Arif Ahmed, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
Limitations of language and limitations of philosophy; ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything’; ‘Pain is pain’..
Arif Ahmed wrote:
Chapter 3
READING THE TEXT
Section 2.3.
The nature of philosophy
… In the Tractatus Wittgenstein had maintained that philosophy was not a body of empirical or a priori doctrine but a form of activity. Its task was not to help us to answer questions with which science can also help us; its task was rather to set limits to what science can say, or – what he then thought amounted to the same thing – to what can be thought.
In fact the claim that philosophy must at least include activities as well as doctrine follows from this conception of its task on the Tractatus’s own theory of meaning. Philosophy can only state the limits of thought and language by means of propositions that generalize over all propositions, including themselves. …
Section 4.2
‘Pain is pain’
… If somebody wanted to know the meaning of a sentence like ‘Jones was reading at such-and-such time’ we have seen how Wittgenstein would respond. He would offer an account of when we are justified in saying that he was reading. We are justified in saying it when he has said the written words right (i.e.) 50 times consecutively. In the recently introduced terminology we can say that his doing so is a criterion for his reading.
Again, we can be justified in saying that somebody who gives the order ‘Write down the sequence +2’ means the sequence +2 and not some deviation from it. What justifies it is what he counts as ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases [Philosophical Investigations 201]. We may say that this too is a criterion of what he meant by the order.
And the same pattern is evident in his account of third-personal sensation ascriptions. The account tells us what justifies such ascriptions, that is, their criteria. In the case of pain, these are behavioural, but they need not be so long as they are ‘outer’. For instance, there might be a sensation for which the criterion was a physiological event, such as a rise in blood pressure.
In all of these cases we are not told the truth-conditions of the statements in question. We are only told when we are justified in making them. Contrast statements whose truth-conditions we do give. A statement of the form x is a square is true just in case x’s replacement denotes something that has four equal sides that meet at right angles. We are here being told what claim upon reality the statement, that something is square, makes. And this is just what his later accounts of reading, meaning, understanding, and third-personal sensation ascriptions appear to avoid.
We have already seen that in the Tractatus the statement of truth-conditions was the one and only way to explain a proposition: for the essence of the proposition is to lay a claim upon reality, to say that this is how things stand. It should also be evident that the Cartesian account of third-personal sensation ascriptions meets this demand. On that account you can explain the meaning of ‘Johnny is in pain’ to me by saying, ‘You surely know what it is for you to be in pain. “Johnny is in pain” means simply that he has what you have when you are in pain’. Whatever the deficiencies of this account it at least aspires to that Tractarian ideal; that is, it attempts to specify what it would take for Johnny to be in pain, not just the sort of thing that would justify my saying so. Whereas the account that we are now considering does nothing of the sort: it makes it appear as though somebody who was able to recognize pain-behaviour knew all that there was to know about the meaning of ‘Johnny is in pain’.
Well, it may be said, there is nothing particularly surprising or objectionable about that. The whole point of Philosophical Investigations was to break the spell of a highly unified conception of language, on which the analysis of a sentence conforms in all cases to a single ideal. When the spell is broken we see that there are indeed many different kinds of meaningful sentence, so too many different kinds of explanation of a sentence’s meaning. Why then should anyone be surprised or concerned that the correct explanation of ‘Johnny is in pain’ is so different in form from that of ‘Such-and-such is square’?
The answer – and this is the objection – is that logic itself seems to dictate otherwise. ‘Either he is in pain or he isn’t’ is an instance of the theorem of classical logic known as the law of excluded middle; so is ‘Either he was reading that first word or he wasn’t’; so is ‘Either he meant +2 or he didn’t’. And it seems that the application of the law in these cases shows that there is more to the ascription of reading, meaning, understanding and pain than Wittgenstein allows. For the law seems to demand that there be a fact one way or another, even if we don’t know what it is. We have to rely on these external signs of pain, or understanding; but the statement itself reaches into a hidden region of reality that in any case makes it true or makes it false.
