That’s good.

Simple idea. But one that I think has profound consequences in later. And I tend to like his philosophy of language, I don’t think he gave up a lot of the tenets of the Tractatus in the investigations, I think he deepen them with this concept of a language game. The idea that, to understand a word like slab, for instance, it’s not enough to know that stands for a certain kind of building block, you have to see how it works in the given take of life as as expressed in language. And to do that you stripped down a language games with the central bank, it’s a great idea. I try to use it in my work.

Ken Taylor
Language as action. I mean, that’s the thing, right? Language is concrete doing? I mean, and it’s the use of language to do things and accomplishing that really matters. Okay, that’s some of the good What about the not so good.

John Perry
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind—I think it’s a mixture of insight and shortcoming. He had this idea that he wouldn’t have called behavioristic. But it became sort of behavioristic in in in as it developed, and I think it was supplanted by better work by people like Lewis and Fodor and putting them over, took some of these ideas and develop them in a more interesting way.

Ken Taylor
I think you’re right. I mean, Wittgenstein was one of the great he initiated the turn away from inner life, you know, there’s not this stuff in us. It’s all out there. And you’re right, it leads to behavior isn’t I think that’s ugly, but you know, you say that’s the not so good. What do you think is the really ugly stuff in vacation?

John Perry
Well, I think is idea that philosophers don’t build theories was pretty, pretty bad. The only philosopher I remember saying anything kind about his Frege. He, he, you know, kind of manipulated Russell and more. And then there was this kind of cult of personality that built up around him. When I was an undergraduate, I read Malcolm’s memoir, and I thought, oh, Wittgenstein. He’s great. He’s one of these philosophical heroes, kind of like Clint Eastwood. He cuts through everything and takes us to deeper depths. But by time I was writing my dissertation. I thought, what a jerk.

Well, yeah, well, you might. To learn more about Wittgensein the person, aour roving philosophical reporter, Zoe Corneli, files this report.

Zoe Corneli
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a genius and like a lot of geniuses, he was also really weird.

David Edmonds
Calling him an eccentric is, in a way, far too mild for what the cause was, but also doesn’t quite capture his genius.

Zoe Corneli
David Edmonds is co-author with John Eidenow of the book “Wittgenstein’s Poker.”

David Edmonds
One can’t understand the bewitchment of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his reputation without also recognizing that there was something extraordinary about his personality and the sheer power of His presence. He was relatively short. He’s five foot six. He’s got dark hair, he’s got piercing blue eyes. He’s a bundle of nervous energy, is extremely charismatic. He has a great deal of presence. He walks fast, you talk fast. He is intolerant, capable of a great intolerance so that many people tiptoed around him because if they said something stupid, he could pounce on them. And some of them found it very difficult to recover from Wittgensteintein’s, what some would say,bullying approach.

Zoe Corneli
Edmond’s book is subtitled “the story of a 10 minute argument between two great philosophers.

David Edmonds
It was a cold night in Cambridge, England on October 25 1946. And Karl Popper, the Viennese born philosopher was newly arrived in England from New Zealand where he’d spent the war years and he was invited up to the Cambridge mall Science Club, which is the philosophy society at Cambridge University. And he was asked to deliver a paper and he was asked to bring up a philosophical puzzle, popper decided to lecture on the subject of their philosophical problem.

Zoe Corneli
During the talk, Wittgenstein, the club’s president, started interrupting, demanding an example of a philosophical problem. Nothing Popper came up with could satisfy him.

David Edmonds
And eventually Wittgenstein was getting so agitated, that he bent down and he picked up the fireside poker, and he was stimulating with it wildly, and he demanded a popper an example of a mole principle, where upon popper said they’ll should not threaten a visiting lecturer with a poker.

Zoe Corneli
Wittgenstein wrote his first book, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in the trenches during WWI.

David Edmonds
And once he’s published the Tractatus, he believes he solved all the problems of philosophy. And as you solved all the problems of philosophy, there’s not much point doing any more philosophy.

Zoe Corneli
Wittgenstein spent time working as a gardener, a primary school teacher and an architect.

David Edmonds
And eventually, he decides, actually, you haven’t solved all the problems of philosophy. And it’s time to go back to the discipline.

Zoe Corneli
Wittgenstein spent the rest of his life writing, but didn’t finish anything.

David Edmonds
If you go to a library now, or if you go to a bookshop, now, you will see a whole shelf of books written by Wittgenstein. He scribbled all through his life. And these books have been assembled, posthumously.

