General
07 Jul 03
09 Jul 03
Originally posted by royalchickenJust because a philosopher gets everything completely backwards does not mean s/he isn't a great philosopher. The problems Wittgenstein was dealing with were incredibly difficult, and at times you can see why the later Wittgenstein was led to his behaviorism about the mental and his conventionalism about justification (even our seemingly a priori justification for believing that certain inference forms are necessarily truth-preserving and certain sentences in logic necessarily true). But behaviorism about the mental is just wrong-headed, and so is conventionalism about logic and mathematics, for that matter.
I believe it was you who called him the 'wrost thing to happen to philosophy' or some such, in the thread "books that are classics"?
10 Jul 03
Originally posted by bbarrare you certain that W was really a behaviorist about the mental? i think a case can be made that he did not deny that we have private sensations, but only that language can refer to these. i think his point was that, if my sensations are available only to me (ie are private) then i can't refer to them because to use a sensation term (eg red) seems to pre-suppose something public that we can agree it refers to. W didn't deny that i have a beetle in my box, only that there is nothing i can say to let you know what my beetle is like. sorry if this is a little ragged - i've had hardly any sleep for nearly 48 hours...
Just because a philosopher gets everything completely backwards does not mean s/he isn't a great philosopher. The problems Wittgenstein was dealing with were incredibly difficult, and at times you can see why the later Wittgenstein was led to his behaviorism about the mental and his conventionalism about justification (even our seemingly a priori justificati ...[text shortened]... is just wrong-headed, and so is conventionalism about logic and mathematics, for that matter.
10 Jul 03
Originally posted by royalchickenRoughly, Wittgenstein was a conventionalist about logic in that he did not think that, e.g., (x)(Px ^ ~Px) expresses a necessary truth. Rather, he thought that it was a matter of the rules of our language game, our grammar, that we label instantiations of this rule 'true' and violations of it 'false'. It makes no sense, on Wittgenstein's view, to claim the law of the excluded middle is true in some ultimate, language transcendent fashion.
This is true, and this seems like a good post, especially the latter comment. Am I roughly correct in thinking that 'conventionalism' is the belief that truth is a social convention? If so, this idea seems completely unacceptable.
BTW, are you related to Fletcher Christian 😉?
10 Jul 03
Thank you for the clarification. What would your response be? In what way is the idea that a sensible statement can be either true or false independent of the means in which it is expressed? (I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here. I understand that the onus is on me to defend anything in agreement with what you described as conventionalism, but I'd like to see a refutation.)
10 Jul 03
Originally posted by dfm65Wittgenstein thought that inner sensations stand in need of some outward criterion. X is a criterion of Y in situations of type S if the very meaning or definition of 'Y', or the rules of grammar for deployment of the term 'Y' justify the claim that one can determine the applicability of 'Y' on the basis of X in normal situations of type S. So Wittgenstein is committed to the claim that there are logical (or, better, conceptual) connections between sensations (e.g, toothaches) and public observables, presumably behaviors of various sorts. It is his claim that there are such connections that makes him a logical behaviorist. Of course, there are different varieties of logical behaviorism. The one you are probably familiar with is the view according to which mental states are strictly identified with outward behavior and statements about the mental are taken to be traslatable without remainder (i.e. reduced) to statements about behavior. This Rylean type of behaviorism is an extreme version of logical behaviorism, and perhaps not one to which Wittgenstein subscribed. The private language argument, which you summarize in your post, can not show that there are the conceptual connections between sensations and behavior that Wittgenstein claims. At most it can show that without some more or less correlative outward observable, we could never be certain that we had successfully taught the use of sensation terms to someone learning the language.
are you certain that W was really a behaviorist about the mental? i think a case can be made that he did not deny that we have private sensations, but only that language can refer to these. i think his point was that, if my sensations are available only to me (ie are private) then i can't refer to them because to use a sensation term (eg red) seems to pre-sup ...[text shortened]... le is like. sorry if this is a little ragged - i've had hardly any sleep for nearly 48 hours...
10 Jul 03
Originally posted by bbarrThis seems to be similar to Derrida's deconstructionism. Our philosophical interpretations are inextricably bound up with our use of language and grammar. Because of the instability of language, there can be no final interpretation of things. There is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end.
Roughly, Wittgenstein was a conventionalist about logic in that he did not think that, e.g., (x)(Px ^ ~Px) expresses a necessary truth. Rather, he thought that it was a matter of the rules of our language game, our grammar, that we label instantiations of this rule 'true' and violations of it 'false'. It makes no sense, on Wittgenstein's view, to claim the law of the excluded middle is true in some ultimate, language transcendent fashion.
But then again, I don't know much about Wittgenstein. Perhaps I've missed the mark.
10 Jul 03
Yes the burden is on you, or on Wittgenstein, as the case may be. I've yet to see Witttgenstein's argument for this conventionalism about logic, though I know that arguments have been reconstructed out of his obscurantist scribblings. Kripke, Dummett and Stroud all have different interpretations of what Wittgenstein's conventionalism amounts to, and since this is my summer vacation and I'm not getting paid, I leave it to you or another to construct an argument to the effect that a minimal law of non-contradiction (There is at least one false sentence) is itself only true in virtue of our linguistic conventions. Anybody whose interested in how these accounts differ will have to look it up for themselves. There is an interesting discussion of these interpretations and their common failing in Hilary Putnam's "Realism and Reason".