New Critical Thinking: What Wittgenstein Offered 9781498583596, 9781498583602

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New Critical Thinking

New Critical Thinking What Wittgenstein Offered

Sean Wilson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir by Malcolm (1984) 1,168w from pp.19, 24–28, 31, 46, 50–53, 56–57, 63, 70, 72. By permission of Oxford University Press, USA. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-8359-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-8360-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To Snoopy The greatest dog ever (a really really tough standard)

Contents

Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxiii Abbreviationsxvii Introductionxxi PART I: WITTGENSTEIN

1

1 Was Wittgenstein a Charlatan?

3

2 What Made Wittgenstein Special?

17

3 Why Does It Matter?

35

PART II: NEW FOUNDATIONS

43

4 Word Sense

45

5 Meaning Is Use

51

6 Task-Functions59 7 Picturing69 8 Therapy77 PART III: POST-ANALYTIC THOUGHT 9 Meaning and Intent

85 87

10 Definition and False Dispute

97

11 Designation and Specimen

109 vii

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Contents

12 Conceptual Investigation

121

13 Aspect and Framing

133

14 Connoisseurship and Ethics

145

15 Religion155 Index167 About the Author

171

Preface

I wrote this manuscript during sabbatical, from June of 2015 through August of 2016. I completed substantial edits recommended by peers in the summer of 2017 and fnal edits in summer of 2018. The original title was going to be “The Logic of Context.” I have included numerous illustrations because I wanted to make the content as accessible as possible to a lay audience. Wittgenstein changed my life. I’m often asked about this—about what it all means. I wrote this book exactly because of that. My whole aim is to uniquely capture Wittgenstein’s thinking and to export this infuence beyond philosophy. Wittgenstein belongs to no academic feld. Philosophy as a discipline is no more Wittgensteinian than is the feld of politics. The whole point is for any scholarly community to think beyond its neighborhood. The whole point is to see Wittgenstein as leaving us new tools for what good thinking, itself, is. I confess that this project has been diffcult to negotiate. Academics can sometimes develop a sour disposition toward turf reclamation. But so much of Wittgenstein is exactly about upsetting the apple cart. In scholarship, the truth that is best is the truth that disturbs. My thesis is that one can’t understand Wittgenstein’s true inheritance without becoming acute in certain ways. Coaching is really the only way to help, for that is all that this orientation really is—a coaching upon how to see connections in a certain way. This is why the book uses thought problems and hypotheticals to teach the “new thinking.” I purposely avoided a work that would have merely argued for reorientation and which might have degenerated into “chicken soup for the soul.” Some readers, of course, may not like this approach. They may lack a desire for being reoriented and will become impatient. People usually want to reason from data, authority, or from a system of thought (theories), not ix

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from something insular—a case, scenario, or an instance. And this is worse when the insular is meant to cumulate. But there is no other way to show the reader the alternate way to connect idea elements. And so problem sets become necessary instrumentation, even though they may be taxing in terms of patience. BIOGRAPHY Wittgenstein is the perfect example of a thinker who must be understood chiefy through biography, frst, rather than through even his own works. You must understand his life before you can understand his writings. Because of this, I, like so many, owe a great debt to Ray Monk and Norman Malcolm, whose professional portraits of Wittgenstein opened my eyes. My philosophical readers who share an interest in Wittgenstein have at times expressed some discomfort with part I of this book, where I present a well-sourced biographical account of Wittgenstein’s unique nature. This opening is simply vital. Aside from setting up what comes next, it plants the tools of the “new thinking” into the earth (involving a real person). It is much more diffcult, for example, to explain how a picture can resonantly fash before the mind’s eye—and even disturb someone—without talking in narrative style about Wittgenstein’s unique psychological constitution. I mean, he writes about the relevance of these pictures all of the time. And if scholars are blind to a biographical conception of Wittgenstein, they end up misunderstanding what the idea of a “picture” amounted to in his writings. This subtext alone is a helpful scholarly contribution. Likewise, how can I even begin to explain that everything taught in a standard critical reasoning course is missing something basic? How can I explain that the best thinking humans may require involves experiencing resonate aspects and being hypersensitive to certain social cues during the behavior of assertion? Do I just say all of that with a bombastic declaration (like I just did) or should I frst show the reader Wittgenstein’s life? I need my biographical vision to make this come alive. The whole point of the book is that what makes reasoning good is not “the logic of our propositions,” if you will, but rather a degree of sensitivity that varies among human subjects. We are not equal in how we comprehend ideas. But yet, if one can become acute here—if one, as it were, “trains”—then a person can come to see the very same issue differently than when he or she lacked suffcient perspicuity. And so it is not facts, logics, or even “values” that themselves get us there, but weird sensitivities of some kind—a weird acumen. And all of this lets us see Wittgenstein not as a perpetually mysterious

Preface

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genius—a stipulated wonderment—but rather as a person whose thinking is defned, at the very end of the day, by nothing more than the repeated use of acute qualitative sensitivities and a haunting pictorial faculty. And so that is why I need part I. Regards, Dr. Sean Wilson (July, 2018)

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my colleague Edward Fitzgerald for helping me obtain sabbatical. He was on the committee that awarded me a year’s leave. I thank Wittgenstein scholars Lars Hertzberg and Duncan Richter for writing letters that encouraged the award. And I thank the following people for receiving the manuscript: David Macarthur, Sally Parker-Ryan, Patrick Quinn, Stephen Hetherington, Jocelyn Wilson, Daniel Layman, Lars Hertzberg, Duncan Richter, Hugo Strandberg, Chon Tejedor, Christopher Robinson, and Ian Bartrum. I thank Lexington Books for publishing my work (once again). I thank Joseph Parry for being an excellent editor and Bryndee Ryan for her invaluable help. SUBSTANTIVE CRITICISM I must now acknowledge the important substantive contributions that others have made to this work. Several people helped me substantially alter the content of an earlier draft. Duncan Richter was the frst to provide transformative feedback. It is because of him that I totally rewrote the introduction and preface. He encouraged me to stress the thesis and its relevance much more than I had in prior drafts. And he helped address many issues of detail. Lars Hertzberg also provided pivotal feedback. It is because of him that the chapter on ethics was substantially revised to address Cora Diamond’s article about vegetarianism. And although Lars was always supportive of the project and my general outlook, he nonetheless raised three very large thematic criticisms, which I could only lessen the impact of rather than completely avoid. I feel that I have an obligation to chronicle these. xiii

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Acknowledgments

First, Lars was uncertain about part I of the book. He was worried about its need and the rough transition. Although the book does markedly change after part I, I have done everything possible to prepare the reader for this and to stress its relevance (chapter 3). And I have made a special effort to address this issue in the preface. Finally, I have been careful in the way I chronicle Wittgenstein’s unique nature. I have distanced myself from the feld of psychology—never endorsing a diagnosis—and instead isolated very specifc skills and behavior that deserve attention. And I have purposely left the issue of acumen as a matter of degree—steps or levels one can achieve to develop perspicuous thinking. This is where Bouwsma’s attitude was quite helpful: it made the application of all of this more relevant to us all (chapter 3). A second criticism that Lars levied was both true and unavoidable. He noted that the book, at times, seemed a bit categorical. It is as if I had reduced Wittgenstein’s method to a muffn recipe (three steps). Lars encouraged me to back off and stress this as a mere infuence or strand—just “one way” of seeing him. Because of this, I did make cosmetic changes to a few sentences. But at the end of the day I cannot do much about this criticism because my thinking about Wittgenstein does make a mechanical investment. I realized this long ago as I was writing. Here is the problem: I simply believe that three natural phenomena—taskfunctions, word traits, and picturing—really do underlie the social behavior of making assertions. And that these are not philosophies about assertion; they are an actual happenstance. And so, because I endorse a natural thesis underneath everything else, I cannot escape the edict of a “muffn recipe,” though I am cognizant of this criticism. The fnal criticism that Lars levied concerned the tone of my assertions. Like John Brigham had said of my frst book, Lars urged me to leave more to my reader. He also encouraged me not to treat Wittgenstein as a great human being (like an idol), but rather as someone we can learn from (an uplifting inspiration). Because of this I again made several cosmetic changes. I reworded, qualifed, and softened various sentences. But at the end of the day my composition does retain a sort of direct and colloquial style that Dennis Coyle once wrote about in terms of offering readers a “tradeoff.”1 In sum, I want to do everything I can to acknowledge the debts, and to thank, both Duncan and Lars. It was extremely diffcult to ask philosophers to help me with this project—and God knows I tried (as do the philosophers). I had so many who would not even return an e-mail. And so, of those who did help, I must acknowledge their contribution, service, perspective, and all they did for me. They not only read and critiqued my book, but they put up with my irritating e-mails and bothersome requests. I am as thankful as anyone can be for such charity and professionalism.

Acknowledgments

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To that end I also want to thank Sally Parker-Ryan for causing me to differentiate task-functions and pictures better than I had in a very early draft. I thank Ian Bartrum for encouraging improvements upon chapter 11 and Christopher Robinson for assistance with several matters of detail. And I thank my daughter for encouraging me to provide more explanation and to pick fewer fghts, both of which I did. Finally, I thank my mother for making a truly brilliant observation. She was worried that readers would wrongly believe that the book was dedicated to the famous Charles Schultz cartoon character rather than the actual dog in my life. I felt it best to address that issue here. NOTE 1. Coyle wrote the following book review about The Flexible Constitution At least no one can accuse Professor Wilson of being tentative or obscure. He states his positions forthrightly and clearly, and expects the good reader will follow. Following some amusing self-deprecating prefatory remarks, he launches a page of “conclusions” (p. xxi). “Those who read this book and understand it properly,” he writes, “will be left with three conclusions.” Well, there you go. By implication, any reader (and presumably reviewer) who fails to reach the proper conclusions simply has not understood the book. This puts the onus on the reader to accept the author’s argument, rather than on the author to convince the skeptical reader or leaving room for a reader to reach surprising and interesting conclusions at variance with the author’s. Defnitely no postmodern vagueness here. (p.629)

Dennis Coyle in Law and Politics Book Review 23, no. 12 (2013): 628–32. http:// www.lpbr.net/2013/12/the-fexible-constitution.html (accessed March 25, 2018).

Abbreviations

Table A.1 Table of Abbreviations Short Form

Full Citation

Aesthetics

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (University of California Press, 2007). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932-1935: From the Notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, ed., Alice Ambrose (Prometheus, 2001). John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. James O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Harvard University Press, 1975). Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 19141944 (Little, Brown & Co., 1956). Ian Bartrum, “Two Dogmas of Originalism,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review, 7, no.2 (2015):157–93, https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_jurisprudence/ vol7/iss2/5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue & Brown Books (Harper Torchbooks, 1965). Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate (Oxford, 1982). O.K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein, Conversations 1949-1951, ed. J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit (Hackett, 1986). The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Library of Living Philosophers Volume XI, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (Open Court, 1999). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984). Ray Monk, The Duty of Genius (Penguin, 1991). Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” Philosophy, 53, no. 206 (1978): 465–79, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www. jstor.org/stable/3749876. Sean Wilson, The Flexible Constitution (Lexington Books, 2013).

Ambrose

Austin Autobiography Bartrum

Blue & Brown Bobbitt Bouwsma Carnap Culture & Value Duty of Genius Diamond

Flexible Constitution

(Continued)

xvii

xviii

Abbreviations

Table A.1 (Continued) Short Form

Full Citation

Grayling

A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001). Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press, 2004). Stephen Hetherington, How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Edward Kanterian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2007). George Lakoff, The Political Mind, A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain And Its Politics (Penguin, 2008). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, The Inner and the Outer, vol. 2, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue (Blackwell Publishing, 1992). Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 1962). Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005). Sally Parker-Ryan, “Ordinary Language Philosophy,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, accessed August 1, 2016, http://www.iep.utm.edu/ord-lang/. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Harper Torchbooks, 1969). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (University of California Press, 2005). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Prentice Hall, 1958). Philosophical Occasions, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, (Hackett, 1993). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (University of Chicago, 1975). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, ed., G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (University of Chicago, 1988). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, ed., G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (University of Chicago, 1988). Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford 1984). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle, (University of California Press, 2007). Duncan Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word (Continuum, 2004). Bertrand Russell, Analysis of Mind (Watchmaker Publishing, 2010). Joachim Schulte, Wittgenstein: An Introduction (SUNY, 1992).

Hamilton Hetherington Kanterian Lakoff Last Writings

Malcolm Monk OLP

On Certainty

Grammar Investigations 3rd Occasions Remarks

Psychology I

Psychology II

Recollections Colour

Richter Russell Schulte

(Continued)

Abbreviations

xix

Table A.1 (Continued) Short Form Stroll Tractatus Waugh Where You Are Not Witt & Vienna Circle Wittgenstein’s Poker Words & Rules Young Ludwig Zettel

Full Citation Avrum Stroll, Wittgenstein (Oneworld Publications, 2007). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (Barnes and Noble, 2003). Alexander Waugh, House of Wittgenstein, A Family at War (Doubleday, 2008). Michael Nedo, Guy Moreton, and Alec Finlay, Ludwig Wittgenstein, There Where You are Not (Black Dog Publishing, 2005). Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Blackwell, 1979). David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (Faber & Faber, 2001). Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (Perennial, 1999). Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig 1889– 1921 (University of California Press, 1988). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (University of California Press, 1967).