Zoe Corneli
Wittgenstein died in 1951. His most famous work, Philosophical Investigations, was published two years later. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Zoe Corneli,

John Perry
Thanks Zoe for that report. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, with me is Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And you John, you’re a much nicer guy than Wittgenstein, I gotta say. We’re joined today by Juliet Floyd. She’s professor of philosophy at Boston University, co-editor of “Future Past: The Analytic Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy.” Juliet, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Juliet Floyd
Hello, John and Ken.

John Perry
Hi, Julia, John Perry here. Julia, people often talk about the linguistic turn and 20th century philosophy. Tell us what it was and what did our man victim Stein have to do with it? Right.

Juliet Floyd
Well, I think it has to do with Wittgenstein case, the problem of the nature of logic, coming to the center of his attention, as soon as he read Frager and Russell, as a young man, Russell’s system, as you know, in Principia Mathematica was in part devoted to solving the paradoxes that had emerged when Frager tried to make logic a maximally universal internally consistent, perfectly explicit science and to derive all of arithmetic from it. And Vidkun Stein was very taken with the idea that when one tries to formulate the laws of logic fully explicitly, one generates a contradiction. So, he begins exploring the limits of sense from inside and more or less tries his whole life I think, to see how to make sense of logic with a small l.

John Perry
Let me just remind our listeners language about community about Frege and Russell. Frege was end of the 19th century early 20th century logician and philosopher and Russell was famous for being Bertrand Russell, the anti war person, but but between the two of them, and with help from others, they really revolutionize the field of logic and prepared it as one of the great influences on the development of computer science. So so we see victim Stein is kind of the philosopher influenced by this really momentous development in logic. So sorry for interrupting, continue.

Ken Taylor
So let’s set the stage. So follow logic struck. These folks at the beginning, toward the end of the 19th century, and at the beginning of the 20th century, because of fragance in innovations as like this great clarifying thing, right. I mean, it was this great, utterly clarifying thing. Conrad said, way back when that logic of logic hadn’t advanced since Aristotle, right. But but at the beginning of the 20th century, toward the end of the 19th century, huge advances in logic, is that right?

Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s right, Ken. Frege, in fact, explodes the complexity of the subject. And John’s exactly right. Frager wrote down the first formalized language, and although Frager didn’t think of it this way, we might say it was really the first programming language ever written down. But Frager retained in his philosophy of logic, a very Kantian, enlightenment, traditional Universalist view that logic formulates a universal framework, within which all human discourse insofar as it concerns truth takes place. So that big, a contextual picture of logic is now reinforced with a very sophisticated mathematical tool. And it’s to Vic and Stein’s great credit that he saw right away as a young man, that this would revolutionize philosophy, because philosophers would try to use this mathematics as an organ and for theories of mind and language and meaning.

John Perry
So but you mentioned logic with a small Allen and what what I get from that is, is these guys, Russell and Frager, at least the early Russell really had kind of this platonic our view of logic as as they’re disclosing to us these truths of some ideal world, the mathematicians paradise Russell call it but but victim Stein, at least by the time he wrote the investigations really pull that out of the clouds and saw Lang logic, I guess, is just part of language, a very human institution is an AI logic with a small l, I think that’s what you mean write logic as, as grounded in language not grounded in some abstract heaven of Platonic ideas?

Speaker 1
Yes, and I would say even in the early philosophy, the reaction against Frager. And Russell is very important in Wittgenstein, where they had made logic, the maximally general science whose laws concerned all objects and all concepts, and would cover all discourse in any other science. Vic and Stein responds in his early work with the other extreme, saying logic is empty. What makes logic logic is it has no factual content, there is no such thing as a logical object, there is no such thing as a logical law. What we have are very complicated patterns, grammatical structures that are fundamental to any natural languages. But there is no general law of logic that itself is true or false, right. But that’s because logic emerges through what we say that is true and false, in particular case.

Ken Taylor
That’s because Wittgenstein, see, tell me if I’ve got this, right, that’s because I understand it. That’s because Vidkun Stein thought that logic was basically something like the frame or the scaffolding that was not part of the picture. Right. And, and so you couldn’t state logical truths, that within the frame and the scaffolding, you can state things that have sense, right, that can be made that can be made true or false by, by by the world somehow, but the frame or scaffolding that makes that those statements possible. Logic is at that level. So it can’t You can’t really assert logic, is that right?

Speaker 1
So precisely, logic needs to be treated in a different way, as you say, at a different level. If you and I are able to disagree over the facts. That’s because already we subscribe to some willingness to acknowledge certain patterns of argumentation and reasoning is relevant. And there is no holding those up and asking whether they correspond to the facts if in fact, these laws, as you say, are the scaffolding against which the whole practice of talking about truth and falsity takes place.

