radical relativity, and realism vs. idealism vs. skepticism
M Murphy
You say:
> > When devising our technical ontologies, we are picking up
> > the bits and pieces of natural language that fit our own views and
> > ignoring the rest.
>
> Philosophy loses all objectivity and all intellectual value if all we
> are doing is supporting our preconceived views by selecting things
> that agree with them. Not only that, but technical philosophy can
> leave ordinary language far behind as technical considerations come to
> take on a life of their own. Not every technical philosopher is an
> ordinary language philosopher who feels obliged to appeal to
> appropriateness of use in ordinary language at every step. In some
> sense we may have to start there, but that does not mean we have to
> stay there. Even Wittgenstein should have said of technical
> philosophy, "This game is played." It has been played for about 2500
> years. Many philosophers try to avoid any influence of ordinary
> language in devising their technical philosophies. The whole first
> phase of analytic philosophy is broadly characterized as the ideal
> language phase because analysts were trying to replace ordinary
> language with formal languages which avoid the vagueness, ambiguity,
> and philosophical puzzlement of ordinary language. Perhaps they were
> using some parts of ordinary language to build their formal languages,
> but their selections could hardly have been based on an appeal to the
> value of ordinary language as such, or their selectivity would have
> been precluded. I think they were not appealing to preconceived views
> so much as trying to *arrive at* reliable views by developing an
> analytic method which avoids vagueness, ambiguity, and philosophically
> puzzling linguistic constructions. Outside analytic philosophy,
> phenomenologists try to avoid basing their technical philosophies on
> language altogether and try to start from what is pre-linguistically
> given. While it is arguable that we all have presuppositions, and
> while we all must in some sense start from ordinary language in order
> to converse in philosophy at all, this does not substantially detract
> from my points. Some presuppositions are intrinsically more plausible
> than others quite apart from ordinary language use, on my view. And
> while we must start learning language in an ordinary way, that does
> not mean we cannot grow beyond that in technical areas of science or
> philosophy.
-------------------
I agree that LW's view of technical philosophy as literal nonsense is
mis-convieved. As you say, it is in itself a language game, has its
own "rules", as it were, and by discriminating against it in this
particular fashion LW is being inconsistantly intolerant (note that LW
seems to have no problem with, for example, religous language games).
However, even admitting this much, I cannot agree with most of what
you write above. For example, even if we allow that, for a term such
as "to know", we have a coherent philosophical use in addition to a
coherent OL use, it takes some proving to show that the former is in
any way less vague, ambiguous, or more precise than the latter. This
cannot simply assumed. In fact, a good portion of OL philosophy can
be taken as attempting to establish that the `technical' vocabulary of
philosophy is simply not up to the task of handling the complexity of
the given phenomenon as well as our ordinary ways of speaking.
(Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia" is an excellant case in point here).
So let me ask you, how is the vocabulary of a formal Ontology more
precise and less ambiguous than OL? Certainly, we cannot replace the
latter with the former in either our everyday speech or, I would
wager, in our scientific theories. Even FOL is not more precise than
OL in this sense. I would incidentally, distinguish technical
scientific vocabularies from technical philosophical vocabularies on
exactly this basis. Here, it is indeed possible to replace OL with
the technical language and achieve something that we can all agree
amounts to greater precision of thought. Again, with technical
philosophical language, I am not sure I see this happening. And to
say, with Quine, for example, that philosophers and scientists are
doing the same thing is in some ways an attempt to shine in reflected
light.
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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Jan Dejnozka
> I rekon these be generally pretty good lines of questionaing,
> potential meat in 'em. I especially like your questioning whether
> Quine's notion that " that philosophers and scientists are doing the
> same thing" may be an "attempt to shine in reflected light." but
> would like to supplenent it with the suggestion there are much
> deeper problems with this than just the "attempt to shine in
> reflected light". .. and I think these issues and problems lie
> latent in much of Jan's book. ... So I too am very interested Jan's
> views in this area.
***** I see philosophy as logically prior to natural science. I see a
line between them, but not a hard and fast line. The line is that
empirical evidence is not relevant to philosophical claims, because
philosophical claims are so general that they interpret the evidence.
Philosophy and natural science were virtually indistinguishable at
first, but eventually the various natural sciences broke off and
started operating independently. Certainly at the higher levels of
philosophy, there should be no confusing science with
philosophy. Logic, of course, applies to every type of reasoning, so
they have logic in common. You can find logical fallacies in
scientific reasoning as well as in philosophical reasoniong. But I
would not take empirical evidence to be relevant to any of my
philosophical claims in either of my books. My books are not mere
scholarship; I do advance my own views from time to time. Of course,
empirical evidence is very relevant to my philosophical scholarship on
what other philosophers have in mind. Please note that like many other
scholars, I rely on a principle of charity in interpretation. My
principle is that where there is an ambiguity, I impute the deeper or
more interesting interpretation, and where there is an apparent
contradiction or at least a tension, I seek to impute an
interpretation that resolves it. This is not meant to "mistake-proof"
philosophers. Even great philosophers can and do make mistakes. But
where there is no plain and obvious mistake, the principle of charity
results in deeper and more rewarding interpretations. These more
rewarding interpretations, however, are not necessarily correct, and
in general we are not going to know if they are correct, if the
philosopher is dead and we have canvassed all available evidence, and
the ambiguity or tension remains. But scholars do claim indirect
empirical support for the principle on the ground that a good
philosopher is not likely to make what may appear to be mistakes,
where the philosopher's writings also allow ways to explain the
mistake away as merely apparent. That is, you can't just make up a
charitiable interpretation out of the blue, but must work with the
materials you find in the philosopher's writings. There is a slightly
different statement of the principle in my first book, pp. 48-49. But
returning to your question, one can do much philosophy without any
reliance on scientific methods, scientific evidence, or science at
all. At least, that's what I've been doing. You can do science without
reliance on philosophy, so why can't you do philosophy without
reliance on science. The main caveat is that other things being equal,
the more science you know, the better philosophy of science you can
do, just as the more mathematics you know, the better philosophy of
mathematics you can do. And conversely, I think there is merit to the
European idea that everyone should take at least one course in the
philosophical foundations of his or her subject, if only to be aware
of the philosophical dimension. That is, other things being equal,
every scientist would be better off taking a philosophy of science
course than not, every artist would be better off taking a philosophy
of art course than not, and so on. Please note I said "other things
being equal."