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein changed my intellectual life. He transformed the very way that I think about, and behave toward, assertion. To understand why, one needs to understand what Wittgenstein did to critical reasoning. My premise is that Wittgenstein didn’t leave us “philosophy”; he left a pathway for a more perspicuous intellect. This came about because of his unique psychology, which caused him to be hypersensitive to the way qualities are perceived in a social context. Wittgenstein’s entire contribution as a philosopher, in fact, amounted to nothing other than the use of a qualitatively punctuated acumen. What is novel may not be what I take to be his “gift,” but rather how I show it. My claim is that Wittgenstein could abnormally perceive three natural phenomena: (a) the social traits implicated in word use; (b) the task-functions signifed in communication; and (c) the pictures that fash before the mind’s eye. Through this acuity Wittgenstein showed us something revolutionary: that language was simply the function of how the intellect behaved in the act of speech. Meaning was usage—or rather, the intellect, used. But what exactly are these three phenomena that I speak of? Are they steps for parsing arguments and claims? Are they only realized with certain intellectual abilities? Can our perception of them become acute in certain ways? The answer to all three questions is yes. Hearing traits, obtaining a taskfunction, and seeing a mental picture are all cognitive sensitivities of some kind that are simply paramount to how well we understand the meaning of something. And if these sensitivities become acute, how we see connections in idea elements will markedly change. And so the thesis in this book is bold. I claim that Wittgenstein’s perspicuous intellect was founded upon a hypersensitivity to three phenomena that,

xxi

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when wielded in unison, constituted a revolution in critical reasoning. This seems to me to be something that is both true and unsaid in any literature. But I must caution my reader about the way the book proceeds. One would think that such a thesis would prove itself exegetically, focusing upon each of Wittgenstein’s works. But this is not what I do. Very little is devoted to documenting how this or that work boils down to the three recurring concerns. I do this on purpose: such a book would have been a bore. And I don’t think, at the end of the day, readers of Wittgenstein would have disputed the exegetical demonstration—they rather would have wanted to know why it even mattered. And so, it is the signifcance of this new form of inquiry and not an exegetical proof that is most important. For this reason I do something more risky. I isolate the three phenomena and teach them, at frst, separately. And then I show how the three, when wielded in concert really well, revolutionize critical reasoning. Let’s do it this way—what does it mean to acutely perceive the social traits of word usage? Can you do that? If a person parses task-functions extremely well, what does the behavior more resemble—a computer or a cultural snob? And what does it mean to have a picture resonantly fash before the mind’s eye? If this experience becomes abnormally pronounced (aggressive) in your psychology, how might that affect your behavior toward an assertion? These questions, I think, are much more important than a work showing that this or that publication bearing Wittgenstein’s name had three recurring focal concerns. But also, there is another beneft to the method of my book’s madness. I claim that, if someone can and does develop a hypersensitivity for the three phenomena, the maneuvers they make in critical reasoning will end up “revealing” Wittgenstein. That is to say, anyone who becomes acute in the requisite way will end up saying things that seem rather Wittgensteinian to me. Thus, anyone who would have disputed an exegetical project is now left only to argue that they do not see Wittgenstein in the end result of being requisitely trained—which I imagine will be quite hard to do. One wants to say: the thesis shows itself. And think about what happens if I am right. If what I say is true, it means that the very way that most of us go about reasoning is fundamentally impoverished in certain ways. And so, although there will be some controversy in how the book proceeds, I ask for your patience. My warrant is that the experience is likely to be worthwhile, because Wittgenstein’s way of thinking offers the hope of completely altering the plane of intellectual regard. It offers to show that how we think conceptually and reason with one another must fundamentally change. And I think the chance of that is worth the patience.

Introduction

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I shall now explain all of these views in the next ffteen chapters, separated into three parts. I begin with a biographical picture that answers the question of why Wittgenstein is special (part I). I then explain the three core phenomena in part II. And fnally, in part III, I apply all of this to a set of subjects that are fundamentally important for good discourse of any kind in any academic feld. The specifc contents are as follows. PART I: WITTGENSTEIN Chapter 1, “Was Wittgenstein a Charlatan?,” explores the philosopher’s curious and paradoxical contemporary status. Two perspectives are presented. One that sees him as an overrated philosophical personality and the other that sees him as a genius whose secrets are hidden but kept alive by devotees. Both of these pictures are problematic. Chapter 2, “What Made Wittgenstein Special?,” presents the thesis that Wittgenstein had a unique psychological status that gave him abnormal strengths and weaknesses. Two traits are of particular interest: abnormal pictorial reasoning, which caused reverberating (felt) aspects, and a meticulous sensitivity for the details of quality. Chapter 3, “Why Does It Matter?,” argues that Wittgenstein’s entire contribution to philosophy boils down to the recurring usage of his abnormal sensitivities. And that we must develop more perspicuous thinking skills as well. This sets up the rest of the manuscript, which isolates the concerns in question. PART II: NEW FOUNDATIONS Part II begins in chapter 4, “Word Sense,” which shows how traits implicated in word use can fuctuate. Ordinary words function not unlike a structured variable. The nature of this dynamic is explained and illustrations help the reader conceptualize it. Chapter 5, “Meaning Is Use,” builds upon the previous chapter. It introduces Wittgenstein’s seminal discovery: the usage of words is their meaning. The focus is upon the term “bachelor.” A stepwise investigative procedure is used to show how the meaning of this term is a natural occurrence rather than a prescription. Chapter 6, “Task-Functions,” explains how to isolate intellectual task(s) that are signifed in communication. This is called fnding the “grammar” of an utterance. And it introduces the governing principle in Wittgenstein’s entire outlook—something he called “the connection.”

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Chapter 7, “Picturing,” explains how it is natural for mental pictures to emerge in the background of the mind’s eye during thinking. Cognitive science is incorporated into the discussion. The chapter also discusses how task-functions and picturing relate to each other, as a system, in the human intellect. Chapter 8, “Therapy,” is the conclusion to part II. It explains how all of the aforesaid transforms the subject of critical thinking. Instead of focusing upon debate or argument, we must point people to issues arising in how they perceive traits, tasks, or pictures. The chapter is both a clarifcation of Wittgenstein’s “method” as well as a critique of its challenges. PART III: POST-ANALYTIC THOUGHT Part III is no longer concerned with explaining the three natural phenomena that Wittgenstein could abnormally perceive. Instead, it is concerned with showing how a perspicuous perception of the three changes our understanding of basic subjects that have dominated thinking throughout time. Specifcally, we must change how we think about defnitions, formality, objectivity, subjectivity, designation, conceptual investigation (how to do philosophy), value judgments, political ideology, ethics, and religion. Chapter 9, “Meaning and Intent,” covers the role that mental states play in language. It specifcally looks at subjective and objective views of language meaning—criticizing both—and the role that intention plays. The chapter also discusses what “nonsense” is. Chapter 10, “Defnition and False Dispute,” explains how reasoning occurs with family resemblance terms. Particular attention is paid to the way the intellect behaves toward a social cluster. This chapter is meant to displace the idea that words have “defnitions.” They don’t have defnitions; they simply have the outcome of the way one chose to behave toward the cluster. Five behaviors are of concern: stereotyping, exemplifying, distinguishing, drawing sharp boundaries (imposing rules), and offering reference phrases. Chapter 11, “Designation and Specimen,” continues the investigation into language. This time, the focus is upon how reasoning works with rigid designators, scientifc jargon, labels, and proper names. Chapter 12, “Conceptual Investigation,” shows how Wittgenstein’s discoveries change abstract thinking. The chapter focuses upon false problems and confusions in the feld of epistemology, but its conclusions have a larger implication for the way philosophy in general must now be performed. Chapter 13, “Aspect and Framing,” introduces Wittgenstein’s concept of an “aspect sight.” It discusses what value judgments and “framing” really

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amount to, and what political ideology really is. And it explains three qualities that can make any framework superior to its rivals. Chapter 14, “Connoisseurship and Ethics,” explains what artisanship is. The chapter shows how training and expertise can transform one’s ability to discern between rival frameworks. Finally, the chapter shows that ethics, properly understood, amounts to nothing more than a kind of connoisseurship—the truth of which rests upon the depth of one’s eye for the subject. Chapter 15, “Religion,” is the fnal chapter. It examines the grammar of God propositions, which are contrasted with behaviors that involve trust, induction, and feeling. Also, the chapter explores the role that picturing plays in religious belief. And it suggests that the central issue in the God question may boil down to how well one’s aspect is for the experience of life. The chapter then ends by presenting a more nuanced typology for religious belief than is commonly used.

Part I

WITTGENSTEIN

Chapter 1

Was Wittgenstein a Charlatan?

The legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein is a curious paradox. On the one hand, we are told that he is a spellbound genius who had acute philosophic ability.1 One scholar even compared him to a prophet.2 He is consistently regarded in numerous polls as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century.3 Yet, the unfortunate truth is that many philosophy departments, today, shun Wittgenstein. My very own daughter graduated with a philosophy degree and was taught nothing about him.4 Not one required class of instruction. For many in philosophy, Wittgenstein is now dismissed as a cryptic and esoteric philosopher of a bygone era who merely possessed entertaining personality quirks. Some have even called him a charlatan.5 And I can think of no academic feld where his works are universally required reading. Indeed, disciples like myself are not only a rare breed in the academy, we sometimes feel like outcastes. What I want to do in these opening chapters is present two pictures of Wittgenstein. The frst is to see him as a charlatan. The second is to lay a foundation for the opposite picture, and, eventually, to posit a specifc hypothesis about what made him special (and why it matters). I begin frst with the more unfortunate portrait. CHARLATAN? There is an interesting case to be made for Wittgenstein being a charlatan. To make the case, one frst has to believe that he bequeathed to philosophy nothing more than a large collection of cryptic and esoteric pronouncements. This is apparently not an unpopular sentiment these days. According to New York University professor Paul Horwich, “Apart from a small 3

4

Chapter 1

and ignored clique of hard-core supporters[,] the usual view these days is that [Wittgenstein’s] writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value.”6 This sentiment is actually not too far removed from what segments of Wittgenstein’s extended family appeared to believe in the 1920s—namely, that he was an eccentric dupe: Ludwig’s uncles, aunts and extended family of Austrian cousins were among those who were the least impressed. Many of them were simply embarrassed by what they perceived to be his eccentric behavior and thought it perverse that he, the dupe of the family—an elementary school teacher—should be honored as a great philosopher abroad. Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England.7

But if this is true, how did Wittgenstein become such a dominant fgure? The charlatan thesis would argue that his unique personality and esoteric behaviors falsely captivated philosophical communities. And this, therefore, gave him undue attention, especially after his groundbreaking work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1922.8 One of the things that fueled the cult of Wittgenstein was the way that the well-known philosopher would reach philosophic conclusions in person. His whole body would appear to be so divinely inspired that it caused people to characterize him as a sort of “bard.” German philosopher and mathematician Rudolf Carnap probably has the best summary of this. He writes of Wittgenstein’s effect upon the famous group of philosophers and scientists known as The Vienna Circle during their meetings in the summer of 1927: His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might also say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specifc philosophical problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain. . . . When fnally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically. . . . But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through a divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.9

This spontaneous “intellectual divination” not only captivated others, it conveniently empowered Wittgenstein. It gave him the freedom to revise or alter his philosophy—or the way he stated it—in subsequent acts of

Was Wittgenstein a Charlatan?

5

revelation, as Austrian philosopher Friedrich Waismann once complained.10 And it protected Wittgenstein from cross examination, as Carnap noted (above). Deference to Wittgenstein was policed on two fronts. It was either socially polite11 or it became explicit.12 Vienna Circle members, for example, were specifcally warned not to interrogate him, because he was “very sensitive and easily disturbed by a direct question,” and that members should only cautiously ask for “elucidations.”13 In some meetings Wittgenstein chose to read poetry,14 “facing the wall . . . [while] his imprisoned audience of logicians stared at his back.”15 British philosopher A. J. Ayer once colorfully described Wittgenstein’s spell upon the Vienna Circle in religious terms—calling him a “deity” and “the Christ.”16 When Wittgenstein became a philosophy professor at Cambridge in 1929, his personality was on full display. The use of in-the-moment inspiration made his lectures quite novel. The performances were not really “lectures,” but original material.17 They had the style of a conversation, with Wittgenstein posing questions and reacting to the answers.18 His mannerisms became legendary: His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. . . . Sometimes, however, when he was trying to draw a thought out of himself, he would prohibit, with a peremptory motion, of the hand, any questions or remarks. There were frequent and prolonged periods of silence, with only an occasional mutter from Wittgenstein, and the stillest attention from the others. During these silences, Wittgenstein was extremely tense and active.19

And people could not help but note the eccentric behaviors that accompanied the performance.20 They would mention his “piercing gaze.”21 One student noted how, in lectures, he spoke with different voices, mixing performance-theater into the spontaneous dialogue.22 The student, who thought him a charlatan, added: I remember one evening he got up from his chair, talking in this funny voice, and said something like, “What do we say if I walk through this wall?” And I remember realizing that my knuckles were going white gripping my chair. And I really thought he was going to go through the wall and that the roof was going to fall in. That must have been part of his spell: that he could conjure up almost anything.23

Because of this, some felt that Wittgenstein’s lectures were not really “educational”; they were more like having tickets to watch Elvis sing. That is, they amounted to privileged Cambridge students being given the chance

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to see a “phenom.”24 What they received from the lecture was the ability to say they saw the legendary Wittgenstein self-converse in performance-theater throughout the term.25 Because of this, some felt that Wittgenstein was “a bad infuence.”26 But it was not only what they failed to learn that might have concerned some. Wittgenstein’s rule over his classes was ironclad. Because he would take both sides of an argument, students felt discouraged from participating.27 And they also became frightened of him. Famous American philosopher Norman Malcolm, who was a student at Cambridge, claims that Wittgenstein was “very impatient and easily angered” and that “fear helped keep our attention at a high pitch.”28 Another student, British philosopher Stephen Toulmin, noted, “For our part, we struck him as intolerably stupid. He would denounce us to our faces as unteachable.”29 The logical coping mechanism was to become deferential.30 And his students did this even during informal meetings,31 as Malcolm describes in this passage: As we arrived one by one we found Wittgenstein sitting in silence in his canvas deck-chair, greeting no one, his face stern, apparently engrossed in serious refection. No one dared to break the silence with an idle remark. We sat quietly as if absorbed in thought. Peter Geach once observed that it had the appearance of a Quaker prayer meeting. It took nerve to shatter this silence by introducing a topic.32

For the most part, the great majority of people who came into contact with Wittgenstein were captivated by him.33 Far from being seen as authoritarian, he rather became idolized. Friedrich Waismann, for example, was once described as having a “grotesque” subservience to “his idol,” changing his opinion “whenever Wittgenstein did” and imitating the gesture of “clapping his hand to his forehead.”34 Students, too, would imitate Wittgenstein’s mannerisms, borrow his expressions and even his tone of voice: The magic of his personality and style was most inviting and persuasive. To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catch-words and even to imitate his tone of voice, his mien and gestures, was almost impossible.35 . . . I doubt that anyone in the class failed to be infuenced by him in some way. Few of us could keep from acquiring imitations of his mannerisms, gestures, intonations, exclamations.36