Ken Taylor
So Juliet well, we’ll come back to this in just a little bit. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Our subject today is Ludwig Wittgenstein, our guest is Juliet Floyd from Boston University.

John Perry
We’ve been talking about Wittgenstein life and his role in 20th century philosophy. Next, his main ideas about language and how they changed or didn’t change between these two most important works. The Tractatus and his later philosophical investigations, you can join us by calling toll free at 1-800-525-9917.

Is logic the scaffolding other world or part of the world? We’ll take your calls and emails when Philosophy Talk continues.

Steve Reich and “Explanations come to an end somewhere”—music based on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I’m told. This is Philosophy Talk. And I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. I wasn’t too impressed with that music based on Wittgenstein, but hey, there you go. Our topic is Lichtenstein, tell us your thoughts about analytic philosophy, the linguistic turn if you know about Wittgenstein,’s role in it. Sure. We’re in good, bad or indifferent thing that linguistic turn in philosophy, whatever your whatever your view, let’s let’s hear it.

John Perry
The toll free number is 1-800-525-9917. That’s 1-800-525-9917. You can also email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot O R G.

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Juliet Floyd from Boston University. Juliet, I’m gonna go back to what we were talking about at the end about and a little bit about how Vidkun Stein’s view changes from the, from the trek Todoist. To the investigation, because you were saying, and I, I take, I think you’re right, that logic for Vic and Stein is the scaffolding, right. And what he’s trying to do is kind of articulate the limits of the thinkable and the saleable. And logic is at the sort of end that you can’t really say what logic is because you can’t say what the frame is like, right? He’s got this distinction. It’s between saying and showing, for example, but he changes his mind, at least some people think radically, about this whole thing as he moves to the investigation. Do you think that’s right that he changes his mind radically?

Speaker 1
I think he does evolve. I think he comes to think that the Tractatus was far too simplistic, and far too general. And far too hopeful about having gotten to the basic fundamental root of where people go wrong and thinking both about logic and about ethics. I should add, I think ethics in the truck. Donnas is very important to Vic and Stein as another place where we tend to look for universal opera your eye laws, and get worried if we can’t find them or figure out how to ground them. But I think a lot of the ideas in the Tractatus about exploring the limits of sense from the inside, remain, it’s just that Vic and Stein came to believe he’d been far too simple minded. First of all, he had relied on only part of logic in order to try to make sense of the whole. And later on, he met mathematicians like Ramsey, he talked with Russell Moore, he read Hilbert, he read girdle. And he came to realize he was just out of date as far as modern mathematical logic went. So the structures and the patterns are much more complicated than he had thought. The underlying philosophical urge, as he himself said, came to him very early. And I think that parallel between logic and ethics remains with him, let’s say, later work.

John Perry
Let’s explore this really this ethical dimension of the Tractatus a little bit? I don’t, I mean, I a victim Stein at one point said, I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it’s not in order to enjoy ourselves. But apart from that, I don’t know much about his ethics after having read the Tractatus many times, what is the ethical view and what in the world does it have to do with logic?

Speaker 1
Well, the parallel would be that in ethics traditionally, in modern philosophy coming through Kant, ethics is viewed like logic as a domain in which we try to find universal Opry or AI principles. And Vic and Stein read Schopenhauer in his youth, and was very much affected by that Kantian view. But my view is that his attack in the truck taught us on ethics is just like his attack on frog is picture of logic or Russell’s. It’s attacking ethics with a big E. So just as logic, though, in some sense, real or shown in our discourse with one another, logic is empty of factual content. So to is ethics. This is a very fundamental philosophical idea.

Ken Taylor
Julian, let me ask you another kind of question related to this. And this, there’s a kind of methodological lesson that comes out of this way of thinking about it. That’s a little troubling for a philosopher, if philosophy is trying to articulate these framework kinds of things, right, that are not that are, in some sense, nonsensical. They’re not like the empirical claims that take place within the frame. But we’re trying to articulate these things that kind of define the frame itself. And if those don’t have any content, well then philosophy Have you philosophical claims must be kind of well, what? Devoid of sense in a way. So why did why do we do that? Why did we do that? When what’s the—

Speaker 1
Well, I think here is the change between the early and the later Wittgenstein in the early Vidkun. Stein, he’s really emphasizing that philosophy should not be in the business of trying to uncover a universal Opry or I metaphysical orders of things. But he leaves it at that. Whereas in the later philosophy, he gets much more interested in the situated character of our talk and ethics end and logic. And he begins to realize how complicated it is to think through the patterns and structures that affect our uses of language when we reason with one another in the empirical world. So, again, there’s continuity here and the overarching aim, but he certainly comes to respect much more how important it is when we’re thinking about ethics to look at the details.