> In the first place, as you are both perfectly well aware, LW used
> and even introduced himself, plenty of technical distinctions and
> "terms of art". Secondly, LW. DID NOT take the view that technical
> philosophy is "literal nonsense" - what he did argue, and
> demonstrate, pretty convincingly, time and again, was that
> *particular metaphysical claims* (not technical philosophy!) were
> EITHER disguised "truths" or truisms of logical grammar masquerading
> as necessary truths about "the ultimate nature of reality as it is
> in itself", mole hills pretending to be mountains... OR confused
> nonsense.
I'm not merely arguing that Wittgenstein is a highly technical
philosopher. I'm arguing that he's logically, if not expressly,
committed to metaphysical views, in particular to the metaphysical
theory of modified realism. Take another look at my fifteen realist
aspects. He has a theory of essence, though rejecting traditional
essence. He has his own theory of what is basic or fundamental which,
though rejecting many specific theories of traditional metaphysics as
bewitchments of grammar, affirms traditional ontology on a highly
generic level. He has a private language argument committing him to a
mind- and language-independent world, and he says we have perceptual
access to that world, an access that is not pre-conceptualized.
Perhaps he is neither a materialist nor an idealist, but in a highly
generic sense, he is a modified realist. Modified realism is a genus
with many species, including both materialist and idealist species,
and still other species as well. What is curious is that he is
logically committed to, and apparently accepts, the philosophically
technical genus while rejecting all philosophically technical species
except for language-games. Language-games are patterns of humans
interacting with things, so they have constituents, but the
constituents are just ordinary people and ordinary things as
ordinarily understood. At least, this is the interpretation I have
been providing citations for and arguing for.
Best wishes,
Jan
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M Murphy
>
>> However, also, MJ, in reply to Jan, wrote:
>>
>> > I agree that LW's view of technical philosophy as literal nonsense is
>> > mis-convieved. As you say, it is in itself a language game, has its
>> > own "rules", as it were, and by discriminating against it in this
>>
>> I cannot be absolutely sure that Jan would fully agree with this but
>>
>> certainly everything else I have read indicates that he most certainly
>> would. So, if this is so & if you don't mind I would like to point out
>> that you are both significantly misrepresenting the truth of the
>> matter here.
>>
>> In the first place, as you are both perfectly well aware, LW used and
>> even introduced himself, plenty of technical distinctions and "terms
>>
>> of art". Secondly, LW. DID NOT take the view that technical philosophy
>> is "literal nonsense" - what he did argue, and demonstrate, pretty
>> convincingly, time and again, was that *particular metaphysical
>> claims* (not technical philosophy!) were EITHER disguised "truths" or
>> truisms of logical grammar masquerading as necessary truths about "the
>> ultimate nature of reality as it is in itself", mole hills pretending
>> to be mountains... OR confused nonsense.
Just a quick response to this, and if need be, I will break out the
citations. I would not claim that LW would always and everywhere
claim that philosophical discourse was literal nonsense. Here and
there, especially in the later texts, there is some charity expressed
towards the discpline, if only in a backhanded way (My favorite
example is from On Certainty, where LW imagines two people coming
across someone who is saying "I know this is my hand.", and concluding
that this person is not mad, only doing philosophy). However, there
is an issue, which seems to be recognized a few writers anyway, which
is left cloudy in his texts as to whether or not philosophical
discourse or discourses (empiricism, for example) is/are language
games in their own right, or merely attempts at saying something in
our ordinary tongue that have been flubbed. Where it seems that LW is
pressing towards the latter conclusion, I think he is mistaken (and
there seem to be places where he is doing this).To argue for the
existence of sense data is not to babble; there are acknowledged
argumentative manouveurs that you can make once you've made this
statement, which may be more or less well-sanctioned by past
empiricist thought, may be more or less origonal with respect to it.
Though I would reject empiricism for Wittgensteinian reasons, if you
were to put a gun to my head I could produce a bunch of empiricist
arguments related to perception, and these would at least be
workmanlike empiricist arguments. So the statement "There are
sense-data" is not confused nonsense in the sense that I could say
this sentence and follow it up with just any other sentence.
Instead, I would defend OL by admitting that philosophical discourse
is coherent in its own way (is a language game), OL is coherent in its
own way, and that insofar as they can be said to be talking about the
same things, OL is generally the suppler, more advanced vehicle for
communicating the distinctions required by the phenomenon. (more on
this when I respond to Jan's last post).When I speak of
`discrimination' against philosophical language games, what I mean is
that, while LW seems to have no trouble accepting the very existance
of religous language games, for example, which have always seemed
pretty peculiar to (an atheist like) me. Why then, does it sometimes
seem like he would like to banish philosophy from academia (and to me
it does seem this way, not that this is a bad thing)? The whole
thrust of LW's philosophy seems to entail an acceptance of a diversity
of language games; why is he down on philosophy as such?
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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