Rethink.

To my read­ers: This is two thou­sand words long, and no, it is not a paper I wrote that I’m post­ing. This is orig­i­nal, and is meant as a blog post. All the pas­sages that are per­ti­nent are listed in the text below, even if they are a bit out of order, and can be used to assess if my com­men­tary does them justice.

I should say that this com­men­tary could be wholly inac­cu­rate. I am focus­ing only on one pas­sage of the Blue Book, and while I’ve read the entirety of it before, as well as a con­sid­er­able amount of other things by Wittgen­stein, a thor­ough com­men­tary on the Blue Book might prove a lot of these thoughts speculative.

for Nancy

1. The library metaphor, and the pos­si­bil­ity of progress in philosophy:

“Imag­ine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be many ways of sort­ing them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up sev­eral books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indi­cate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arrang­ing the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that there­fore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvi­ous that hav­ing put together books which belong together was a def­i­nite achieve­ment, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the great­est achieve­ments in phi­los­o­phy could only be com­pared with tak­ing up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on dif­fer­ent shelves; noth­ing more being final about their posi­tions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the dif­fi­culty of the task might well think in such a case that noth­ing at all had been achieved. — The dif­fi­culty in phi­los­o­phy is to say no more than we know. E.g. to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.”

- Wittgen­stein, “The Blue Book”, pg. 45 of the Harper Torch­book Edition

2. Con­text of this quote

The imme­di­ate con­text of this pas­sage is that it is sit­u­ated in the midst of a tricky dis­cus­sion about “mean­ing.” The ques­tion the Blue Book started with is “How do we account for the mean­ing of ‘mean­ing’?” The tricky thing about “mean­ing” is that to give it a def­i­n­i­tion, of course, would mean that we already knew what “mean­ing” meant.

So on BB 43 Wittgen­stein reaches this pre­lim­i­nary conclusion:

“Mean­ing” is one of the words of which one may say that they have odd jobs in our language.

He then uses a metaphor to describe this: Imag­ine an “insti­tu­tion” with “func­tions,” like an office (“office” is my idea). If you wanted to know what the office in ques­tion does, you’d ask what the employ­ees do there. Some type, some take care of finances, some take care of the mail and mail­ing. All one has to ask is what is being done, or what num­bers the peo­ple in the office are work­ing with, or what sort of mail they get, and one knows what the “office” is doing more specifically.

It looks like an “insti­tu­tion,” then, can be defined by “function.”

But we can imag­ine this office hir­ing a guy to do other things, right? Things like mak­ing pizza runs for the employ­ees work­ing over­time, or emp­ty­ing out garbage, or work­ing with a spe­cial project. Would that “func­tion” define the “insti­tu­tion”? Of course not.

Hence, Wittgen­stein says What causes most trou­ble in phi­los­o­phy is that we are tempted to describe the use of impor­tant ‘odd-job’ words as though they were words with reg­u­lar func­tions (BB 44). We expect the uses of “mean­ing” to deliver the same infor­ma­tion that knowl­edge of what is typed in an office would deliver; the uses of “mean­ing,” though, refuse to give that info, even as they do many very impor­tant but diverse things.

It is after this dis­cus­sion that Wittgen­stein talks about some­thing that seems to be an abrupt change of pace. This “some­thing” resides between the metaphor­i­cal dis­cus­sion of mean­ing and the quote about the library being orga­nized above:

The rea­son I post­poned talk­ing about per­sonal expe­ri­ence was that think­ing about this topic raises a host of philo­soph­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties which threaten to break up all our com­mon­sense notions about what we should com­monly call the objects of our expe­ri­ence. And if we were stuck by these prob­lems it might seem to us that all we have said about signs and about the var­i­ous objects we men­tioned in our exam­ples may have to go into the melting-pot.

The sit­u­a­tion in a way is typ­i­cal in the study of phi­los­o­phy; and one some­times has described it by say­ing that no philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem can be solved until all philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems are solved; which means that as long as they aren’t all solved every new dif­fi­culty ren­ders all our pre­vi­ous results ques­tion­able. To this state­ment we can only give a rough answer if we are to speak about phi­los­o­phy in such gen­eral terms. It is, that every new prob­lem which arises may put in ques­tion the posi­tion which our pre­vi­ous par­tial results are to occupy in the final pic­ture. One then speaks of hav­ing to rein­ter­pret these pre­vi­ous results; and we should say: they have to be placed in a dif­fer­ent sur­round­ing (BB 44).

The big ques­tion is: Where did these two para­graphs come from? The first one talks about “per­sonal expe­ri­ence.” What does that have to do with any­thing regard­ing “mean­ing” and “odd-jobs”? The sec­ond one talks about every new problem/advance in phi­los­o­phy threat­en­ing all oth­ers — how does that tie into “per­sonal expe­ri­ence,” and all the other top­ics mentioned?

I think the topic of “per­sonal expe­ri­ence” comes merely from the fact Wittgen­stein used a metaphor to describe how “mean­ing” works. The prob­lem with a metaphor is that it doesn’t define any of the ele­ments it uses; it is not a strict log­i­cal account­ing that can be ana­lyzed. It depends, rather, on one speaker just “know­ing” that his audi­ence has had cer­tain expe­ri­ences, and trust­ing that he can build an anal­ogy that can be followed.

Metaphor is quite dif­fer­ent from the proto-language games and the other thought exper­i­ments which are gen­uinely ana­lytic, which try to force us to break down the very par­tic­u­lar uses of lan­guage so we can get a grasp on where the philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem is com­ing from. Wittgen­stein had pre­sum­ably used these sorts of tac­tics ear­lier (I for­get, it’s been 4 years since I read the Blue Book entirely), but metaphor, which he’s using to try and resolve this sit­u­a­tion right now, is a vastly dif­fer­ent method than those others.

