early and late WITT/TRP

[Andrew Dinn]

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu writes:

> and a big fat thank you for your clear rendering of TRACTATUS. So I
> turn to you, or anybody, to tell me what one makes of LW's
> repudiation of TRAC. in PHILOSPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS?  Is he saying
> that the atomic picture approach fails because there is no way
> to--connect--the logical structure of language to that of the world
> w/out--constructing--the connection (thus breaking the positivistic
> rule)?

No, he said that in the Tractatus and found it uncomfortable but
compelling.  He was led for the most part to his later rejection (as
indeed he was led to his position in the Tractatus) by considering
mathematics, in particular the notion of mathematical rules. This led
him on to also look at rules in the grammar of languages, natural or
otherwise.

As an example of the problem consider colours. LW hypothesised the
existence of a speck of colour at some point in the visual field at a
given time as a possible prototype of an ireducible atomic fact. The
fact that such a speck is blue seems to rule out its being yellow
hence, said fact appears to have some sort of structure, a logic which
invalidates other alternatives, thereby rendering colour as a
non-atomic phenomenal attribute. LW argued that the fact the speck
being blue implied thereby that it was not yellow was merely an
artifact of colour word usage, not colour. Suggesting that something
was blue and yellow at the same time would on analysis come down to
saying that something was one thing and also not that thing since the
words define/delineate non-overlapping sets of phenomena. Not that you
could express this difference since that would require describing the
logical form of the words yellow and blue. Such a description would be
vacuously true and, what is more, only someone who already understood
the concepts involved would be able to understand why you were giving
such an explanation.

Now when LW started teaching young kids maths he began to realise that
the most serious problem with his theory was not that it made it
impossible to establish a meta-language for discussing language. Worse
still it implied that it was impossible for anyone to learn anything.

This is very closely related to Kant's problem of things as we
perceive them and things in themselves. If we only ever experience
things as we perceive them how do we all arrive at the same notion of
the underlying things which give rise to those perceptions, except by
virtue of some arbitrary miracle. LW's phenomenology in the Tractatus
was intended in part to dismantle this notion that there are
perceptions and things which give rise to them.  Everything including
my view of myself is just phenomena and constructs over phenomena. But
if this renders e.g. mathematics or the rules which relate colours
etc. vacuous how can anyone who does not already grasp a concept ever
acquire it except by virtue of some arbitrary miracle. Whereas, as LW
well knew, schoolkids can perform such miracles every day in the
classroom.

In his middle-period writings (Philosophische Bemerkungen,
Philosophische Grammatik) LW tried to reduce the grasping of
(apparently vacuously tautologous) concepts to the acquisition of
rules, mathematical rules, grammar rules, colour rules i.e. to turn
the problem of how people identify truths to that of how people master
techniques for the recognition of truths. The problem was then one of
accounting for i) how an understanding of a rule can be acquired and
ii) the easy part how people can be trained to follow rules.

The shift in his later writings - I actually think it's beginnings are
visible in the aborted attempt to rewrite the Philosophische Grammatik
and may be down to his listening to Brouwer's lectures - the shift was
to reject the notion that people do grasp all the implications of a
rule via some sort of intuition. Instead he argued that they learn to
use a rule or a system of rules as a calculus, by rote, and adopt it
as a way of measuring, calibrating and judging situations which the
rules and their related concepts have been adopted explicitly to
formalise. And where we think we see a hard necessity, that a rule
implies that one thing must follow in fact the only necessity is that
implied by the brute fact that everyone agrees in how to interpret the
rule, what are legitimate applications, continuations, interpretations
etc. everyone agrees that such and such is an invalid move. He
carefully distinguishes this de fact agreement in behaviour from any
notion of agreement by convention.

Now I know it sounds to a mathematician or scientist that this might
account for some concepts, some systems by which people make
judgements e.g. value-judgements. But it cannot be used as a basis for
explaining how mathematical and scientific concepts are founded. Well,
that's what I thought when I started reading the man. But reading his
Remarks on the Foundations of Maths and the lecture notes collected by
Cora Diamond convinces me that he is right to argue that objectivity
is a human construct. Built around observed regularities for sure and
the more regular the better, but regularity is only one of the things
which governs how the world is judged even in science and, yes, even
in mathematics.

> So the question of this pots is:

> Does GR stand to V. as PI stands to TRAC?  Does the attention shift
> to the leap of faith, what Paul M., I think, puts as: "this project
> also informs GR. An oscillation between (infinite) resignation in
> the face of the 'facts', and the 'leap of faith', the presentation
> of unactualized possibility?"

Yes, there is indeed a strong parallel. LW's later work is liberating
because it restores the notion that how the world appears depends as
much on perspective as on what is being perceived. And it pushes this
conclusion not just so that it covers the accepted, soft elements of
our reality, it applies it to hard reality, scientific and
mathematical reality, claiming that they are also social systems whose
construction and application is as much a reflection on the way we
(colectively, or dare I say objectively, hyurghh, hyurghh) want to
construct and apply our notions of reality as it is on the reality
thereby identified.

> A recognition that there is no access to the world directly through
> language, but that this is not a bad thing, because it helps us to
> stop seeking Truth, since all we are doing is playing language games
> when we do so.  But it doesn't deny the existence of Truth, or even
> transcendence (IMO), it just puts them on the other side of the
> great divide from the forms of life, and maybe elevates these forms
> to a higher ontological status than they possess when viewed merely
> as logical equivalents of some Platonically pure atomic structure
> (or course--ontology--itself no longer means what it used to mean
> either, right?).

No, LW argues that Truth or even transcendence are merely epiphenomena
of the way we identify things. They are not on another side of a
divide, they are merely two of many features in the landscape of human
culture (or perhaps even some subset thereof) and the landscape always
is and always will be changing. Nothing is sacred except for what we
place on the pedestal.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.