It is a mistake to think that this effect occurred only among students and a few professional colleagues. Wittgenstein’s personality dominated people as a general rule. Of all of those to fall under his spell, Bertrand Russell may be the most famous. And he did so when Wittgenstein was a mere undergraduate

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student. Russell called him his “dream student” and a “genius.”37 So captivated was Russell that he curiously began deferring to his undergraduate on points of logic.38 And he experienced hurt feelings when Wittgenstein became critical of his academic work.39 So strange was this teacher-pupil relationship that Russell even compared it to the dynamic at play with his girlfriend, saying, “[Wittgenstein] differs from me just as I differ from you. He is clearer, more creative, more passionate; I am broader, more sympathetic, more sane.”40 Wittgenstein’s aura was so stunning that even Cambridge philosophy dons would attend his lectures to keep up with the latest revelations.41 G. E. Moore, in particular, attended many lectures from 1930 to 1933. Although he found them rich in illustration, intense and exciting to the audience, he also admitted something rather curious. He could not understand “a good many of the things” being said.42 And this was no anomaly. One of the effects that seemed to happen quite regularly with Wittgenstein is that people simply assumed he was “correct” even though they themselves could not see the truth of the matter. One student put it aptly: “I accepted that most of what he said was beyond my then comprehension but hoped that someday understanding might dawn.”43 And this is pretty much the same thing G. E. Moore said of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy in the Tractatus: Moore thought he could understand it when [Wittgenstein] went through the work with him line by line, but as soon as he parted company from the author found himself totally muddled and quite unable to explain it to anyone else. In the end Moore had to concede that it was the indomitable force of [Wittgenstein’s] will which convinced him that his friend must be right, whether he could understand him or not.44

Even Bertrand Russell suffered from this. He, too, had experienced the feeling in person that Wittgenstein had to be right, while not otherwise understanding his point. And he felt this when Wittgenstein was a mere undergraduate student: I showed him a crucial part of what I have been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the diffculties—that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he had seen something that I have missed. If I could see it too, I shouldn’t mind, but as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my writing—I can only go on with what I see, and yet I feel it is probably all wrong, and that Wittgenstein will probably think me a dishonest scoundrel for going on with it. Well, well,—it is the younger generation knocking at the door—I must make room for him when I can, or I shall become an incubus. But at the moment I was rather cross.45

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And so, this is the charlatan thesis. A hypnotic dynamo came to Cambridge and rose to artifcial power peddling cryptic comments and performancetheater like you have never seen before. I must now ask my reader: what is wrong with this picture? GENIUS? The central problem with the charlatan thesis is that Wittgenstein has infected new generations of scholars who never personally met the “bard.” British philosopher A. C. Grayling describes this as “a kind of apostolic succession,” with Wittgenstein’s pupils ordaining a new set of disciples.46 But it is a mistake to suggest that the original pupils are themselves the source of any authority. The new generation is directly captivated by something inherent in Wittgenstein’s unique body of work. Consider, for example, Ray Monk, whose biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, remains the best excavation of the philosopher that one can fnd, along with Malcolm’s testimonial.47 Although Monk never met the man who could impress his correctness upon you, the biographer nonetheless fell under the auspices of his spell. He would proclaim that Wittgenstein “towered” over other philosophers in the twentieth century—which means he had no real competition. And he would go on to say that Wittgenstein’s seminal work Philosophical Investigations was the greatest philosophy book ever written in the history of philosophy. And he would even declare that Wittgenstein’s simple diary entries and abandoned projects48 to be among the top ten works of the last century.49 I must say, you are pretty good when your diary jottings are among the greatest works ever produced in the 1900s. And take a look at the photo of Monk inside the jacket of the hardcover edition of the legendary biography, which is found in the next chapter, in fgure 2.1(B). (I ask my reader to examine it now.) It looks as though the author is trying to replicate Wittgenstein’s gaze. Why would Monk do that? Here’s the point: he seems transfxed. But Monk’s behavior was not unusual. It happens to many excellent scholars who never met Wittgenstein. Consider Philip Bobbitt, who is an American giant in the feld of legal theory. If you examine either of his seminal works on jurisprudence,50 you will fnd Wittgenstein’s fare and style portending within. Even the book dedication of Constitutional Fate proudly pledges the work to the “Glory of God” in an almost word-for-word replication of what Wittgenstein wrote for a dedication in 1930.51 Dennis Patterson, too, is an American legal theorist who has been noted for scholarship that has a zeal for Wittgenstein.52 And of course, I know

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frsthand how this phenomenon works, because my own scholarship proudly bears the affiction.53 So what causes it? The answer, I contend, has nothing to do with the affected being facile or with the teacher being a charlatan. It rather has to do with something exceedingly simple: how Wittgenstein shows you to get from point a to point b. What transfxes people are the means by which certain connections in idea elements, previously hidden, are revealed. And I’m not sure which is more intoxicating: the lights coming on or the way it is shown. For no one can credibly deny that exposure to Wittgenstein is consequential. It causes strange reactions. Rightly or wrongly, it pushes people toward various schools of thought. Some become behaviorists,54 others firt with deconstruction, while many become pragmatists.55 Still others become mystics. Some become crude reductionists and adopt attitudes that are dismissive and curmudgeonly. Others call the teachings liberating56 and become “disciples.”57 Still others end up despising him—which is itself a poignant transformation. And I would argue that when the feld of philosophy acknowledges Wittgenstein’s status as a great philosopher, but then ignores him—that this, too, is a very curious reaction. A charlatan cannot be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and neither are great philosophers shunned by an entire feld. So, the effect that Wittgenstein has upon people remains consequential. It is for this reason that he remains a leading fgure not merely for one, but two, movements in intellectual history—analytic and “post-analytic” thought.58 Or as a popular book once said it, “While very few people in the history of philosophy can boast the creation of one school of thought, Wittgenstein can lay claim to the foundation of two. Russell labeled the two approaches Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II.”59 Therefore, my point is that Wittgenstein is not going away any time soon, despite the fact that philosophy departments have put him in the closet. Much of what I want to do in this book is not only make Wittgenstein’s approach more accessible, but show felds other than philosophy why they desperately need him in the curriculum. And so what I will do in the next chapter is lay out a thesis for why people should begin to see Wittgenstein not unlike the way astronomy sees the contribution of the Hubble Telescope. I will show that it is not cryptic comments that defne the philosopher, but rather a uniquely gifted acumen with abnormal perspicuity that discovered new tools in critical thinking. And that to break the perceived encryption of his remarks—so that we can properly receive this inheritance—we must frst come to terms with the abnormalities in his psychology that gave him such acute intellectual sensitivities. And it is precisely this subject that I shall address next.

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NOTES 1. See generally Duty of Genius. Bertrand Russell once described Wittgenstein as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Young Ludwig, 118. British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey concurred: In my opinion, Mr. Wittgenstein is a philosophic genius of a different order from anyone else I know. This is partly owning to his great gift for seeing what is essential in a problem and partly to his overwhelming intellectual vigor, to the intensity of thought with which he pursues a question to the bottom and never rests content with a mere possible hypothesis. From his work more than that of any other man I hope for a solution of the diffculties that perplex me both in philosophy generally and in the foundations of mathematics in particular. G. E. Moore in Occasions, 48.

2. After spending some time with Wittgenstein, American Philosopher O. K. Bouwsma remarked: What is a prophet like? Wittgenstein is the nearest to a prophet I have ever known. He is a man who is like a tower, who stands high and unattached, leaning on no one. . . . He fears no man. . . . But other men fear him. And why? Not at all because he can strike them or take their money or their good names. They fear his judgment. And so I feared Wittgenstein, felt responsible to him. I always knew how precious a walk and talk with him was, and yet I was in dread of his coming and of being with him. . . . His words I cherished like jewels. And do so now. But the main point is that he robbed me of a lazy comfort in my own mediocrity. . . . [He] was so clearly my rightful superior. Bouwsma, xv–xvi.

3. Richter, 1. For a reader poll of the most infuential philosopher of the last 200 years (600 votes), see “Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog,” accessed February 17, 2016, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-importantphilosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html. 4. She attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). 5. See Freeman Dyson’s view in Phillip F. Schewe’s book, Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson, published by Macmillan (2013), 33. 6. From the New York Times philosopher’s forum called The Stone, published on March 3, 2013, accessed on February 17, 2016, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/. 7. Waugh, 147. 8. As I write this line of text, America is having a presidential primary election. It’s about one-third of the way through. The picture of Donald Trump just popped into my head. For those who are detractors of Wittgenstein, the picture they have of his rise to power in philosophical circles is probably not unlike the picture of how Trump came to dominate television time in the American primaries. This is a picture—not an analogy. I’m just talking about the phenomenon of how a personality captures attention. The charlatan thesis claims something like this. 9. Carnap, 25–26. 10. Waismann wrote German philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick in 1934, during Wittgenstein’s transition phase, saying, “He has the great gift of always seeing things as if for the frst time. But it shows, I think, how diffcult collaborative

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work with him is, since he is always following up the inspiration of the moment and demolishing what he has previously sketched out.” See Gordon P. Baker, “Verehrung und Verkehrung: Waismann and Wittgenstein” in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt (Cornell University Press, 1979), 256. 11. After the very frst Vienna Circle meeting, Schlick apparently said this to his wife: “I observed with interest the reverential attitude of the pilgrim. He returned in an ecstatic state, saying little, and I felt I should not ask questions.” Schulte, 8 (note 12). 12. Wittgenstein “tolerated no critical examination by others, once the insight had been gained by an act of inspiration.” Carnap, 26. 13. Carnap writes: Schlick admonished us urgently not to start a discussion of the kind to which we were accustomed in the Circle, because Wittgenstein did not want such a thing under any circumstances. We should even be cautious in asking questions, because Wittgenstein was very sensitive and easily disturbed by a direct question. The best approach, Schlick said, would be to let Wittgenstein talk and then ask only very cautiously for the necessary elucidations. When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick’s warnings were fully justifed. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Carnap, 25.

14. Schulte, 8; Duty of Genius, 243. 15. Wittgenstein’s Poker, 155. 16. In February of 1933, A. J. Ayer wrote to his friend Isaiah Berlin with his impressions of the group: “Wittgenstein is a deity to them all.” Russell, according to Ayer, was seen as merely a “forerunner of the Christ [Wittgenstein].” Wittgenstein’s Poker, 152. 17. “It is hardly correct to speak of these meetings as ‘lectures,’ although this is what Wittgenstein called them. For one thing, he was carrying on original research in these meetings. He was thinking about certain problems in a way that he could have done had he been alone.” Malcolm, 26. 18. “For another thing, the meetings were largely conversation. Wittgenstein commonly directed questions at various people present and reacted to their replies. Often the meetings consisted mainly of dialogue” Malcolm, 26. 19. Malcolm, 26. 20. Edward Kanterian notes that Wittgenstein gave students “the impression that something important and groundbreaking was happening in their midst. . . . Often he would conduct a monologue with himself and not let anyone interrupt him. Then again, he would engage somebody from the audience in a dialogue.” And when Wittgenstein’s thoughts were not bombarding him, as they were supposed to, “He would sometimes exclaim ‘I’m just too stupid today!’ or ‘You have a dreadful teacher!’” Kanterian, 127, 128, and 129. 21. Malcolm, 31 (“piercing gaze”). 22. According to Peter Gray-Lucas, “He was an absolutely marvelous mimic. He missed his vocation: he should have been a stand-up comedian. In his funny Austrian he could do all sorts of mimicry of accents, styles, ways of talking. He was always

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talking about the different tones of voice in which you could say things, and it was absolutely gripping.” Wittgenstein’s Poker, 24. 23. According to Peter Gray-Lucas, who is said to be “no admirer of Wittgenstein, regarding him as a ‘charlatan.’” Wittgenstein’s Poker, 24. 24. This sentiment was voiced by F. R. Leavis, who was a Cambridge English lecturer and an acquaintance of Wittgenstein. One of Wittgenstein’s colleagues, philosophy logician W.E. Johnson, also questioned what students were really “learning” in Wittgenstein’s courses. See Leavis in Recollections, 62–63 and Drury at 103. See also, Duty of Genius, 262. 25. Leavis describes Wittgenstein’s infuence as “the immense vogue” generated by his “genius.” He believes the lectures did not result in any greater understanding by anyone who heard them. Recollections, 62. 26. See Leavis in Recollections, 62. For W. E. Johnson’s concurring view, see Drury in Recollections, 103 and Duty of Genius, 262. 27. Leavis in Recollections, 51. 28. Malcolm writes: Wittgenstein was a frightening person at these classes. He was very impatient and easily angered. . . . Once when Yorick Smythies, an old friend of Wittgenstein’s, was unable to put his objection into words, Wittgenstein said to him very harshly, ‘I might as well talk to this stove!’ Fear of Wittgenstein helped to keep our attention at a high pitch. Malcolm, 27. 29. Wittgenstein’s Poker, 190. Sir John Vinelott, a barrister and judge in the English legal system who was a student at Cambridge in the 1940s, had a much more mitigating assessment: “He was a diffcult man because his honesty and his directness were uncomfortable to most ordinary people.” 30. Former student John King writes, “It will not surprise anyone who has read the memoirs written about him (all of which bear testimony to the fact) that at times he had, in Lee’s words, an ‘inhibiting effect on his pupils.’ I feared his judgement and admired in silence.” King in Recollections, 70. 31. Wittgenstein would sometimes lecture at home or in student rooms. See Malcolm, 52 and Aesthetics, Preface, frst page (unpaginated). 32. Wittgenstein was having lectures at his home with about half-a-dozen students. Malcom, 52–53. 33. Sir John Vinelott noted, “The impression he made upon one was of somebody whose life was consumed with a passion for inquiry, for discovery, for intellectual excavation, and who was profoundly honest and simple in his style of life.” Wittgenstein’s Poker, 190. 34. “The Austrian mathematician Karl Menger—a member of the [Vienna] Circle—described Waismann as having a ‘grotesque’ subservience to Wittgenstein, ‘his idol.’ ‘In particular, he changed his opinion whenever Wittgenstein did.’ Waismann had also become enough of a disciple to pick up Wittgenstein’s habit of clapping his hand to his forehead.” Wittgenstein’s Poker, 155. 35. Malcolm, 19 (Georg Henrik Von Wright). 36. Malcolm, 26. 37. Russell wrote a letter in December of 1912 to his then-girlfriend, Ottoline ­Morrell, which stated the following:

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I believe a certain sort of mathematicians have far more philosophical capacity than most people who take up philosophy. Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. It has long been one of my dreams to found a great school of mathematically-trained philosophers, but I don’t know whether I shall ever get it accomplished. I had hopes of Norton, but he has not the physique. Broad is all right, but has no fundamental originality. Wittgenstein of course is exactly my dream. Kenneth Blackwell, “The Early Wittgenstein and the Middle Russell,” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Irving Block (The MIT Press, 1983), 11–12.

