Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Let x = x I’m having a thought, so I'll write it down. Then we can all consider it together, and see whether it holds up. (Incidentally, I missed my morning meeting this a.m. by crawling back into bed. I'm going to have to come up with a better strategy for writing in the cold morning rooms of my house.) To say that identity is a necessary condition of making true statements is to say that, before we can say anything true, objects must be nameable. In order to support a name, an object must have an identity, identity with itself, or, in other words, it must have what we call existence. It must be something that we can name, that will be there with its name, that will be. Wittgenstein says, in one of the most cryptic passages in the (fairly cryptic) book: The "experience" that we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience. Logic precedes every experience– that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What. [5.552] The same condition hold for us as the subject– we must persist, exist, in order to recognize the existence of those things that we name. This is no existence independent of our perception of things, however. It is simply what is required of a thing before we can properly perceive it. The "knowledge" that we have of identity, or of what we call existence, is of a fundamentally different kind than that which we have of the facts of the world. Sometime it appears that Wittgenstein is trying to elevate the study of logical tautologies to a mystical appreciation of Being, and this might be the case. ("Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is," he says near the end of the book. We’ll get to that soon. [6.44]) In any case, he assigns a different word to our apprehension of this identity: it shows itself, and there is nothing which can be said about it. When we try to make sentences about our apprehension of identity, we generate tautologies, which are meaningless. Anything that can be truly said cannot be a tautology– it must be a well-formed sentence or proposition. In some ways, I believe, this is probably similar to Heidegger’s notion of ontological difference, that the Being of beings is not itself a being, and therefore cannot be described in the same ways that we describe ordinary beings. And there is no doubt that Heidegger saw something transcendent in his Being, although it probably still falls short of any normal theism (negative theology, maybe, but that’s not normal). If I knew Heidegger’s work better, I might say it is the same notion, but I do not. If it is, I doubt that Heidegger arrived at it in quite the same way (although he worked from a Kantian base, too, I believe. Any closet Heiddeggarians out there?). If anyone dares, I would appreciate some comments on this. Does it make sense? Does it seem plausible? Oh, and for fun, if you haven’t checked it out yet, Paul at Playing with My Food (for reasons which are still unclear to me) posted a link to the entire text of Monty Python’s "Philosopher’s Song". Scroll to the end of the skit to see the lyrics. (Thanks, Paul!) 10:25:28 PM    comments? [] Finding the limits The next subject is a little difficult, which probably just means that I don’t know enough about what I’m saying to render it into easily understood prose. But, whatever. We have to get over the hurdle of limits in order to get to an understanding of the subject and ethics from here. The key phrase here is "the conditions for the possibility of meaning in language", which is a descendant from "the conditions for the possibility of knowledge". This is a variant of a project which Kant undertook in The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant looked for the conditions under which knowledge was possible so that he could distinguish the realm of knowledge from the realm of faith. Actually, now that I look at it on the screen, it appears that what we might really need here are the conditions for the possibility of truth in language, rather than for meaning. Wittgenstein didn’t see the problem this way, but that is because he didn’t allow for any meaningful sentences which were not either true or the converse of a true sentence. We have discussed the ways that metaphorical sentences can be meaningful and false, but these don’t have a true converse paired with them. Sentences which contain the name of an imaginary object ("The troll sleeps under the bridge") are also meaningful and false, and their converses ("The troll doesn’t sleep under the bridge") are too. So the sentences which describe the known world must be all of the true sentences, and not, as Wittgenstein believed, all of the meaningful sentences. Wittgenstein delegated a lot of what we say to the realm of nonsense, which led to a lot of trouble for ethicists for a little while, and which led a great many people (the logical positivists) to misunderstand him badly (and infuriate him). We’ll try to avoid that trap. The key thing to notice at this point is that there are certain operations that every ordinary human being can do without any thought at all. These are simply obvious things to anyone who has the pertinent information. One is the recognition of the true sentence in a pair of converses which describe a present fact. If I ask my husband, "Is it true that you have the magazine we received in the mail today?", he doesn’t have to do any reasoning or thinking of any kind in order to determine the answer. It is simply observed, perceived. I am writing in the library, my daughter is reading in her bedroom, and my husband is eating a sandwich at the dining room table. All true. The dog is outside and the cats are inside. Both false, unless one of the cats has slipped in without my knowing. Another operation which is instantaneous in the same way is the recognition of sameness and difference. It can take longer than an instant to solve one of those puzzles we give children where there are six drawings and only two of them are identical, but that is only because we have to compare so many pairs of drawings in order to find the correct pair. There is no confusion over what conditions we are looking for. Identity isn’t something we reason to, it is something we simply see. It is there or it is not. Identity and truth are not simple qualities or relations, either. We must be able to recognize these before we can pick out anything that is a quality or a relation. They are logically prior to all factual assertions– a fact requires that things be differentiated from each other while in a relationship. A fact must be a definite state of affairs, one that can be truly described, no objects which flicker in and out of existence, or which occupy more than one position at a time. These are also not synthetic a priori statements of the kind which Kant sought. To put any statement about identity into a sentence generates a tautology: I am what I am. And to say "proposition ‘a’ is true" is to say no more than "a". (If I say, "It’s true that I like Diet Coke", I’m saying the same thing as "I like Diet Coke".) They are a priori, and they encompass an operation of the human subject, but there is no synthesis involved– just truth and identity, matching things which are the same, not relating things which are different. I’m going to stop there, so that I can grab a few more minutes in my warm bed. It is not as cold this morning as it was yesterday, but it’s still cold enough to make me want to hide. We’ll resume whenever I figure out where I want to go with this. 7:15:50 AM    comments? []

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