Ken Taylor
You can join this conversation, 1-800-525-9917 we’re doing something that we do sometimes from time to time we’re looking at one of the philosophical greats, and Wittgenstein, whatever you say pro or con was certainly one of the greats. He was influential and highly quotable. And a really important and one of the founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, and Andrew and Oakland’s on the line, welcome to Philosophy Talk, Andrew.

Andrew
All right. analytic philosophers seem to overlook something in Wittgenstein, when he talks about I tend to ignore when he talks about things like the mystical, or he, he says things like, when all the questions of science are answered, the questions of life are unanswered. And it’s almost like he’s, he’s trying to unravel language not to reach some conclusion or to reach some technological breakthrough or something, but to leave some kind of open spiritual space in his mind, as if it’s a transcendental quest. Wondering what you thought about that.

John Perry
Thanks for the call. Juliet, what do you think about Andrew’s comment?

Speaker 1
I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that question. We’re offline. And Boston. Can I have to turn it back to you?

Ken Taylor
Oh, well, Andrew asked. He said, analytic philosophers tend to ignore kind of the mystical elements, the transcendental transcendental elements in in Vidkun. Stein, because this stuff that goes beyond the salable, right, he’s he doesn’t, he doesn’t know he doesn’t. He doesn’t dismiss it. It’s but it’s a different category and analytic philosophers haven’t really come to grips with that. What do you think?

Speaker 1
Well, I think it’s true that in the initial scholarship on Vic and Stein, there was much more interest in his writings on logic. But I think there’s an increasing interest in thinking about his ethics. What does he mean, when he talks about the transcendental, I would regard that as an attack on Kant’s view of the transcendental, as given through general laws. But it doesn’t mean that Vic and Stein wasn’t interested in, as we say, drawing limits of sense from the inside, and calling our attention to conditions we’ve taken for granted in our discourse with one another. Yeah, so I would hope that readers of Vic and Stein would continue to be interested in this part of his thought he was not a mystic. However, the idea that the mystical is a separate realm of discussion, in which we talk about non facts is itself for Vic and Stein a very tempting misleading, and I would say, intellectually, bad move,

Ken Taylor
That means a category of read the Tractatus that way is this category of the Nazi elbow, but showable, right, that stuff that can only be shown. And then he entered the Tractatus that of where we cannot speak Passover in Thailand. So there’s some something like that. That’s but that you say that you want to say that’s not the category of the like, the incomprehensible, or the non cognizable? Or something like that, like the mystical might be, is that the mean, but what is that category of the showable? But not say, how to think about that category?

Speaker 1
I think the problem is when one thinks when can draw a straight line on a piece of paper and write on the left side, the realm of desirable and the sensical. And on the right side, the realm of the nonsensical, there’s no such thing as the nonsensical. There are efforts to try to ask philosophical questions and answer them. But when we try to talk at this level of generality, that’s when we really fall outside the boundaries of that which is subject to reason.

John Perry
Okay, let me let me interrupt you. We’ve got we’ve got an email. That’s right, right on the topic of things that analytical philosophers haven’t appreciated about victim Stein. I’ll read the email, then I’ll give my own answer, and then we’ll see what everybody else has to think. This is Alex and he says, I think you’re overlooking how important it was to victim Stein to destroy philosophy. One question I’ve always wanted to ask as a really, as philosophers engage with victim Stein as a philosopher is to what extent one can really Do philosophy with victim Stein without, in some sense rejecting or discounting his most fundamental idea, which seems to me that there really isn’t such a thing as philosophy at all. So here’s my reaction. When I, when I got to UCLA in 1968, I just spent four years at Cornell and I had just kind of read the Tractatus the investigations a couple 100 times each. And I thought, well, one thing I can do is be evicted Stein expert. So I started out that way. But but then much, much to my dismay, it turned out that there weren’t this just these two books, this kind of fixed small corpus that that a lazy person like myself can can deal with. But book after book came out, this man did philosophy, his entire life, writing and writing and writing. So I think this was just bad faith, this idea that philosophy is over and I’m all for ignoring it. What do you think Juliet?

Speaker 1
I ignore it, too. I think it sounds much too much like a drive by quotation from Richard Rorty. They can shine himself said that when he wrote philosophy should be able to bring itself peace. That was a lie, because he could never leave it alone. So when we read the investigations, we’re reading the culmination, as you say, of many, many years of writing, and what he kept doing when he was drafting that work, was to cut and cut and cut the detailed discussions of data. kinde Frey got Schopenhauer and Kant out of the manuscript. He was trying to write in spite of himself, perhaps a classic, that would last but Julian that’s why the the book reads the way it does.