38. Monk writes in Duty of Genius that, in just one year of schooling, Wittgenstein had learned all that Russell had to teach on the subject of mathematical logic—“and indeed, had gone further” (41). He was “being primed as Russell’s successor” (55), with Russell himself saying that Wittgenstein would “solve the problems I am too old to solve” (55). And by year two, Russell was “fully prepared” to accept that analyzing logic was “Wittgenstein’s feld rather than his own” (71). 39. Ray Monk writes: In 1913, however, Russell stopped treating Wittgenstein as a student altogether, and began to defer to him on points of logic. In the summer of that year . . . Russell’s deferential attitude towards Wittgenstein was to have devastating repercussions on Russell’s own intellectual development, when, after Wittgenstein criticized with great severity a draft of a book that he was working on, Russell became convinced, temporarily at least, that he had nothing further to contribute to fundamental questions in philosophy. Monk, 7. See also, Duty of Genius, 80–82.

40. Duty of Genius, 79. 41. Attending the lectures beginning from the Lent term of 1930 included “a few dons, most notably G. E. Moore.” Duty of Genius, 289. 42. G. E. Moore writes: I will try to give some account of the chief things he said under all these heads; but I cannot possibly mention nearly everything, and it is possible that some of the things I omit were really more important than those I mention. Also, though I tried to get down in my notes the actual words he used, it is possible that I may sometimes have substituted words of my own which misrepresent his meaning: I certainly did not understand a good many of the things he said. Moreover, I cannot possibly do justice to the extreme richness of illustration and comparison which he used: he was really succeeding in giving what he called a “synoptic” view of things which we all know. Nor can I do justice to the intensity of conviction with which he said everything which he did say, nor to the extreme interest which he exited in his hearers. Occasions, 50–51.

43. King in Recollections, 70. 44. Waugh, 145. Moore was not the only person who, outside of Wittgenstein’s presence, puzzled at what his views actually meant. The famous German logician, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege once said he could not recommend Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for publication because “the content is too unclear to me,” even though he had specifcally corresponded with Wittgenstein about what it meant. He ended up believing the book to be a work wherein “what is said . . . takes second place to the way in which it is said.” Monk, 32.

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45. David Pears, Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Oxford, 2006), 12. Originally quoted in R. W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (Knof, 1975), 204–5. 46. “Wittgenstein made ardent disciples of some of his pupils at Cambridge, and in the interval since his death those pupils have, by a kind of apostolic succession, ordained yet other disciples.” Grayling, 129. 47. See Malcolm. 48. Both were published posthumously. The diary entries are published in Culture & Value. The abandoned project was Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (MIT Press, 1996) ed., G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe. He had lost interest in fnishing that work. Duty of Genius, 522. 49. See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/01/bestbooks.philosophy (accessed February 18, 2016). Monk is quoted, “The following list is unashamedly ‘unbalanced’. Of the 10 books listed, four are by a single philosopher: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I make no apologies for this. In my view, Wittgenstein towers above all other twentieth-century philosophers to such an extent that it is surprising to fnd any books not written by him included in such a list.” 50. See Bobbitt, and also, Constitutional Interpretation (Blackwell, 1991). 51. Here are the two book dedications: Wittgenstein: I would like to say “This book is written to the glory of God,” but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them. Remarks, 7. Bobbitt: I would like to say “This book is written to the glory of God” but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, the trick of a cheat, for it would not be rightly understood. I mean simply that it came at an end of another’s suffering and is intended to serve a value I cannot name that is other than mere self-regard. Insofar as I have failed to be in harmony with this value, my book will fall short of the vision it is an attempt to express. Bobbitt, vii.

52. This is what philosopher David Backhurst had to say when reviewing Patteson’s book Law and Truth (Oxford, 1999). “Here again his inspiration is Wittgenstein. Patterson obviously admires Wittgenstein’s thought; unfortunately, however, he is prone to invoke Wittgensteinian slogans without adequate explanation.” David Bakhurst, “Truth, Philosophy and Legal Discourse,” University of Toronto Law Journal 47, no. 3 (1997): 395–401. 53. The Flexible Constitution. See also: “On the Problems of Political Science and the Nonsense of Quantitative Ideology Models,” (March 27, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1113914 (accessed July 10, 2016). In this book, I make strategic shifts to speaking in the plural when I want to assume his arrogant tone. And in a few instances I make use of question offset by an intruding dash. I may

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even have one “shews” in here (probably in the chapter on religion). All of this I did on purpose and with an idea of celebration. 54. Richard Rorty, “Wittgensteinian Philosophy and Empirical Psychology,” Philosophical Studies 31, no. 3 (Springer, 1977): 169; C. Grant Luckhardt, “Wittgenstein and Behaviorism” Synthese 56, no. 3 (Springer, 1983): 319. 55. See, for example, Anna Boncompagni, Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: On Certainty in the Light of Peirce and James (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 56. Elizabeth Anscombe found it liberating. Duty of Genius, 498. 57. See Grayling, 129; and Justus Hartnack, Wittgenstein Modern Philosophy, (Notre Dame Press, 1986), 2–3. 58. Wittgenstein is cited as a major infuence in analytic philosophy (traditionally construed). Peter Hacker describes the infuence as huge. See Interview with Peter hacker. https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/Peter_Hacker (accessed June 19, 2016); See also, Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton, 2003) and Volume2: The Age of Meaning (Princeton, 2003); and Hans-Johann Glock, “Was Wittgenstein an Analytic philosopher?” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 4 (Wiley, July 2004), 419–44. But Wittgenstein is also claimed as an infuence in both continental philosophy and in something called post-analytic philosophy. For example, Duncan Richter notes that “post-analytic philosophers and their continental counterparts often regard Wittgenstein as a fgure of central importance.” Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefeld, 2014), 14. See also Dale Jacquette “Chapter 10, Wittgenstein as Trans-Analytic-Continental Philosopher,” in Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, eds. Jack Reynolds, James Chase, Ed Mares and James William (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); and George Duke, Elena Walsh, James Chase, and Jack Reynolds, “Chapter 2, ‘Postanalytic’ Philosophy: Overcoming the Divide?” in Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, 14. 59. Wittgenstein’s Poker, 227.

Chapter 2

What Made Wittgenstein Special?

On the back cover of the 1991 paperback edition of Ray Monk’s Ludwig ­Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius there is an excerpt from the The Los Angeles Times Book Review. It proclaims that Wittgenstein possessed one of the most “acute philosophical minds” of the century. What does this mean? If a person is considered a genius in math or science, the matter is taken for granted. They may even want to study the brain, as they did with Einstein.1 But if you say that someone has superior philosophical ability, you immediately confront social cynicism. Isn’t philosophy just one’s “philosophy”? We know that a person can excel at specifc traits. One could have a photographic memory, an encyclopedic mind, good vocabulary, or be exceptional in mathematics or reading comprehension. Or one can be well informed. But can a person really be superior in the way that he or she otherwise thinks? The prevailing view probably has a democratic prejudice: everyone has the potential to think as well as they want, even if specifc skills are challenged. Critical reasoning courses seem to suggest this. In this chapter, I try to bridge the gap in debates about whether Wittgenstein was a cryptic charlatan or an untouchable genius. I want to move beyond characterizing his acumen with grandiose accolades and instead focus upon specifc, tangible aptitudes that appear deeply rooted in his psychology. There are three that concern me: (a) undetached and resonating imagery (pictorial thinking); (b) a fastidious perception of qualities; and (c) a transfxing concentration. I shall now address each. UNDETACHED THINKING I begin with what may be the most important quality: Wittgenstein had real trouble becoming detached from ideas. To understand what I mean, I need my 17

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reader to indulge a picture. One of my colleagues once told a story of having an autistic student in his classroom when a rumor began circulating on campus. The rumor was about a dead person found inside a car in the university parking lot. Although the rumor turned out to be false, it was uncertain for a time. Most people in the class reacted to the rumor not unlike they would watching a scene in a movie: they were detached. There was excitement, interest in plot, conjecture—even a feeling of it being “neat” (something to tell others). But for the autistic student, the enormity of the idea—the way it was experienced—was intimately reverberating. The student was disturbed. The picture in the mind’s eye was resonating—it stung and could be “felt.” This is the way Wittgenstein was with the world of ideas. He lived them. He experienced thoughts in bursts of resonating pictures with reverberating affect. In fact, pictorial reasoning in Wittgenstein was especially pronounced. This is why the phenomenon dominates the entire corpus of his philosophy.2 Wittgenstein once noted that “everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time.”3 He even wondered if this condition was “feminine.”4 He said his philosophy was really an effort to paint these pictures.5 He compared his way of seeing ideas to the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance.6 And in what I take to be an especially poignant statement of just how different his faculties were, he confessed twice in his diary that describing his views to others was like trying to describe dreams.7 This made Wittgenstein associate words and phrases with the felt aspect of imagery that appeared before his mind’s eye.8 This is why it looked as though he had the weight of the world upon his shoulders when giving an answer to a philosophical question. He was not giving a policy stance or registering an opinion. He was rather confronting the felt enormity of the matter amid the professional need to “paint it” accurately and sincerely. There are popular caricatures of Wittgenstein’s legendary gaze. I have reproduced them in fgure 2.1(A–C). The mistake is to think the cartoons are of the gaze—they are not. They are showing how resonating imagery is capturing his mind’s eye. The gaze doesn’t signify vacancy; it signifes possession. His mind’s eye is looking at something. He was regularly bombarded with these trances. It is for this reason that “big ideas” would shake the fber of his being—they would disturb him. Scholars tend to describe Wittgenstein’s wide-eyed penchant for spontaneously divining philosophical truth as being an ethical virtue. They talk of it as a solemn duty. But this is only what it looked like outwardly. The impetus for it all was his resonating pictorial faculty—his undetached thinking— that caused him to want to speak sincerely about the depth of a felt aspect. And were he not disturbed by ideas, sincerity itself would have been much less captivating.

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Figure 2.1  Wittgenstein’s Legendary Gaze. Source: Image A was drawn by ©Vladymyr Lukash. Image B was drawn by ©Siegfried Woldhek. Image C was drawn by ©Emiliano Bruzzone. Image D is a computerized sketch of the book jacket photo of Ray Monk from his 1990 hardback edition, Ludwig Wittgenstein; The Duty of Genius, published in the United States by The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

This explanation helps us understand a great deal of Wittgenstein’s behavior in life. He had serious and recurring thoughts of suicide as a young man,9 because he took ideas gravely. And this explains why he became captivated with seeing religion as the feeling of being kept safe, no matter what happened—which is a truly powerful idea (if you just think about it).10 And this also explains why he joined World War I, asking to be put at the Front, despite being the wealthy heir of an industrial baron who could have avoided the war.11 He felt he needed to prove himself and to “turn into a different person”12—ideas that were causing him overwhelming tumult. Ray Monk notes the following in Wittgenstein’s diary: “Now I have the chance to be a decent human being,” he wrote on the occasion of his frst glimpse of the enemy, “for I’m standing eye to eye with death.” It was two years into the war before he was actually brought into the fring line, and his immediate thought was of the spiritual value it would bring. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me.”13

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It was during the war that Wittgenstein became seriously affected by the idea of God—something he would forever wrestle with. It caused him to give away his huge fortune and live with fnancial worries throughout his life,14 a decision he apparently never regretted. And it caused him to take seriously the idea of suffering—comfortable people became defective because they never had their feet planted in struggles of humanity. This picture was reverberating to him. Wittgenstein’s need to “live” his ideas affected everything he did in philosophy. It was the reason he would never use notes when lecturing—“the words looked like ‘corpses’ when he began to read them,” he said.15 And this is why he would often feel shame at the conclusion of a lecture—he could not adequately convey his reverberating aspect or show others how to experience the connections.16 So he would go to the cinema for what he called “the shower-bath.”17 It not only washed away the shame; it allowed something external to force-feed his resonating imagination, which gave his own faculties a break.18 And this is also the reason why he detested pretense and insincerity.19 He didn’t like it when people engaged in “devil’s advocate,” because treating ideas as a “play toy” was not the proper way to experience them. He hated when students showed only a “shallow cleverness” in their intellect,20 because the feeling of being clever spoiled what they were otherwise supposed to feel. And this is why he would not tolerate the “facetious tone” characteristic of people “having no serious purpose”21—even students invited to tea were not allowed any “small talk.” The conversation had to be “serious and interspersed with long silences.”22 And so, my ultimate point here is that these reactions were not mere pompous attitudes. To see them as such would be an abomination. Wittgenstein felt this way because of how his pictorial faculty operated as a condition of his mind. He felt this way because of the experience it produced when thinking. QUALITATIVELY FASTIDIOUS Along with felt aspects, Wittgenstein had a fastidious and even neurotic sense for the details of qualities as they appeared in any given context. This trait is bit hard to explain, but it does show itself in several areas. A good place to start is his perception of word sense—it was unnaturally accentuated. His diction was often so idiosyncratic that it required an acclimation. He would sometimes proffer more than one sense of a word in a single act of speech. His close friend Frank Ramsay noted this. He said that Wittgenstein’s sentences had “an ordinary meaning and a more diffcult

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meaning which he also believes.”23 Ray Monk characterizes Wittgenstein’s language as being “both colloquial and painstakingly precise” at the same time, making translations from German to English very diffcult.24 One of his students, Theodore Redpath, encountered this diffculty when trying to translate an early preface to Philosophical Investigations in the summer of 1938. Redpath notes: I had not realized what an exhausting task it would be. We sat for several hours one day thinking out not only every sentence, but pretty well every word, and Wittgenstein sometimes got very worked up when he (or we) could not fnd words or phrases which entirely satisfed him. Time and again I found myself wishing to heaven that he would let me work on the German quite alone and present him with a version which he could then comment on and revise, but he pushed inexorably on, and though his interpositions were sometimes quite awry, as well as exasperating, one did learn something from the procedure, and it gave one insight into Wittgenstein’s fanatical care both for accuracy and style.25