The sec­ond para­graph, about whether we can make any progress in phi­los­o­phy or not, ties into the first as metaphor’s depend­ing on “per­sonal expe­ri­ence” forces one to address a rad­i­cal skep­ti­cism. If “per­sonal expe­ri­ence” is going to lead us to Truth, how on earth is it going to do so? After all, I don’t share the same expe­ri­ences you do, & you don’t share mine. There is no guar­an­tee we actu­ally speak the same lan­guage, even. For all I know, an invis­i­ble pres­ence around you might shield you from my words and pre­vent you from hear­ing any­thing I speak and tell you some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from what I say, some­thing that only coin­ci­den­tally prompts a response from you that looks like a per­fectly ratio­nal response to me.

Wittgen­stein does not address this rad­i­cal skep­ti­cism directly. Instead he asserts that yes, dif­fi­cul­ties arise. Does that mean we want to throw out every­thing that has come before?

3. Back to the library

What’s curi­ous about the library metaphor isn’t just that he’s using a metaphor to defend his use of metaphor, but also this:

1. We can take the books one at a time, and put them in the right place on the shelf.

2. We can take sev­eral books at once and put them on the shelf, declar­ing them to be a unit that makes a coher­ent whole.

Who on earth puts books on a shelf one at a time? It’s not only labo­ri­ous, but in some sense coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. After all, if phi­los­o­phy is gram­mar, and con­cerned with the use of words, then words don’t work because we utter one — they work because there is a con­text, because we under­stand some­thing about a given sit­u­a­tion which makes the word make sense. Yet, I think, those who are look­ing for a log­i­cally per­fect lan­guage have to put books on a shelf one at a time. Each word must have its proper place, and its ref­er­ents must be accounted for entirely.

It is option #2, books in units, that allows Wittgen­stein to say there might be a way to con­ceive of progress in phi­los­o­phy. It is a major achieve­ment if one book can be placed next to another, and that place is cer­tainly the right place. It doesn’t even mat­ter if the books get shifted again, as long as they get shifted as a unit, for that is what is a philo­soph­i­cal achievement.

Which makes me won­der: Is progress in phi­los­o­phy really pos­si­ble? Wittgen­stein has given us a pic­ture of what it might look like, but he has not deci­sively routed the objec­tion he posed, which is that some philo­soph­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties could cause the whole of past phi­los­o­phy to be recon­sid­ered. He has sug­gested that such a momen­tous hap­pen­ing would occur because of an empha­sis on per­sonal expe­ri­ence, but has used another metaphor, one again depen­dent on per­sonal expe­ri­ence (imag­ine how hard it is to sort a library) to try to steer clear of the con­se­quences of the other use of metaphor (again, its per­sua­sive­ness being reliant on per­sonal experience).

Wittgen­stein is very aware of all that is going on: The dif­fi­culty in phi­los­o­phy is to say no more than we know (BB 45). He gives one exam­ple of this as under­stand­ing that two books, when they most cer­tainly should be together, can still be moved around as a whole. And he is going to go on and say that a lot of other prob­lems arise from “per­sonal expe­ri­ence” as the basis of philosophizing.

But how do we deal with his two great uses of metaphor? And how do they relate to knowing?

4. Metaphor and knowledge

It is obvi­ous to me that the two metaphors make sense, even while they don’t put — esp. the lat­ter one — cer­tain philo­soph­i­cal objec­tions to rest. The first one explains how “mean­ing” works. The sec­ond one explains how progress in phi­los­o­phy might be possible.

Using the sec­ond one, we can see a pur­pose for phi­los­o­phy that would cre­ate such progress. The trick would be for phi­los­o­phy to be ded­i­cated not to skep­ti­cism, but to keep­ing us from mak­ing claims we shouldn’t make. The phi­los­o­phy of Wittgenstein’s day was in (like much phi­los­o­phy today) a pre-Kantian mode in need of cri­tique. Frege and Rus­sell wanted their log­i­cally per­fect lan­guage that was going to make sci­ence that much eas­ier and elim­i­nate or prove that there was a God blah blah blah. One way of keep­ing phi­los­o­phy in line is to appre­ci­ate its power in let­ting us under­stand how deeply some things relate, things that we wouldn’t expect to relate. A good exam­ple of “two books going together” is the research that shows that strong ver­bal and math­e­mat­i­cal skills are com­ple­men­tary. We know this from Godel’s work in logic: arith­metic is incom­plete and of infi­nite rich­ness not because it is tied to the absolute cer­tainty that attracts many to math­e­mat­ics, but because of its roots in the rich­ness of lan­guage. Math is a lan­guage, and we under­stand that bet­ter because of philosophy.

Re: Wittgenstein’s use of metaphor and his inabil­ity to com­pletely rid him­self of the prob­lems “per­sonal expe­ri­ence” cre­ates — he might be against some­thing deeper than he has con­ceived. Hei­deg­ger would insist that cer­tain ques­tions aren’t just things we ask, but things we are, and they can’t go away. Wittgen­stein would con­cede, I think, and then get caught, at least from these pas­sages. For Heidegger’s ques­tion­ing runs at just as deep a level, if not deeper, and pushes phi­los­o­phy in another direc­tion, one that does not look for lit­tle results but for pur­pose itself. Such a direc­tion depends upon the fact that we do think, when we do phi­los­o­phy, that all prior knowl­edge is ques­tion­able, and all progress to date is ques­tion­able. And why shouldn’t we think that?

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