Ken Taylor
I understand what you’re saying. But Julian and John, I do think there’s something utterly serious in Vidkun Stein, both in the Tractatus, but also and more so even in the investigation. There is a deep belief that philosophy is some kind of malady not philosophizing. But the deliverances of philosophy here to four are the result of some kind of malady, and that Vidkun Stein has a has the cure for that malady, in a new kind of philosophizing, and that that old kind of philosophizing should just come to an end. I mean, I think he’s utterly serious about that. Don’t you agree?

Juliet Floyd
Yes, yes, in a sense of philosophers nowadays don’t tend to write about reason with a capital R in the same kind of way. That’s not just because of Vic and Stein. But I would say one of Vic and Stein’s great legacies to 20th century philosophy is getting philosophers not to do that. Talking about reason we’re talking about value as such, are very complicated matters. So he does think there’s been a kink in the history of philosophy. I don’t think he thinks he made it. I think he’s trying to philosophize in the face of that kink. And if I may say, so I think the 20th century intellectual history bears him out.

John Perry
I kind of agree with that. And I’d like to kind of set the stage for maybe some of our listeners who aren’t steeped in 20th century philosophy. If you go back to the Cambridge of victim Stein’s day, in Russell’s day, there was this fella named McTaggart, a brilliant fellow wrote three volumes on the nature of existence. And he had an argument that’s really perplexed people over the years about the unreality of time, and he put out this argument and the conclusion was time is unreal. And I think that’s a kind of a good example of what victim Stein might regard as pretentious philosophy. I mean, it’s fine to put out this puzzle about time, but to suppose that a philosopher by kind of thinking about time is going to come up with a conclusion that time is unreal, is is kind of just to divorce the whole enterprise from understanding how language actually works, and how we talk about time. And we live all of us even Ken, who thinks victim Stein was mostly pernicious. We live in a post victim Stein in an era where that’s our natural approach to these things.

Ken Taylor
I agree about that, in a way I agree about that, that we do live in a post Vidkun Stein era, and I wouldn’t try to recover that the previous study and bad old days, and there are certainly certain insights, I mean, be consigned makes this claim that philosophical problems, and I think he’s thinking of old philosophical problems, the quote, enduring problems of philosophy arise from, quote, language gone on a holiday, right? This goes back to John’s notion of a language game that we talked about earlier. You know, if you just look at the language game in which certain kinds of philosophically supposedly problematic terms are at home, in the forms of life, those that sustain those language games, either terms like free or no or self or other all, you’ll find that these philosophical problems are generated by people just not paying attention to these language games and the forms of life and he says, The philosophers don’t theorize just look, just look at what we already do. That makes a philosophy a very homely thing.

Speaker 1
But only thing can but I would also say unlike JL Austin, who was an ordinary language philosopher, whom I admire, actually, I think Austin was very important to Vidkun Stein his writing in his way, a great defense of the eternal problems as well. It’s very open ended one can look within the context of a particular language game and get a lot of illumination. But it certainly is part of the picture of language we See in the philosophical investigations, that language will not carry us into every possible context that we can think up for it our priori. And that language is not apt to be expected to take us into any possible empirical situation we hadn’t foreseen. So language will have to evolve. And when we shift those philosophical questions, we’ll be back with us.

John Perry
Right. We’ll take that up some more soon. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re discussing Wittgenstein with Juliet Floyd from Boston University.

We’ve been talking about victim signs, great works the Tractatus and the philosophical investigations. Next we’ll consider his legacy. What of lasting value has come from the work of Wittgenstein.

The legacy of Wittgenstein, for good or for ill—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Bee Gees
Words are all I have to take your heart away.

John Perry
That’s the Bee Gees and “Words.” A lot of people don’t realize the Bee Gees had this earlier. Philosophical period, Ken. I think they had an album called Tractatus Disco-Philosophicus. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. I was wondering if that was from their tractarian period or there were we’re tackling the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein—the “vit and visdom” of Wittgenstein. And we’d like you to hear hear from you. We’re having some technical difficulties if you want to join this conversation, email us comments at Philosophy Talk at that O RG. We’d love to have you join in.

John Perry
Email us comments a Philosophy Talk dot o RG just to repeat that and you’ve got an email there now. But yeah, I do have an email here. Let’s let’s go to this. Juliet, I’m gonna give you a hard assignment here. Paul writes good. The guest please explain victim Stein’s private language argument. So I’ll give you a minute to discuss this important landmark in the history of thought one minute, Julia.