Wittgenstein’s philosophy would refect this acuity. For example, to really understand the word “afraid,” he once said that one might need to take into account tone of voice and nuanced circumstances—because, frankly, these subtle variations were resonating to his sensibilities.26 He compared picking the right word to fne differences in smell.27 And he noted that, to really understand religious words, one would have to be living and behaving a certain way—otherwise, their true point would remain shrouded.28 This perspicuous sensitivity did not apply just to words, but also what I would call, in layman’s terms, the “logic of concepts.” Wittgenstein was particularly sensitive to the signature that an idea would leave at the scene of its use.29 A good example is the way his ears would hear the word “knowledge.” He would become animated if you said you “knew you were in pain,” because pain is merely the nervous system causing “ouch.” As such, all that you had really said was that you knew your nervous system was working properly, when that was never in issue in the social context. And the point was not that you spoke this way—as if it were bad manners—but rather that you had not seen this meticulous quality when doing so. And this is why he thought it wrong to say, “I know I feel pain here,” but not wrong to say, “I know where you touched my arm.”30 Why? Because we could have an honest dispute about where the touch occurred, with the nervous system playing the role of testifying in the contest. But in the former case, the system’s report should be taken for granted—there is no need for it to “testify.” And you simply should have been perspicuous enough to see that.31 And this is why he once wrote that it is correct to say “I know what you are thinking,” and wrong to say “I know what I am thinking.”32

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This meticulous qualitative acuity is probably what allowed Wittgenstein to have what seemed like a photographic memory of movements in music. His ability to whistle was quite legendary. “He could whistle whole movements in symphonies . . . and when other people whistled something wrong, [he] would stop them and frmly tell them how it should go.”33 And he could hear piano notes even after a person stopped playing. He writes in his diary, “I am so afraid of someone’s playing the piano in the house that, when this happens and then the tinkling stops, I have a sort of hallucination of its still going on. I can hear it quite clearly even though I know that it’s all in my imagination.”34 And so, it was not a photographic memory that caused this; it was simply his penchant for the fastidious details of quality. Wittgenstein’s meticulous inclination also had an unfortunate side effect: he couldn’t organize thoughts. He was so besieged in nuance that it appeared as though no forest could possibly emerge among his innumerable trees. If you looked at how he organized his courses, for example, you would fnd something striking: there is no organization. It is as if he just dumped everything on the table. His courses were a maddening maze of seemingly arbitrarily conversation and dialogue. Malcolm noted that a student would have to take three of his classes “before one could begin to get any grasp of what he was doing.”35 Students found it “hard to see where all this rather repetitive concrete detailed talk was leading to—how the examples were inter-connected and how all this bore on the problems.”36 Some may think that Wittgenstein purposely avoided organization because he was against abstractions, theories, and generality. But this is both false as stated and far too charitable.37 The truth is that he wanted to organize not only his courses, but his philosophical remarks, but simply could not. He confessed to being devoured by detail and not being able to know when to stop.38 “I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!” he exclaimed.39 He simply didn’t know what he needed to mention,40 even though, in his mind, he was trying to say the same thing over and over again, just from a different angle.41 He could not bring “the big, important thing to light.”42 He blatantly admitted that his mind had no choice but to jump around because orderly (linear) thinking could not be achieved.43 He felt that his writings never more than one-tenth explained his true thoughts, saying they amounted to “stuttering”44 and “bad musical composition.”45 He called himself a poor tour guide,46 a “very bad painter”47 and an extremely below-average writer.48 He complained, “I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all” (emphasis in original).49 And the best he could do after years of trying was to leave a book that he admitted was only an “album” of remarks.50 But one should note something rather intriguing. Wittgenstein had no problem being especially lucid in letters and correspondence. Why were

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they different? The difference is that the content of those writings involved ordinary intellectualism. None of his acute or pronounced features were summoned. There is a reason why journalists don’t have trouble organizing paragraphs—canned soup comes as it does. Thus, it was only his philosophic thoughts that could not be organized. And this was precisely because of the way that his mind processed them. He experienced vivid and imaginative pictures that were reverberating in aspect, along with a neurotically meticulous sense of qualities as they appeared in the given context. The enormity of the thing he was trying to convey made a neat organization both a Herculean and a maddening task51— something he simply could not achieve. As a result of all of this, Wittgenstein would resort to short remarks and simile to convey his points. This was done for two reasons. First, simile naturally complemented the pictorial facet of his intelligence—you can show someone a picture more easily by using a simile. Secondly, the device forced the other person to make the connections in the idea elements themselves— that is, they had to make the linkages. Of course, this fails as a device if the person can’t do it. But if he or she can, the end result is an experience. The lights come on, and there is a sense of wonderment. And it is this that explains the cult of Wittgenstein and the phenomenon of discipleship. There is a comparison one can make here to Jesus of Nazareth and the use of parables. The one who proffers this method must rely upon the other person to make the linkages (connections). To be clear, I’m not saying that Wittgenstein used simile as a mere literary strategy—he surely did not. He used it as a necessary adaption to the conditions of his mind. It was the only way he could ordinarily communicate felt experiences of detailed qualities. His sister Hermine noted this trait early in their lives: Since we, his brothers and sisters, very often communicated with each other in comparisons, I told him . . . that imagining him with his philosophically-trained mind as an elementary school teacher it was to me as if someone were to use a precision instrument to open crates. Thereupon Ludwig answered with a comparison which silenced me[,] for he said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He doesn’t know what kind of a storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.” It was then that I understood his state of mind.52

HYPER-CONCENTRATION The last trait of Wittgenstein’s unique acumen that I want to discuss is his abnormal concentration. Stories about his lengthy, exacting train of thought

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are legendary. Even in 1949—less than two years from his death (and sixty years old)—a discussion with him was described by an American philosopher as “probably the most philosophically strenuous two hours I have ever spent.” He goes on to say, “Under the relentless probing and pushing of his enquiry my head felt almost as if it were ready to burst. . . . There was no quarter given—no sliding off the topic when it became diffcult. I was absolutely exhausted when we concluded the discussion.”53 And this was no anomaly.54 When Wittgenstein was a mere freshman at college, Russell had noted something odd that was occurring during their discussions. “I put out all my force and only just equal him. With all my other pupils I should squash them fat if I did so,” Russell said.55 He would later complain, “I don’t know anything more fatiguing than disagreeing with him in argument.”56 Malcolm, too, had complained of feeling “utterly exhausted” from trying to follow his chain of thought during a lecture57 and of experiencing “formidable strain” keeping up with him when going on simple walks.58 And Ramsey had noted that Wittgenstein possessed an “overwhelming intellectual vigor” and “an intensity of thought” that never rested.59 In fact, everyone reports intellectual treachery when taking a stroll with Wittgenstein. Former student and philosopher Peter Geach recalls the “long and intellectually taxing walks in the countryside around Cambridge as ‘work rather than pleasure.’”60 And Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, also a former student, adds: “Each conversation . . . was like living through the day of judgment. It was terrible. Everything had constantly to be dug up anew, questioned and subjected to the tests of truthfulness. This concerned not only philosophy but the whole of life.”61 The claim here is not that Wittgenstein was a pit bull—which, of course, he also could be.62 Rather, the point is about what his intellect would do to yours when the two were caught in a substantive exchange. Wittgenstein is actually making the minds of his interlocutors tire from an overload of thinking tasks. There is an interesting story that British literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis tells.63 He was a lecturer at Cambridge when Wittgenstein was there.64 One day, on a Friday afternoon, Leavis hosted a tea party. Wittgenstein arrived early at 2:00 p.m. When Leavis asked him about a philosophical paradox that had been of concern, Wittgenstein launched into a public dissertation that lasted six continuous hours. As guests began arriving at 4:00 p.m., Leavis had to play social host, but kept nodding in Wittgenstein’s direction to acknowledge that he was still speaking. Wittgenstein kept on talking—perhaps sometimes to himself—as no one really understood what he was stammering about. Even after everyone left, Wittgenstein apparently kept talking about his resolution to the paradox. (I say “apparently” because, at that point, Leavis had no idea what he was referring to). At 8:00 p.m., to Leavis’s delight, Wittgenstein was transported to a philosophy club meeting

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where the philosopher was scheduled to give a presentation that night. By all accounts, Wittgenstein had been completely oblivious to anything other than his chain of thought, including that he had just given a six-hour public dissertation through an entire tea party.65 And when he was not engaging others, he was engaging himself. Wittgenstein had such intense bouts of “self-dialogue” that he would on occasion vocalize his thoughts abnormally. One time this was so loud that a witness overheard voices outside of Wittgenstein’s dwelling and entered to see who the guest was. Wittgenstein answered, “I was talking to a very dear friend of mine—myself.”66 He even admitted that nearly all of his writings were private self-dialogues.67 Wittgenstein’s concentration made his obliviousness somewhat legendary. Russell had said, “He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting [artillary] shells when he was thinking about logic.”68 Wittgenstein’s friend and former student Maurice Drury once went to pick him up for lunch, only to be told to wait for a moment so that Wittgenstein could fnish composing a thought in his notebook. Without saying a word, Wittgenstein fnished two hours later and was “quite unaware that it was now long past their lunch-time.”69 Wittgenstein’s chain of thought would also hijack his body. During walks, Malcolm noted that he would go “in spurts, sometimes coming to a stop while he made some emphatic remark. . . . Then he would walk rapidly for a few yards, then slow down, then speed up or come to a halt, and so on.”70 He could be so absorbed in thought that neighbors unfamiliar with his manners could think he had a psychological illness. In one incident a family saw him suddenly stop and draw a fgure in the dirt, staring at it “in complete absorption for a long time before resuming his walk.”71 The family was so concerned at the behavior that they banned him from the property for fear that he was “mad.”72 Wittgenstein often complained that he could not turn his mind “off.” Russell once speculated, in fact, that Wittgenstein’s “mystical turn” was taken precisely to escape the torment of perpetual analysis.73 Wittgenstein was once asked, point blank, whether intense discussions robbed him of sleep, and he replied, “No but . . . I think I may go nuts.”74 And in 1948 he believed he had become insane. He confessed to feeling mentally “unwell” and being “frightened of the onset of insanity.”75 The feeling came about, I believe, from having to live with certain philosophical investigations to which he had been subjecting himself. He was trapped within his own torment. This explains why he blamed inescapable resonating attachments as the thing that could cause the insane to become warped;76 why he believed that a healthy intellect could easily be surrounded in madness,77 with insanity coming naturally;78 and why he often feared becoming insane.79

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CONCLUSION And so, the picture I present of Wittgenstein is not merely one of a raging genius with a solemn duty for truth and sincerity. It is rather a complex picture that arises from the unique and abnormal conditions of his intellect. He experienced pronouncedly reverberating aspects and a transfxing concentration, and he possessed a neurotic qualitative acuity. And this produced considerable defcits in other areas of functioning. Some of these tradeoffs resemble those who have high-functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.80 For example, he had emotional problems, acerbic tendencies in his personality, and experienced drastic life changes.81 He was possessed by fxation and routine. He would wear the same types of clothing.82 He would eat the same foods83—a waitress could know his order without having to take it.84 His desire for cleanliness was neurotic,85 and he had an abnormal phobia of bugs.86 He was unconscious of his own appearance, which made him sometimes appear “strange,”87 yet he was fxated upon looking tidy while having no sense of fashion.88 And if you visited his Cambridge offce, instead of fnding academic books on the shelf, you would see piles of detective magazines.89 And he was terribly inept, socially. There are so many stories in the biographical literature of his unique behaviors that I shall make no attempt to repeat them here. But I will mention four of my favorite anecdotes. He was so fearful of English doctors committing egregious malpractice that he once chose not only to remain awake during an operation to remove a gall stone, but to have “mirrors placed in the operating theater so that he could watch what was happening.”90 As a dinner guest, he once took command of the clean-up, insisting the dishes be washed in the bath tub due to the superior logistics.91And after pretty much inviting himself to be a houseguest to a family of strangers while he was on sabbatical, he once became so involved in a children’s game called Snakes and Ladders,92 that the children had to beg him to stop the game after two hours—because he demanded to see it reach a meritorious conclusion.93 And during a social walk with Malcolm and his wife, when the three began to discuss the solar system, this behavior came to pass: It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another. My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her in a trot. Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife. Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran. He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion.94

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Figure 2.2  Wittgenstein’s Unique Aptitudes. Source: Author.

And so, what have I done in this chapter? I have made an appeal to the picture of a high-functioning autistic spectrum personality as that which gave Wittgenstein pronounced functioning in some areas while causing defcits in others. I never encourage any specifc diagnosis because Wittgenstein is unique, and the feld of psychology does not at present have my confdence.95 But I need to be clear: I am not pretending to be a psychologist and nor do I want to be. I am simply borrowing certain concepts to paint a more descriptive account for why Wittgenstein was a unique phenomenon in philosophical thinking. My project isn’t psychology—it is explanation. People may say, “Why can’t you just say he a genius—why bring up psychological traits?” The answer to this is complex and important. And I shall provide it in the next chapter. But for now, I close this chapter with a summary of Wittgenstein’s unique gifts, depicted in fgure 2.2, which I ask my reader to examine. NOTES 1. See, for example, Carolyn Abraham, Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain (Icon Books, 2005). 2. The phenomenon of picturing has always dominated his philosophy. It begins with the picture-theory of meaning in the Tractatus, where he says, “We make to ourselves pictures of facts” (2.1), and, “The logical picture of facts is the thought” (3.0). See also Duty of Genius, 117–18. In his later philosophy, picturing remains an integral component (Chapter 7), except that reality is no longer the yard stick ­(Problem 9.4).

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3. Wittgenstein writes: I just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time. I had to cut half off many of them and throw it away. Afterwards when I was copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time. (Is there something feminine about this way of thinking?). Culture & Value, 1937, 31e.

