Saturday, September 27, 2003

Still drifting around the subject. I’m feeling a little stuck here, so I’m going to drift for a while and see where that gets me. Most of these ideas that I record here developed out of my attempts to explain Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to myself. Many of my ideas turn out to be rather different from those that L.W. put forth in his book, but the bones are the same: the picture theory of language, the limits to the scope of language, logic as the (meaningless) form of representation, etc. Anyway, I had misplaced my copy of the book, sometime in the last four years or so, and since my stuff is mostly in boxes for a home renovation project, I decided to buy a new one instead of trying to figure out where I packed the old one. And then I discovered that the translation I prefer has gone out of print. So I ordered a used copy, and it finally came this week. Now that I have this book, I’m glad I didn’t have it when I started writing all of this down. I believe that I’ve allowed myself to diverge farther than I would have if I had the book in front of me the whole time. Now I’m going to point out one of those places I’ve diverged. L.W. says, at 3.323- 3.325 that the main source of confusion in everyday language is that we use the same words to mean different things and we sometimes use different words to refer to an identical thing. He believes that the development of an ideal logical symbolism will help philosophers by eliminating these areas of ambiguity or confusion about the reference of words. What I am believing is that the problems come from not recognizing when we are using poetic language. This is not an entirely original thought, mind you. Without actually showing the self-discipline to track down the references, I believe that I can safely say that a lot of Derrida’s early work was a critique of the priority that we tend to give to the metaphor of speech in our philosophies of language. He exposes and undermines that metaphor by looking at textual treatments of the opposing metaphor of writing throughout history. Because speech is connected to notions of spirit and writing to more material things, the whole exercise is simultaneously a (devastating) critique of metaphysics as a whole. Wittgenstein actually doesn’t prioritize speech, and his linguistic theory is more sophisticated than the one Derrida depended upon (Saussure’s), but he errs (in the Tractatus) by believing that, well, that the substance of the world is immutable, I guess. (He developed most of the ideas for this book while serving in the Austrian army in WWI.) He says: "Objects [by ‘objects’, here, he means something like sub-atomic particles] form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound. If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false)." He is right in that the (by now well-established) mutability of substance makes it impossible to generate a permanent picture of the world. Fortunately most ‘matter’ is stable enough that our temporary pictures are entirely adequate for practical science. It is not stable enough, however, for him to accomplish what he wanted: a symbolism which would reveal the permanent structure of the world by stripping away everything that is changeable in language, in order to show those points where language and reality meet up, as it were. In fact, the points where language and reality meet up change over time, so that the meaning of our sentences actually is relative to those other sentences which show the correct ways to use the words, rather than being relative to the world to which the sentences refer. Wittgenstein tackles this and related problems in his later works, but he never puts his ideas into systematic form again (never publishes another book, in fact– all of his later writings were published posthumously). So. The picture theory of meaning cannot sow us the permanent structure of the world, but it does suffice to give us science and all of the technological benefits thereof. The question remains: where does this leave philosophy? If philosophy looks for immutable truths and final meanings, isn’t it screwed? Or, as MacIntyre asserts, is it merely historical? Probably it is historical (as, in fact, science too has turned out to be). If so, our present philosophy suffers from a lack of ethical theory, and it seems worthwhile to try to address this before we destroy ourselves through our bad behavior. Whether or not ethics is also regional is a question which gets debated in the newspaper columns and weblogs today, if you haven’t noticed. As you can see, I am still postponing a serious look at metaphor. I promise, I am not trying to build suspense here. The subject just seems so vast. Perhaps I should try to think of some way to break it down into more manageable parts. Hmm. Back tomorrow, I’m sure. We’re off to the movies now. 8:33:09 PM    comments? [] Unknowables and analogies Did I say four regions where language gets strained? Okay, then, let’s try to work with that. We have (1) inside the body (my body), (2) inside the objects (or beyond the reach of our observational tools), (3) inside other people, and (4) out there near the origins and teloi of things, where ultimate meanings reside. Our sentences depend upon analogy and metaphor and other poetic devices in order to meaningfully describe these regions, by necessity. Meaning is here understood as the connection between the sentence and either the subject with whom it originates or the subject who comprehends it. Neither of those subjects, nor any other human subject, has the kind of direct public access to these four regions which enables us to create meaningful descriptions of them, in the simple sense. Anything meaningful which is said about these regions, is therefore meaningful in some other sense of the word. This is what we must try to understand. As I have suggested earlier, simple meaning in language is fundamentally a function of analogy. The subject recognizes when things are the same or they are different. The arrangement of words in the sentence is recognized as a analog to an arrangement of things in the world. We also know when the use of common words is appropriate through analogy. This is an old joke between my husband and I, because when I first met him I had been immersed in these matters for about the four previous years. He has very little background in philosophy, and he thought it was cute that I was interested in tautologies. Then I told him to start looking for them, because people use them absolutely all the time in ordinary speech, most commonly in the form of "A is exactly like B, except for the ways in which it is different". We still laugh when we hear someone say something like this, because it is, after all, a completely meaningless sentence. It is the basis for our use of words, however– My neighbor’s dog is exactly like my dog, except he’s a different breed and he has different colored fur and eyes. The similarity is, however, enough that we can call both of them dogs. The objects to which a name refers, as Wittgenstein showed in his later writings, do not always have some distinct set of qualities in common– rather they reflect a ‘family resemblance’ to each other. This resemblance is built up by lots of individual instances of some person thinking to themselves, "This is just like that, except in the ways that it is different. I suppose I can use the same name for it." Imagine going to a new website for the first time. Is it a weblog or a web page? How do you know? I'm going to stop here for now and think a little more about the next step.  I'll be back before the weekend is over, however. 3:06:58 PM    comments? []

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