Speaker 1
Oh, boy. Okay. Well, Wittgenstein was very interested, as I say in logic and ethics. And I read the private language considerations as circling around an idea a very old enough thought that somehow solipsistic them the idea that I’m the only mind and everything else is a figment of my mind. solipsism and realism really come to the same thing in the end. If you really think through the realist metaphysician, who wants to say that’s all that’s real is what’s objective in mind independent. In the end, these positions collapse into one another. And the private language considerations in the later philosophy are circling around this kind of problem, Vic and Stein asks whether I could imagine coining a language for myself, which would be incomprehensible in principle to anyone else. And the suggestion is that if I tried to do that, and thought it through, I might well become incomprehensible to myself. So this is how I see the private language argument. I do not see it as advocating behaviorism. By the way, do you think that pulling around.

John Perry
Do you think President Bush has has more or less invalidated the private language argument?

Speaker 1
I think there are growing forms of irrationality in the world, John, that required treatment? And I must say, I think Vidkun Stein’s philosophy is very relevant today. Let me try to reconcile ourselves to the failure of certain ideals of logic like themselves felt in the world.

Ken Taylor
You said that the private language argument doesn’t give rise to behaviorism. And I think you’re right about that. And I think a standard A widely shared sometimes misinterpretation of Victor’s was that he was a behaviorist, but it does do something in common with the behaviorists. It does say that mindedness is somehow out there, right? It’s not internal. There are these private exhibits that come before my mind, which are my meanings by thoughts, my sensation, and you know, the Cartesian thing? Well, the first object of my knowledge and awareness are my own mental states, my own sensations, and it’s a problem about how to get out there. Make consign somehow thinks that if we just pay attention to how the length of the talk about mind, the language of mindedness works, we’ll see that minds are already out there. They’re already public in some sense.

Speaker 1
So I think it’s the interplay between my situation and inheriting language as an individual and the social context that Vic and Stein thinks is a dynamic interplay. Again, it’s not that he’s a social constructivist who thinks that what’s true is simply what 30,000 Americans say is true. He certainly thinks that they can be wrong. So it’s the idea that you can’t locate meaning in one place, or in one kind of account, be it a psychological account or a sociological account. That’s where the pinched iron, I think is pushing with this argument.

Ken Taylor
I want to explore a little bit what you mean by that. I mean, okay, look, let’s make some distinctions. For those in our audience. behaviorism is the view that well, mind talk just somehow reduces to talk about publicly observable behavior. And that’s all there is, right? There’s no like inner stuff, that we’re not talking about inner stuff, it just kind of analytically reduces. Or, if we want to make scientific progress, all we should care about is the outer stuff and don’t posit these mysterious inner causes. Okay, Vidkun, Stein wasn’t a behaviorist like that. But there is this kind of what I call the disappearance of the inner. And I’m trying to make sense of I that’s one of the things that really boggles me about that whole period in philosophy, right? There is inner life, there are inner thoughts, there are inner feelings, it’s not all just out there.

John Perry
Let me just interject here for a second, I really think that we can learn something here from victim Stein’s very simple language game of the slab, block, slab and so forth. Because we might think that those are just paradigm cases of naming. And in the Tractatus, uh, you know, you have a name slab that stands for certain kinds of blocks. But in his little exploration, he says, you know, would that make any sense if these weren’t part of a form of life, like the very simplest you can imagine in which a builder says when asst slab and the slab goes and gets his slabs and brings it to him? It’s that integration into what he calls a language game and not into a form of life, something that’s goes way beyond language that gives language its meaning. And I think fundamentally, that’s the point he’s making about sensations not that they’re not real. But that this idea that you can set up a language just by giving names for your sensations is is bizarre for the for basically the same reason.

That seems like a deep point, do you agree about John’s interpretation of, of that.

Speaker 1
I do, if I scream out in pain, and you’re worried about whether my word names something, you’re sort of missing what’s right before your eyes, you might say, and this is a part of the ethical point, again, a Vic and Stein. So things are out there in contexts that we build, it doesn’t mean we don’t have in our lives, he says explicitly, one human being can be an enigma to another. And we may find our language diverging.

Ken Taylor
In particular, how do we think about the human condition? How do we think about the relationship between inner and outer? If we’re Vidkun? Stein? How do we think about that? I mean, I take it you say, Wittgenstein doesn’t want to think about it in a behaviorist way, which just says, the idea of this inner mysterious inner is just an illusion or something. How do you think about the input?

John Perry
Put another way, Juliet, what’s your take on his concept of a criterion?

Juliet Floyd
Oh, well, the criterion is something that is very localized. Also, it’s not a sort of logical set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count, for example, as a chair, nor do I think we can shine should be read as simply arguing always against that picture of meaning. No, fundamentally, it’s the idea that if there is to be such a notion as truth, and speaking truth, be a truth about my inner life or truth about the facts before us. If there is to be such an idea, it has to be parochial, fundamentally, it has to be localized and tied by us to circumstances we can make relevant ultimately to our lives.