4. See previous note (last sentence). 5. “And after all a painter is basically what I am, often a very bad painter too.” Culture & Value, 1949, 82e. 6. “Sometimes [I] see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance (Or it seems like that anyway).” Culture & Value, 1947, 58e. 7. Wittgenstein writes: There are cases where someone has the sense of what he wants to say much more clearly in his mind than he can express in words. (This happens to me very often.) It is as though one had a dream image quite clearly before one’s mind’s eye, but could not describe it to someone else so as to let him see it too. As a matter of fact, for the writer (myself) it is often as though the image stays there behind the words, so that they seem to describe it to me. Culture & Value, 1949, 79e.

8. “During a dream and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest signifcance. Can’t we be subject to the same illusion when awake? I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this nowadays. The insane often seem to be like this.” Culture & Value, 1947, 65e. 9. “Wittgenstein thought about suicide for much of his life.” M. Fitzgerald, “Did Ludwig Wittgenstein Have Asperger’s Syndrome?” European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 9, no. 1 (2000), 61–65. 10. Malcolm notes the following: [Wittgenstein] told me that in his youth he had been contemptuous of [religion], but that at about the age of twenty-one something had caused a change in him. In Vienna he saw a play that was mediocre drama, but in it one of the characters expressed the thought that no matter what happened in the world, nothing bad could happen to him—he was independent of fate and circumstances. Wittgenstein was struck by this stoic thought; for the frst time he saw the possibility of religion. Malcolm, 70.

11. He had been excused from compulsory service in the war because of the “rupture he had suffered the previous year.” Duty of Genius, 111. 12. Duty of Genius, 111–12. 13. Duty of Genius, 112. 14. Duty of Genius, 171. 15. Malcolm writes: He told me that once he had tried to lecture from notes but was disgusted with the result; the thoughts that came out were “stale,” or, as he put it to another friend, the words looked like “corpses” when he began to read them. In the method that he came to use his only preparation for the lecture, as he told me, was to spend a few minutes before the class met, recollecting the course that the inquiry had taken at the previous meetings. At the

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beginning of the lecture he would give a brief summary of this and then he would start from there, trying to advance the investigation with fresh thoughts. Malcolm, 24.

16. “Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself.” Malcolm, 27. 17. Malcolm, 27–28. 18. The reason he went to movies was not so his mind could be turned off, but so that he could become totally absorbed in the performances. He didn’t like it if he could see the actors “play-acting”; they had to really be in the role. He would not only sit in the front row, but on the edge of the chair. See King in Recollections, 71. 19. Malcolm, 27 and 30; Duty of Genius, 366–67. 20. Malcolm, 63. 21. Malcolm, 29. 22. Malcolm, 29. 23. Ramsey is quoted as saying: It’s terrible when he says “Is that clear?” and I say “no” and he says “Damn it’s horrid to go through that again.” Sometimes he says: “I can’t see that now, we must leave it.” He often forgets the meaning of what he wrote within 5 minutes. . . . Some of his sentences are intentionally ambiguous having an ordinary meaning and a more diffcult meaning which he also believes. Waugh, 146.

24. Duty of Genius, 414. 25. Theodore Redpath, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Student’s Memoir (Duckworth, 1990), 72–73. 26. Investigations 3rd, 187–88e (#ix). 27. “How do I fnd the ‘right’ word? How do I choose among words? Without doubt it is sometimes as if I were comparing them by fne differences of smell” Investigations 3rd, 218e. 28. “Theology which insists on the use of certain words and phrases and bans others, makes nothing clearer (Karl Barth). It, so to speak, fumbles around with words, because it wants to say something and doesn’t know how to express it. Practices give words their meaning.” Colour, 59e (#317). 29. The picture that popped in my head just now is a crime scene investigator who detects trace materials left over after certain behaviors. 30. “‘I know where I am feeling pain’, ‘I know that I feel it here’ is as wrong as ‘I know that I am in pain’. But ‘I know where you touched my arm’ is right.” On Certainty, 7e (#41). 31. In general, see Malcolm, 89–90. 32. Investigations 3rd, 222e. 33. Duty of Genius, 443 34. Culture & Value, 1947, 64e. 35. “One had to attend for quite a long time (at least three terms, I should say) before one could begin to get any grasp of what he was doing.” Malcolm, 28. 36. Two of his students had this reaction. Duty of Genius, 502. 37. The view itself would be too doctrinal. We should also remember that Wittgenstein embraced the conceptual, which is all that a course organization would have been. He writes, “I may fnd scientifc questions interesting, but they never really grip me.

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Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that.” Culture & Value, 1949, 79e. He once equated “conceptual investigation” with philosophical investigation. Zettel, 82e (#458). 38. “I still keep getting entangles in details without knowing whether I ought to be talking about such things at all; and I have the impression that I may be inspecting a large area only eventually to exclude it from consideration.” Culture & Value, 1947, 65e. 39. Culture & Value, 1948, 67e. 40. “It seems to me that I am still a long way . . . from the point of knowing what I do and what I don’t need to discuss. Culture & Value, 1947, 65e. 41. “Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.” Culture & Value, 1930, 7e. 42. “What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.” Culture & Value, 1947, 65e. 43. “If I am thinking about a topic just for myself and not with a view to writing a book, I jump about all round it; that is the only way of thinking that comes naturally to me. Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. Is it even worth attempting now?” Culture & Value, 1937, 28e. 44. Culture & Value, 1931, 18e. 45. Culture & Value, 1941, 39e. 46. Wittgenstein is noted as saying the following in a lecture given in 1939: I am trying to conduct you on tours in a certain country. I will try to show that . . . philosophical diffculties . . . arise . . . because we fnd ourselves in a strange town and do not know our way. So we must learn the topography by going from one place in the town to another, and from there to another, and so on. . . . But I am an extremely bad guide, and am apt to be led astray by little places of interest, and to dash down side streets before I have shown you the main streets. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939, ed. Cora Diamond (University of Chicago, 1989), 44.

47. Culture & Value, 1949, 82e. 48. “A writer far more talented than I would still have only minor talent.” Culture & Value, 1948, 75e. 49. Culture & Value, 1937, 28. 50. Investigations 3rd, v–vi. 51. You’d have to be a different sort of person to see this stuff in the frst place. And much of what the whole process is is trying to get the reader to make that transformation. 52. Rush Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections (Blackwell, 1981), 4–5; Where You Are Not, 39. 53. American philosopher John Nelson wrote this on August 13, 1966, in a letter to Sister Mary Elwyn. The letter is in the Carl A. Kroch Archives at Cornell University. This excerpt comes from Elwyn’s master’s thesis, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Survey of Source Material for A Philosophical Biography, at The Catholic University of America, 1966, 78–81. For additional detail, see Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, “Wittgenstein’s Visit to Ithaca in 1949: On the Importance of Details,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 14, no. 1 (2013): 2–29, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16009 10X.2012.736399. See also, Kanterian, 191.

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54. When Bouwsma returned to Nebraska in 1951 after his two-year sojourn, he wrote to his friend and former student Kenneth Johnson that in Wittgenstein he “saw what struck me as the height of perspicuity, the most intense intellectual activity, the swiftest and keenest mind I have met. It was like a miracle. His words were like a beam of light through a fog in almost any conversation.” Bouwsma, xvi. 55. Waugh, 48 (quoting a letter Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell on March 16, 1912). 56. Autobiography, 308. 57. “Throughout the year I made a real effort to follow his thoughts during [lectures,] an exertion that left my mind utterly exhausted at the end of two hours. . . . The astonishing depth and originality of his thinking was strikingly evident to me.” Malcolm, 46. 58. “A walk with Wittgenstein was very exhausting. Whatever we talked about, he turned his mind to it with a great seriousness and intensity, and it was a formidable strain on me to keep up with his thoughts.” Malcolm, 31. 59. Occasions, 48. 60. Wittgenstein’s Poker, 190. 61. Wittgenstein’s Poker, 189. 62. His acerbic qualities are well documented in the biographical literature. Examples include the following, with all cites to the Duty of Genius unless otherwise specifed: (a) his characterization of antinuclear advocates as being the “scum of intellectuals” and relishing in their fear of apocalyptic destruction (Culture & Value, 1946, 48–49e); (b) characterizing a philosophy conference as a “bubonic plague” (487); (c) calling the entire English civilization “putrefying” (488, 516); and (d) characterizing university life in Cambridge as being stiff, artifcial, and nauseating (493). His pointed attitudes eventually drove away friends. When economist Piero Sraffa ended his conversations with Wittgenstein, who pleaded for him not to go, Wittgenstein promised to talk of other subjects. And Sraffa replied, “Yes, but in your way” (486). See also, Basil Reeve, a young doctor who parted friendship with Wittgenstein on bad terms and felt liberated from “giving Wittgenstein the emotional support he demanded” (455). 63. Recollections, 63–64. 64. Recollections, x (Rhees). 65. Recollections, 63–64. 66. Duty of Genius, 526. 67. “Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.” Culture & Value, 1948, 77e. And there is also this quote from Investigations 3rd, 220e: “One can say things in one’s head very ‘distinctly,’ when one reproduces the tone of voice of one’s sentences by humming (with closed lips). Movements of the larynx help too. But the remarkable thing is precisely that one then hears the talk in one’s imagination and does not merely feel the skeleton of it, so to speak, in one’s larynx.” 68. Autobiography, 144 69. Duty of Genius, 536. 70. Malcolm, 31. 71. Duty of Genius, 525. 72. Duty of Genius, 525.

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73. Russell wrote to his then-girlfriend, Ottoline Morrell, on December 20, 1919, “He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.” Monk, 24. 74. Duty of Genius, 554. 75. Duty of Genius, 522 and 523. 76. “During a dream and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest signifcance. Can’t we be subject to the same illusion when awake? I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this nowadays. The insane often seem to be like this.” Culture & Value, 1947, 65e. 77. “If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.” Culture & Value, 1944, 44e. 78. “Madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn’t it be seen as a sudden—more or less sudden—change of character?” Culture & Value, 1946, 54e. 79. “I am often afraid of madness.” Culture & Value, 1946, 53e. 80. See Sula Wolff, Loners, The Life Path of Unusual Children (Routledge, 1995). See also, M. Fitzgerald, “Did Ludwig Wittgenstein Have Asperger’s Syndrome?” European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 9 (2000): 61–65. Further speculation about Wittgenstein’s psychology comes from Lars Christopher Gillberg, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Gothenburg University, who wrote: In the British daily newspapers in the early 1990s a debate arose addressing the issue of whether or not Ludwig Wittgenstein might have had Asperger syndrome. The Scottish child psychiatrist Sula Wolff has a section in the last chapter of her book “Loners,” in which she describes Wittgenstein as “schizoid.” Having read this well-informed piece, portions of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Secret Diaries,” his sister Hermine Wittgenstein’s Family Recollections, and Gunnar Fredriksson’s Wittgenstein, I gradually became interested in the possibility that he may indeed have had Asperger syndrome. Talking to friends who knew him slightly (including Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher) and rereading those texts, I now fnd it likely that Ludwig Wittgenstein had an autism spectrum disorder, and that he ftted almost to perfection the syndrome as outlined by Hans Asperger. Christopher Gillberg, A Guide to Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129.

81. His drastic life changes are chronicled in the biographical literature. Some rough examples from Duty of Genius include (a) leaving the study of aviation in favor of philosophy (34–35); (b) frequent thoughts of suicide; (c) joining World War I when he didn’t have to (111–12) and requesting to be sent to the Front (125–26); (d) fnding God and renouncing his wealth (170–71); (e) becoming an elementary school teacher (170); (f) courting and proposing marriage to Marguerite Respinger (238, 258); (g) personally confessing his sins to his close friends in a private, pre-arranged solitary meeting (362–84); (h) extreme charity and volunteer work during World War II (431–57); (i) resigning his professorship at Cambridge (517–19); and (j) the development of his philosophy from proto-Tractarian to Tractarian-mystical (137–46), and then to later periods. 82. Duty of Genius, 265–66. “There was never any variation from [his] form of dress, though the colour of the shirts varied from green to grey.” King in Recollections, 68. “He always wore light grey fannel trousers, a fannel shirt open at the

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throat, a woolen lumber jacket or a leather jacket,” but never a suit, necktie, or hat. Malcolm, 24–25. 83. Duty of Genius, 552 and Malcolm, 85. 84. Duty of Genius, 536. 85. When visiting Malcolm, Wittgenstein was “very fussy about the amount of soap and hot water that ought to be used and whether there was the right sort of dish mop. Once he rebuked me sternly for not rinsing properly.” Malcolm, 85. See also Duty of Genius, 377–78. 86. Russell once described this fear of bugs as a “weakness” and “foible.” Despite Wittgenstein’s Christian-inspired outlook that promised to insulate one from happenstance in the material world, Russell noted, perhaps somewhat irascibly, that, “no [such] account could enable him to endure insects with patience. . . . I found him terrifed of wasps, and, because of bugs, unable to stay another night in lodgings we had found in Innsbruck.” Autobiography, 146. 87. “He often created a strange impression because he took no notice of his personal appearance—for example he went around every day of the year and on all occasions in a brown coat, grey fannel pants (patched when possible), a shirt with an open collar and no tie.” Schulte, 26. “The last thing in the world he would try to do would be to look or play a part.” King in Recollections, 68. 88. Quoting Joan Bevan, “He was completely unconscious of his own appearance, he was very fussy about his personal cleanliness—but it was utterly without vanity. . . . He was very demanding and exacting although his tastes were very simple. It was understood that his bath would be ready, his meals on time and that the events of the day would run to a regular pattern. Where You Are Not, 85. 89. Duty of Genius, 443. 90. He had refused a general anesthetic out of fear that English doctors might accidentally kill him. Duty of Genius, 436. 91. Malcolm, 45–46. 92. A similar game in America is called Chutes and Ladders. 93. He was granted sabbatical in 1944 and went to Swansea to work on his book. He stayed with a family called the Clements. Monk writes, “The Clements had not until then taken lodgers, and had no great desire to do so, but, on being pressed, they assented.” The Clements had two daughters, Joan, age eleven, and Barbara, age nine. During the a game of Snakes and Ladders that lasted more than two hours, the girls “had to plead with him against his will to leave the game unresolved.” Duty of Genius, 465. And there is another Felix Unger story that Monk tells around this time. One day, after Joan had been told that she failed a test, Wittgenstein “marched down to Joan’s school to confront the teacher,” with Joan and her mother “following anxiously.” It turned out that there was a grading mistake—Joan had actually passed. “The teacher was denounced an ‘incompetent fool’ by Wittgenstein . . . [and] Mrs Clement was ashamed to show her face again at the school.” Duty of Genius, 465. 94. Malcolm, 51–52. 95. I’ve been charitable here. For the truth is that I harbor grave concerns for the name-calling that psychology unleashes and the social leveling that ultimately results.