But nothing in Wittgenstein’s explanations of these statements shows what sort of fact this could be: all it tells us is what justifies us in those cases in which we can tell one way or another whether, for example, he is in pain. Wittgenstein’s account therefore seems superficial. It seems that logic itself forces upon us a conception of these statements’ meaning that is beyond the reach of the sort of explanation that he would have us accept.
In two passages, one of great beauty, Wittgenstein gives powerful expression to this concern.
Here it happens that our thinking plays us a queer trick. We want, that is, to quote the law of excluded middle and to say: “Either such an image is in his mind, or it is not; there is no third possibility!” (Philosophical Investigations 352)
A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. Here again we get the same thing as in set theory: the form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness. For us, of course, these forms of expression are like pontificals which we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the effective power that would give these vestments meaning and purpose.
In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. (Philosophical Investigations 426)
This passage also contains the seeds of Wittgenstein’s reply. We must distinguish between the logical law itself, which is simply a convention of our language, and the picture that it suggested to us. The picture is of a region of reality that outruns its visible part: the inside of someone’s mind, say, or the infinite continuation of the decimal expansion of π. But that picture is just a picture: it tells us nothing about the actual use of the expression but just stands there like an irrelevant or merely ornamental illustration to a text.
Thus Philosophical Investigations 352 continues:
The law of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So it really – and this is a truism – says nothing at all, but gives us a picture. And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how – but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied . . .
Similarly when it is said “Either he has this experience, or not” – what primarily occurs to us is a picture which by itself seems to make the sense of the expressions unmistakable: “Now you know what is in question” – we should like to say. And that is precisely what it does not tell him.
The metaphysical picture, of a region of reality that outruns its visible part, is inert: once it is distinguished from the law of excluded middle it makes no difference to anything that anyone actually says whether or not we ‘accept’ that picture. So we should – of course – accept the law itself; but we should not think that it reveals any incoherence in the way we actually employ third-personal sensation ascriptions, which is what Wittgenstein takes himself to be describing.
Nor does this mean that the law of excluded middle should itself become an object of philosophical scrutiny, as though philosophers could settle whether or not it is true, in cases where the evidence is equivocal, that either Jones was in pain or he wasn’t. To do so would be to have some independent means of deciding whether ‘Jones was in pain’ is either true or false in cases where I have no means of telling which. But there is no independent means for deciding that. Given Wittgenstein’s conception of truth, ‘It is true that Jones was in pain or it is false that Jones was in pain’ is just another way of saying ‘Either Jones was in pain or he wasn’t’ and so cannot itself be evaluated by some prior method.
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything (Philosophical Investigations 126).
We have seen some reasons for dissatisfaction with that general attitude … But given Wittgenstein’s conception of truth its application to the present objection is entirely appropriate.
The Source:
Arif Ahmed*, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: A Reader’s Guide, Continuum 2010
*Social Science Files subscriber since September 2022
Extract from The Times (London), Monday January 16 2023
[Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak is preparing to appoint the UK’s first “free speech tsar” with powers to ensure academics and visiting university speakers are not “cancelled” or censored for controversial views. The new director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will have powers to investigate claims of no-platforming on campuses including a new complaints scheme for students, staff and visiting speakers.
It is understood that the leading contender for the role is Arif Ahmed, a Cambridge philosophy professor who has spoken out against the “cancel culture” on campuses. Last year he warned that freedom of speech was under threat and said students needed to be taught that university “should be an environment where you can say pretty much anything you like and other people can say whatever they like as well”.
He added that such training is necessary because “it is a very natural impulse to try and suppress the views of people you don’t agree with”.
The new role is being established under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which is passing through parliament. The legislation creates a new duty on universities and colleges to “actively promote” freedom of speech, which extends to student unions. A new complaints scheme will be set up …
… During last summer’s leadership contest, the prime minister promised to tackle the “woke nonsense” he claimed was permeating public life. … ministers are concerned about growing pressures on universities to adopt what they see as a “woke” attitude towards their history and contemporary controversies such as trans rights. The legislation was, in part, driven by a series of incidents when visiting speakers had their invitations rescinded because of views that were controversial with students — known as “no-platforming”. … Academics have also been threatened with being “cancelled” over their views …
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