Ken Taylor
That’s complicated. You said a lot of conflict. But the the trip from my worries about inner lives to John’s is about criteria and to your statement. That’s because Vic and Stein there can’t be an inner thing without an outer criterion, right right now and you’re saying these outer criteria kind of localize particular now, that’s I mean, that sounds very Pomo relativist is thinking to last I’m gonna give you his Vic and Stein, a Pomo, relativist, how does he differ from a Pomo relativist.

Speaker 1
Because he’s trying to make sense of the notion of truth, he’s indebted enough to Frager that he’s really interested in how our norms of truth actually apply in the real world. So he’s not saying that there’s no such thing as truth. He’s not saying that truth is, quote, relativized to a language game, or that true for me is not true for you. But he is suggesting that in order to understand how the notion of truth really gets a grip, you do actually have to look at how you operate with that word. And think about how what you do interacts with your picture of what truth is.

Ken Taylor
And if somebody else operates differently with the same word.

Speaker 1
Well, he had an analogy in one of his manuscripts he said, we say that a human behavior flows from character and it’s in that way, that use flows for meaning. Now what I take that to be is something like this a good person a person of good character can act badly and a person of bad character can act well

John Perry
And Juliet I’m gonna have to on that is gonna have to let that be the last word. You’re gonna have to thank you for joining us.

Juliet Floyd
Thank you very much.

John Perry
Guess has been Juliet Floyd, Professor of Philosophy from Boston University, co-editor of “Future Past: The Analytic Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy.”

We want to thank all the callers we didn’t get a chance to for technical as well as time reasons this time and a couple of emails came in that we didn’t get a chance to read but thanks for sending them

Yeah technical difficulties that cut out most of the callers today. So John, what did you What did you learn today?

Well, it’s hard on the radio to to get victim Stein’s most basic lesson where I’ve one cannot speak there on one must be silent. But we are not allowed to be silent on the radio, we have to keep speaking even aware of we have not the foggiest idea.

Ken Taylor
Oh, you know, a lot of you were you. You were reared on this stuff.

John Perry
I like Wittgenstein, I consider myself a Wittgensteinian, except I don’t say that, because there’s so much has, has collected around that term that, that I don’t really like.

Ken Taylor
I think that you’re a Wittgensteinian in this thing about the focus of action on language. But I think of you as a highly theoretical systematic philosopher, which Vidkun Stein would say, don’t do. I mean, so you’re not really a deep Wittgensteinian.

John Perry
Well, he said, Don’t do it. But he’s got lots of technical term criteria and language games, forms of life, so forth and so on. So you know, but you know, my view about hypocrisy. It’s really the engine of human progress.

Ken Taylor
You know, I actually do believe the Juliet’s said that we live in a post Wittgensteinian world what for good or ill I mean, whether you agree with Vidkun Stein ultimately or not, I do agree. There is no going back beyond Vidkun Stein, but the way forward, I think is really Antiva it constantly and but you know, this conversation continues as always, on our blog, the blog dot philosophy, talk that O RG where our motto is Kognito ergo, blogger, I think, therefore, I blog and I’ve already weighed in, so go, go check it out.

John Perry
Yeah, I should do that too. But not being an insomniac, like you I find it a little more difficult to be a good blogger. You can download podcasts of our program from our website as well. And, you know, get out your popcorn, uncork Your Diet Cokes, because coming up now is Philosophy Talk goes to the movies.

Ken Taylor
You know, John, the other day, I saw a great flick with lots of philosophical content in a day, “Children of Men.” Have you seen that flick?

John Perry
Yes, I have Clive Owen Julianne Moore. Great acting. Interesting story. I liked it a lot.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. I mean, and it poses a really, I think, deep, hard question. You think about the meaning of life, think about what your life means to you. And now suppose that you knew that in some period, there were going to be no more human beings. Now the last human being was was already born and they weren’t going to be any more of them. How would that affect your conception of your own life? Here’s one of the one of the opening scenes of the movie. Newsflash, the youngest person in the world has died. And Theo the main protagonists, we see him just utterly depressed by this news. He goes to his office, everybody’s watching it. There’s been worldwide infertility for 18 years, no child has been born for 18 years. That means there are no more elementary school students. Right? The last high school student is about to have graduated from high school, and there’s no one coming behind them. How would that affect life?

John Perry
Probably the last philosophy PhD student is is is an undergraduate at that time. Yeah, that’s right. So we’d be sitting there looking at this pipeline of people to work with and go out and teach younger generations. Maybe nobody would even be writing a philosophy PhD. I don’t suppose the world in general would care much about that. But it would get to be to to know that this whole process was coming to an end.