Chapter 3

Why Does It Matter?

In the summer of 1929, Wittgenstein told fellow Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore that he was “getting new ideas that were still then confusing to him.”1 As this work progressed, he repeatedly characterized it as a new method of thinking.2 Although he had always thought of philosophy in methodological terms,3 this time was different. Instead of trying to lead the feld in best practices, he was now trying to destroy it. He was proclaiming a discovery that rendered not only centuries of philosophy antiquated, but that would put the very subject itself to bed. And in 1946—only six years from his death—he compared the discovery to a mathematician who had invented “a calculus,”4 the importance of which was like the switch from alchemy to chemistry.5 But there was a curious problem with this pronouncement. No one else seemed to properly comprehend the new method. According to Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, the depth and originality of his approach made it “very diffcult to understand” and “even more diffcult to incorporate . . . into one’s own thinking.”6 And this frustrated Wittgenstein. “He felt himself to be a failure as a teacher,” Malcolm noted.7 For even if he delivered a good lecture, his students were never helped by it.8 “What they learn is not worth learning,”9 he complained. And he therefore hated the professional works of his former pupils.10 He thought his teachings had “made them drunk,” because they could not soberly use his new method and had turned it “into a formula.”11 He even began to fear that his only true contribution would be a new form of jargon and slogans.12 And he issued the same verdict against his professional colleagues. They, too, could never really “get it.”13 Wittgenstein not only resented that they stole ideas from him,14 but that they butchered them.15 He called them “philosophical journalists” and hoped they would simply forget his work16—which, in all honesty, a good many have (today). 35

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But we must now ask a crucial question: why could no one understand? Is this true? If it is true, what could plausibly explain it? NEUROANATOMY AND INSIGHT One intriguing conjecture comes from neuroanatomy. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has been arguing for some time that the brain is physically confgured to comprehend complex ideas only in terms of pictures—what he calls “frames” and “metaphors.” And he says that this capacity is adaptive. “The more the system is activated, the stronger its synapses become,” which causes greater resourcefulness.17 If this is true, Wittgenstein’s acute pictorial intelligence may have functioned as a resource in philosophy that gave him an advantage when appreciating creative scenarios. For if his synapses are stronger than yours, and he professes to see the connections of something that you must struggle to see—what do we now do with the subject of philosophy? How does this change critical reasoning? This is important because imaginative scenarios were so vital in Wittgenstein’s work. He thought that conjuring different facts would cause the person to reconstruct how ideas work.18 He wanted thoughts to hit people (reverberate). “Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fctitious ones,” he wrote.19 And this required a creative imagination: In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities.20

And so, an inferior capacity to imagine, or the failure to experience an aspect in a reverberating way, may cause certain philosophical defcits. A poor imagination, Wittgenstein noted, could cause someone to be “aspect blind.”21 Only someone who could think (in the right way?) would have a shot at understanding him, he once said.22 And this capacity was simply not equal in people.23 This explains something rather interesting that Wittgenstein noted about his teaching. He thought he was raising students to artifcial heights, only to see them return to their normal state once his infuence was removed. He writes:

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A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is reaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me; I have sometimes thought so.24

And so, what is my conjecture here? I am arguing that philosophical thinking—specifcally, conceptualizing—may be a trait not unlike mathematics in that people are not equal in the ability. And I am further saying that Wittgenstein’s particular gifts seems to arise from a complex psychology where abnormal strengths and weaknesses coexisted, similar to the dynamic found in high-functioning autistic spectrum personalities (and Asperger’s Syndrome). Out of this peculiar mix, two very important intellectual skills emerge: (a) the experience of resonating aspects; and (b) an abnormal sensitivity to the details of context. Both of these combined to show Wittgenstein a new, perspicuous path of inquiry. And this at least provides a more descriptive account for why he can claim to see something that you or I have trouble seeing. This thesis has three extremely important consequences. First, it offers us a means to break the supposed encryption of his remarks, because we now have a picture that explains why they appear so disjointed. And second, it removes the urge to see his work as merely giving “arguments,” as if we could all debate-score the performance from an equal vantage point. And lastly, it forces us to confront a rather uncomfortable question: who has the real problem here—he or us? If it is true that he can see connections in idea elements more acutely, are we just supposed to defer to him or can we learn how to do this, too? PERSPICUITY Wittgenstein knew his abilities were unusual, so much so that he once called himself a “freak.”25 He also knew that these gifts were perfectly suited for philosophy. He once confessed to Drury, “It made an enormous difference to my life when I discovered that there really was a subject for which I had a special ability.”26 But there was also something curious that he once said. His only true gift, he thought, was the ability to take over another’s chain of thinking and clarify it. He was basically saying that he was only good at repair work. He writes,

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“There is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else and I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarifcation.”27 And so, he needed your mistakes to see his answers. Without them, presumably, he was blind.28 “I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right,” he wrote.29 And this is why he said that his contribution was one that belonged “to the soil rather than to the seed,”30 and that, if you planted a seed in his soil, it would grow “differently than it would in any other.”31 Wittgenstein therefore was not a crusader for a philosophical doctrine—he was not like, for example, Karl Marx or Soren Kierkegaard, whose philosophies involve substantive prescription.32 His entire body of work was simply an attempt to show his unique acuity over and over again. And that is why he once said, “I am not interested in constructing a building so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.”33 The truth is that Wittgenstein really left us with nothing other than an example of how to be incredibly insightful. Every subject he ever addressed seems not to be about that subject, but the way he investigates it.34 His remarks about religion, for example, are not really about “religion,” nor mathematics about “mathematics,” and so on.35 Rather, they are about seeing something with meticulous sensitivity and resonating aspects. This is why he said, “it did not matter whether his results were true or not: what mattered was that ‘a method had been found.’”36 And the best part is that this acuity appears capable of being learned (or at least improved upon). Wittgenstein himself believed it could happen with training and practice.37 But it is American philosopher O. K. Bouwsma who says it best: “One thing I know is that one does not understand Wittgenstein until he is able, not to repeat what he says, but to work with his ideas. The latter requires long practice.”38 Based upon my own experience, I see three levels at which people absorb Wittgenstein’s teachings. The frst involves those who fail to see even the most basic connections. Their ears hear it as “chicken soup for the soul” or as a mystical attitude of some kind, or perhaps a program for wonderment (a Tony Robbins course). And then there are others, who seem only to partially see the connections. They commit their own sorts of philosophic sins, such as consigning Wittgenstein to a school of thought (doctrines) or relegating him to something perpetually mysterious. But what about those who do fnally “get it”—if there are any—what makes them different? Are they some sort of towering genius? No, they

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are not. All they have done is develop abnormal sensitivities of a certain kind. Because that is all that the new thinking really is—abnormal sensitivities. CRITICAL REASONING In the remainder of this book, I am going to present a simple thesis. I am going to suggest that Wittgenstein’s gifts were methodical and had recurring concerns. Over and over, what he abnormally perceived and dwelt upon in philosophy were three basic things: (a) the fuctuation of word traits (chapters 4 and 5); (b) the intellectual tasks of speech acts (chapter 6); and (3) the mental images that form in the background of the mind’s eye (chapter 7). And I am going to argue that perspicuous investigation into these three phenomena is what constitutes what I shall call the new critical thinking. For only if a person can become requisitely acute in perceiving these three things can one transcend the ordinary critical thinking tools that descend from Aristotle. I also claim that abnormal acumen for each of the three will transform one’s own orientation. The intellectual plane of regard will radically shift. What we understand about the concept of “foundation” will fundamentally change. And two things will then become paramount. First, we shall see the role that usage plays in the meaning of language as defnitive. What people do with their intellect during a speech act will become the focal point of our concern. And this will signifcantly alter how critical reasoning occurs, because, instead of focusing merely upon on statements or “arguments,” we shall now focus upon subtle intellectual behaviors that people show beneath their language. Wittgensteinians call this “therapy,” and I explain it in chapter 8. Secondly, the large issues in life that have always concerned us—disputes in ethics, politics, science, religion, and so on—will never be seen properly without frst developing a vantage point necessary for making connoisseur judgments (chapter 14). This is a kind of insight that empiricism or analytics alone cannot provide. It encourages a refective and even creative intellect. All of this I explain in the last three chapters. The name that I will eventually give to all of this is post-analytic thought. My goal from this point forward is simply to show this new orientation. And following Bouwsma’s advice, my method is to practice the skills needed to see it. That is why I have organized the material around problem sets, original examples, and thinking exercises. There is no other way that I know of to properly do this. And so, our journey now begins.

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NOTES 1. This was occurring as he was writing Some Remarks on Logical Form. Occasions, 47. 2. See, for example, Culture & Value, 1946, 48e. He writes of how diffcult it is to establish “the new way of thinking.” 3. “Philosophy is not a theory, but an activity.” Tractatus, 52 (#4.112). 4. “My ‘achievement’ is very much like that of a mathematician who invents a calculus.” See Culture & Value, 1946, 50e. 5. “The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking.” Culture & Value, 1946, 48e. 6. Malcolm, 19. 7. In conversations with Malcolm during the winter of 1946–1947. Malcolm, 62. 8. Duty of Genius, 499. 9. Wittgenstein writes in 1946: My lectures are going well, they will never go any better. But what effect do you leave behind? Am I helping anyone? Certainly no more than if I were a great actor playing tragedy. What they learn is not worth learning; and the personal impression is of no use to them. This applies to all, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

See Ludwig Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten [His Life in Pictures and Texts], eds. Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti (Suhrkamp, 1983), 323. The above quote is a Google translation of the German text appearing therein. 10. Malcolm, 58. 11. Bouwsma, 11–12. 12. “The only seed I am likely to sow is a certain jargon.” Malcolm, 63. See also “The danger [with disciples] was that the thoughts should deteriorate into a jargon.” Malcolm, 19 (Von Wright). 13. “He was convinced his book would be fundamentally misunderstood—especially by academic philosophers.” Duty of Genius, 484. In the preface, he writes that his “results” were “variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down.” Philosophical Investigations 3rd, v–vi. 14. It is interesting that notes from his classes were apparently widely “bootlegged.” Bouwsma speaks of reading two sets of bootlegged notes in the summer of 1939 from two former students, Malcolm and Lazerowitz. “Well, those notes, bootlegged, and circulated too, against Wittgenstein’s wishes, I studied, and they made a powerful impression on me. . . . For ten years I spaded and dug and watered as I was able, working out hints I had picked up in those notes.” Bouwsma, xvi–xvii. Wittgenstein evidently began forbidding students from taking notes. “One of [his] students recalls that “Wittgenstein disliked us to take notes during his classes, and he would prevent anyone foolhardy enough to try.” Occasions, 427. 15. Malcolm, 58, 59. 16. “It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon—this is what I wish for it—be completely forgotten by the

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philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader.” Culture & Value, 1948, 66e. 17. Lakoff, 234. 18. “One of the most important methods I use is to imagine a historical development for our ideas different from what actually occurred. If we do this we see the problem from a completely new angle.” Culture & Value, 1940, 37e. See also Investigations 3rd, 230e (#xii). 19. Culture & Value, 1948, 74e. 20. Here is a little more of the quote: What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. . . . In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. . . . Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the feld of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it. Malcolm, 50.

21. If you were unable to see something as something, you would be aspect blind. “What would a person who is blind towards these aspects be lacking?—It is not absurd to answer: the power of imagination.” Psychology II, 92e (#508). 22. Bouwsma, 8. 23. Wittgenstein always thought that the ability to think was a skill that had levels. He writes in Culture & Value (page citations in parentheses): Wanting to think is one thing; having a talent for thinking another (44e). . . . You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage (52e). . . . Every idea that costs a lot carries in its train a host of cheap ones; among these are even some that are useful (58e). . . . Virtually in the same way as there is a difference between deep and shallow sleep, there are thoughts which occur deep down and thoughts which bustle about on the surface (42e).

24. Culture & Value, 1940, 38. 25. He “was aware of his own unusual abilities—he once said to Raymond Townsend that he knew he was a ‘freak’.” King in Recollections, 70. 26. Drury in Recollections, 76. 27. Culture & Value, 1931, 19e. 28. “Blind” here means not knowing the relevance of what mattered. Without people in confusion, he couldn’t see which of his thoughts were more important (needed). 29. Culture & Value, 1931, 18e. 30. “I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.)” Culture & Value, 1939–1940, 36e. 31. “Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.” Culture & Value, 1939–1940, 36e.

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32. Richter, 1–2. 33. Continuing, “So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs.” Culture & Value, 1930, 7e. 34. Patrick Quinn wrote a book that sees Wittgenstein as a pedagogical phenomenon. He stresses, for example, how the dialogical approach in Wittgenstein’s lectures made students focus upon what he was thinking. I would add, also, how it was occurring. See Wittgenstein on Thinking, Learning and Teaching (Peter Lang, 2015), 127–28. 35. “An investigation is possible in connexion with mathematics which is entirely analogous to our investigation of psychology. It is just as little a mathematical investigation as the other is a psychological one.” Investigations 3rd, 232e (#xiv). 36. Moore in Occasions, 113. 37. Notice how Wittgenstein specifcally says in this metaphor that training and practice are what are needed to have philosophical acumen: People who have never carried out an investigation of a philosophical kind, like, for instance, most mathematicians, are not equipped with the right visual organs for this type of investigation or scrutiny. Almost in the way a man who is not used to searching in the forest for fowers, berries, or plants will not fnd any because his eyes are not trained to see them and he does not know where you have to be particularly on the lookout for them. Similarly, someone unpracticed in philosophy passes by all the spots where diffculties are hidden in the grass, whereas someone who has had practice will pause and sense that there is a diffculty close by even though he cannot see it yet. Culture & Value, 1937, 29e (emphasis supplied).