Ken Taylor
And that’s kind of the question this movie puts. But let’s talk about the way it answers this question. Because it’s really, really powerful. I mean, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket over this. I mean, societies have collapsed, everybody is depressed. Every scene in the movie is drab and bleak and dark, right? And people spend a lot of time numbing themselves, right? I mean, the government even dispenses a suicide drug. So if you want to end it now and not go on with his misery, buy it and take it, you know?

John Perry
Well, let me let me look at this from the perspective of somewhat older person, you think people would get so depressed if all of a sudden everybody started kicking off at 67, and we just didn’t have this older generation of 67 to 100 hanging around to dispense wisdom and drool.

Ken Taylor
I think our lives the meaning of our lives are partly constituted by are tied to the past, but older people represent the past, and humanity wants this renewal. And Plato talks about in the symposium that what we can’t be immortal, but what we’re after is reproduction through love, and we want to reproduce ourselves, and it is our way of being immortal. That’s a deep urge of ours. And if there are going to be no generations after us, we’re stuck with our own mortality in an inescapable way. And the message of the movie children of men is that is deeply, utterly depressing.

John Perry
You know, we talk about how our presidents like Clinton and Bush, worry about how history will treat them. Now think about what that means. That means after they’re dead, there will be this name that appears in various books in the middle of various sentences written by people that never knew them. And they’ll never know read by people that never knew them. And they’ll never know. And they care a lot about what those sentences surrounding their names are going to be. You ask yourself, why do we build so much of the meaning for our present life out of these future events that will never be part of.

But the story the movie isn’t just about that. John, there’s a there’s a surprise event that happens. I think we have to give that away.

Turns out that a young African lady who I assume although I didn’t understand everything that happened in the picture, is an illegal immigrant England is actually pregnant. Her name is key, and she’s played very well by Claire, hope, Ashanti. And so there is some hope that the world will be repopulated. And that’s where a lot of the drama comes. What happens is this woman is going to be exploited by the rebels or exploitative by the government or snuck out of the country by one of our heroes, to some ship that for some reason, that remains obscure to me is a better place to be.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, well, this thing called the Human Project, right, and they want to get into the human project, the human project that tried to re fertilize people that tried to save humanity, supposedly, but nobody knows whether they really exist. I mean, this movie is overwhelmingly despair, depressive, except for this little ray of hope, which emerges out of darkness and in turmoil. And you don’t know that going to do anything to save the world. Anything. But there’s little, little tiny little bit of hope, that that represents the continuing spark of humanity.

John Perry
Yeah. But still, it seems to me, we might be better off if we didn’t build the meaning of our lives so much in terms of the past and the future. If we thought more about look, what can we do for this individual that’s right with us. This fella that’s on the street begging, or this child that needs someone to read to them in the local school, or in children that we can help with money then thinking so much about future generations. I mean, if our beloved president was more worried about what he could do for the kids in America now than what he can do to bring democracy to the capital D to the Middle East with a capital M and a capital E, wouldn’t we be all better off?

I don’t know. You mean, so you’re thinking we shouldn’t have the meaning of our lives tied up with a future with a future generations. I mean, if there weren’t future generations, a lot of the stuff that we do couldn’t be sustained. A lot of the stuff that gives our lives meaning could not, could not go on.

I guess, if you’re Clinton or Bush, no matter how kind history is to you, if there’s no one around to read the history books, it won’t matter much.

Ken Taylor
You know, we need to end this and we can end this with one of the quote from the movie because there’s all kinds of graffiti strewn all over the place. And one lovely piece of graffiti that just flashes for a moment on the screen is last one to die. Please turn out the lights.

John Perry
We’ve been discussing “Children of Men”—very interesting, fascinating, philosophically rich movie, still available at some local theaters and I’m sure out on DVD before too long.

Ken, it’s fun talking about movies, but it’s also fun to help our listeners talk about the philosophical problems that arise in their own life.

Yeah, if you’ve got a conundrum, you can send us an email at conundrums at Philosophy Talk dot o RG. We won’t promise to solve your problem, but we will give you lots of new ways to think about it.

Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manilla productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2007.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest

John Perry
Special thanks go to Devon Strolovitch, Neil Van Leeuwen, Zoe Corneli, and Mark Stone. Our senior consulting producer is Gordon Earle.

Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University.

Also from the friends of Philosophy Talk and the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco where our program originates.

The views expressed or mis expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

The conversation continues on our website, www dot Philosophy Talk dot o RG I’m John Perry.

And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

And thank you for thinking.