38. Bouwsma, xvii.

Part II

NEW FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 4

Word Sense

In the early 1900s a tradition emerged in analytic philosophy. The sense of a word was thought to be associated in some way with the “thing” that it referenced. And so you started with reality frst and worked your way backward. Even Wittgenstein’s early thinking was captivated by this charm. He writes, “Every proposition must already have a sense; assertion cannot give it a sense, for what it asserts is the sense itself.”1 What is critical to understand is that Wittgenstein will completely repudiate this conception. One does not look at reality to fnd “sense.” To the contrary, assertion alone does determine a word’s sense. This is because “sense” amounts to nothing more than a set of social traits implicated in an act of speech. Consider the word “chair.” When you use this word, referring to seating item, three traits seem common: (a) a seating posture of a certain type; (b) facilitating one person; and (c) having portability. (Notice how this resembles a defnition.) But even these three seemingly universal traits easily fuctuate with usage. Love chairs, for example, shed the one-person trait. The “electric chair” or the Captain’s chair on Star Trek is not portable. And lounge chairs shed the conventional seating posture. “But is it fair to call these things chairs?”—That’s not the point. The point is that if they are successfully spoken of as such, the traits implicated in the context will be whatever they are. What is changing is merely the sense of chair. And this is not a philosophy; it is a phenomenon. Word sense is merely traits rotating in and out. Problem 4.1. Monopoly® is a game. What does “game” mean in this sentence?

Wittgensteinians sometimes check to see whether the sense of a word is “ordinary.” In the usage above, “game” means something like “a popular 45

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leisure activity played for fun.” One could imagine a simple collection of traits being implicated in the social context. To see these traits, I ask that my reader examine fgure 4.1(A). But what I am now going to say is very important. With regard to the traits shown in the fgure, I’m not laying down a rule here—I’m not saying that any person has to think of these specifc things. In fact I am saying nothing about mental states yet. And I am not even saying that these traits are perfect or ironclad in some way (universal). Rather, only two things are said: (a) this set of traits represents a simple conception of a game; and (b) the speech act in Problem 4.1 is using an ordinary sense. And so, those who are acculturated to the ordinary use should not fnd these traits foreign as an ordinary conception.2 That’s the point—that’s all that is being said right now. Very often, the traits implicated in a social context will change even though the conception remains ordinary. Wittgenstein made this point famous in philosophy when he wrote: Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you fnd many correspondences with the frst group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all “amusing”? Compare chess with [tic-tac-toe]. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of [solitaire]. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.3

Figure 4.1  Conceptions of a Game. Source: Lego images were licensed from Adobe Stock.

Word Sense

47

In the above passage, what Wittgenstein is talking about is how the substitution of traits can be complex and varied even though the word “game” remains ordinary. When traits that seem basic and fundamental substitute in and out in this way, I call it a nuclear substitution. The best way to conceptualize it is to think of a set of basic traits {a b c d e} from which a subset is chosen. One use of a word might implicate traits {a b c} while another implicates {a d e}. Let’s move on now to consider more complex forms of substitution. Problem 4.2. Love is a game. How has the meaning of the word “game” changed in this sentence compared to Problem 4.1?

The difference is that the person is not picking out a board game for reference; he or she is offering a vantage point about “love” (a perspective). Because of this, the term takes on an abstract connotation—“ongoing reciprocal behaviors with a perceptible dynamic.” Another way of saying it: the sense of game has markedly changed. And because of this, the traits implicated in the social context have shifted dynamically. When love is said to be a “game,” the traits seem to be those that are shown in fgure 4.1(B). I ask that my reader examine the fgure. Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m only trying to locate the sense in which love could be a game—or at least spoken of as such. And so, the set of traits in the fgure only represents a conception. I’m not saying it is perfect or that anyone has to think of these specifc traits. I am merely saying that those who are familiar with the way in which love could be spoken of as a “game” would not fnd this set to be foreign. And what I am ultimately trying to do is show not merely that the traits in play have become markedly different, but that the whole idea has become extended in some way. Yet, the structure of the substitution is such that an overall familiarity remains between the ordinary and abstract usages. They are analogous in some way. Instead of something played for fun, the activity is now consented to for “attachment,” which is a more complex phenomenon that flls the same space in the language game that “fun” did in the other use.4 In fact all of the concepts have become more complex while flling similar space. The activity trait has been traded for an “experience”; turns have become “reciprocity”; rules have become “a perceptible dynamic”; and spare time has become “private life.” This is why the two uses have what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance” (chapter 10). But it is also the reason Wittgenstein differentiated between a word having primary and secondary sense.5 I call this an analogous substitution. It is a more complex form that goes beyond common traits subbing in and out. We start with some basic set, {a b c d e}, but what gets rotated in are traits that are similar to those. So let us say

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Table 4.1 The Structure of Trait Substitution Resources

Hypothetical Use

Type of Substitution

{a b c d e} {a+ b+ c+ d+ e+} {r1, r2, r3, r4 . . . rn}

{a, b, d} {a, c+ e+} {a, b, c, r1} {a+, b, c+, r2, e+}

Nuclear Analogous Nuclear with rogue Analogous with rogue

that a is similar to an incoming trait, denoted a+. One use of the word might implicate traits {a+ b c} while another use might implicate {a d+ e}, where d+ has suffcient similarity to d. Here is the best way to say it: some words function not unlike an album of family photos. Certain photos have members of the nuclear family—this brother, this sister—while others see a cousin or two who pop in. And that is exactly what is happening with the word “game”: cousins have become substituted for brothers and sisters. In real life I suspect that substitution can even be more complicated. I see three basic types: nuclear, analogous, and “rogue” (unrelated). This would account for those scenarios where, on occasion, an oddball is thrown into the mix, such as the “reality” trait in fgure 4.1(B). (In the table the rogue trait is denoted as r.) And so, you have nuclear and analogous substitutions occurring with an occasional rogue trait thrown in.6 And the viability of any such combination is governed simply by whether the use remains intelligible in the social context. In short, it works if it can ft (table 4.1). CONCLUSION So what have we learned? There is a general parameter to sense that Wittgensteinains like to negotiate. Words can have ordinary and extended conceptions, each of which involves a different dynamic in trait substitution. Wittgenstein adds, “And in this way there is an alteration—a gradual one—in the use of the vocabulary of a language.”7 But what is perhaps most important to understand is that catching the traits in play is a skill. Doing it well requires a sensitivity. Ray Monk describes it as “a kind of sensitivity . . . gained only through experience.”8 And so, if you can develop a strong acuity for catching fuctuating word traits, you will better understand the subtle yet important differences that occur when words like this are thrown at you: democracy, liberty, religion, discrimination, rape, adult, child, harassment, constitution, politics, ideology, science, and so on. If one says, for example, “America is not a ‘democracy,’” we would want to know the sense of the term—for this word has traits in some contexts that it does not have in others. The lure of the statement vanishes if we say that

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America is not an Athenian democracy. Because here, certain traits show themselves better, which takes away any venom that might otherwise have struck us. One last note of caution: It is a common misreading of Wittgenstein to think that fuctuating traits are limited only to general words like “chair” or “game.”9 This is not true: the phenomenon applies to any word where the use of shifting traits remains intelligible in the social context. This is a point I will show better in the next chapter (and also in chapter 11). NOTES 1. Tractatus, 49 (#4.064). 2. And if my reader has diffculty here, I ask that this exercise be undertaken. Imagine something never heard of—say, Cheslenchia®—where someone asks what it is. If I reply, “Oh, it’s just a game,” what might you think? The traits I have listed are not unfamiliar as a connotation. 3. I am quoting Wittgenstein’s famous passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On Family Resemblance and On Seeing As: Selections from Philosophical Investigations,” in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Eric Dayton (Broadview Press, 1999), 225. 4. Wittgenstein discusses the idea of language having pre-structured “spaces” in his intermediate work, Remarks. See Bertrand Russell’s letter to Moore concerning it, in Autobiography, 310–11. 5. Investigations 3rd, 216e. 6. Although at frst this may seem complex, modern linguists seem to think that humans are actually hardwired to catch fuctuating traits. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Perennial Classics, 2000), 143–52. Pinker estimates that the average high school graduate knows 60,000 words (145). He also argues in Words & Rules that fuctuating traits may be both natural and functional to human communication (278–87). 7. On Certainty, 10e (#63). 8. Duty of Genius, 547–48. 9. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made it very clear that these were just examples of a larger phenomenon in language generally (#65). He mentions all sorts of words and phrases, from proper names like “Moses” (#79) and “Excalibur” (#39–#45), to the word “is” (#38, inserted slip) and “number” (#68–#69), and many others.

Chapter 5

Meaning Is Use

In the last chapter, I said that usage could cause word traits to fuctuate and thus to determine a word’s sense. But how does this occur and what does it mean? In this chapter my goal is to show something extremely important in Wittgenstein’s thought: language meaning is a phenomenon rather than a philosophy. As such we cannot prescribe rules that erase its occurrence. Rather, we can only become skilled enough to catch the happenstance. I shall show this using a stepwise investigative procedure. This is where one begins with a central case and moves outwardly into extension. Wittgensteinians often use this kind of procedure for mapping something they call “language games.” Further, my investigation will not involve a general word, like “game” or “chair,” but rather the word bachelor. I do this purposely because some think that this word has a fxed or universal meaning. It is imperative that we not place false parameters upon Wittgenstein’s most popular contribution. The investigation now begins in Problem 5.1 (below). Problem 5.1. There is a show on television called The Bachelor. During one season, the individual pictured in fgure 5.1(D) was selected. Upon learning of this, a viewer proclaimed that the show had chosen a “perfect bachelor.” What traits might be implicated in the use of that phrase?

In fgure 5.1(A), I offer a set of traits for the phrase “the perfect bachelor,” as I imagine its usage in the above problem. I ask that my reader examine the fgure, which is located inside this chapter. Once again, my claim is not that anyone must specifcally think of these traits—issues of mind are dealt with elsewhere (chapter 9). Rather, I claim only that the social context could support this conception of a dominant specimen. 51

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Figure 5.1  Different Conceptions of a Bachelor. Source: All images were licensed from Adobe Stock, except Image E, the cover of Roger Lea MacBride’s Bachelor Girl, for which HarperCollins Publishers gave permission.

In the fgure, one should notice that I have labeled the traits. Three kinds are said to exist: (a) operational (adult, unmarried, male); (b) functional (what the person is eligible for); and (c) impressionistic. I did this because this conceptual structure is thought to be encapsulated in the dynamic of the word, so that, if the traits change in some way, how they change inside this structure will be meaningful to see. Problem 5.2. Both Tom Cruise and George Clooney were widely referred to in periodicals and elsewhere as being a “most eligible bachelor” despite having been “blemished” with a prior divorce.1 Was this an incorrect use of the term?

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What does it mean to say that the use is “incorrect”? All that has happened is that two traits have subtly changed from the prior use. As I show in fgure 5.1(B), analogous traits have substituted in, one functional and one impressionistic. And this only affects the sense of bachelor in play. If one argues that a divorced male cannot be a “bachelor,” one argues merely for a pristine conception. Such speaking arose in Middle English when divorce was regarded as a major social blemish upon eligibility.2 Today, divorce has come to mean “eligible again” rather than scarred. And so, the two conceptions represent a subtle sense shift, which is even sometimes explicitly recognized by dictionaries.3 But what of those who insist otherwise? What if someone insists that Clooney can’t be a “bachelor”? What I say here is of extreme importance to understanding Wittgenstein. Such a claim would not involve a factual contest about truth or falsity; it would merely constitute a rival vernacular. In short, it would concern one’s philosophy of bachelor. For if disagreement on this point existed, each side would only be declaring which conception he or she favored. And when this happens, the disputants only reveal how they prefer to speak of the set of traits in question. But that isn’t our central issue right now. This chapter is not concerned with how different people prefer to speak about traits; it is concerned with what happens to the traits in play whenever communication is successful. We are only interested, right now, in what works. Success in communication is a phenomenon, not a philosophy. A speech act in a social context communicates what it does. Or as Bishop Butler says, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”—which is a phrase Wittgenstein wanted as a motto for his later philosophy (a point I shall repeat throughout the manuscript).4 And so, when Clooney is successfully referred to as a most eligible bachelor, the traits substitute in the manner that they do—even for the language prudes who may otherwise disagree with such usages. And this is possible not because of any logic or rule; it happens, simply, because it works. The participants in the language game are simply acclimated to it. But how far does this idea go? What happens if we take away a critical trait? Problem 5.3. Imagine that Tiger Woods is married, but cheats repeatedly with numerous women as a matter of course. Imagine that the way that he cheats is to frequent a bar, called Fat City. The bartender, Jake, knows all of the happenings of the club. One day a girl asks Jake, “What’s the best bachelor around here I can fnd?” Jake replies, “Tiger comes in at 8:00.” The girl knows who Tiger is and that he is married. An English professor who overhears interjects, “Tiger isn’t a ‘bachelor.’” Who is right, the professor or Jake?

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To a Wittgensteinian, the issue is never whether Tiger Woods is or is not a “bachelor”; the issue is only what senses of talking would admit or exclude him. The hypothetical has Woods behaving as a de facto bachelor—which means that, although he lacks the usual format, he is functioning as one. The bartender has therefore proffered a colloquial sense of the term. This use subtracts a very important operational trait,5 but retains so many of the others that the speech act can be successful in the social context. To see this, I ask that my reader examine fgure 5.1(C). For Wittgensteinians, there is no issue of creed here. There is no crusade for what must or must not be a bachelor. The central question is whether the speech act works, and if it does, what it “says.” Because, if it is intelligible— if no miscommunication occurs—then it means that this language game has allowed a critical trait to substitute out as a phenomenon.6 And that is exactly the point: meaning occurs through success in usage.7 Wittgenstein writes, “A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it.”8 This view is action-centric9—language is what it does. This is not unlike hand-waiving as a phenomenon (communicating though a behavior).10 The key is that it is result-oriented. Only the ends of successful communication are what count.11 Language is like a free market.12 If the trading of words is successful, whatever “stuff” those trades supply, they supply. But what do we do if the use of “bachelor” does cause confusion? What do we do if communication would mislead? Problem 5.4. Imagine that a heterosexual female, Jane, sees an unmarried gay male in a bar. The male is Rock Hudson. Jane does not know that Rock is gay. She asks the bartender, Jake, “Is he a bachelor?” How should Jake answer the question?

The issue here is always the same: how to successfully speak of the set of traits implicated by the social context. Jake is not being asked for his philosophy of bachelor; he is being asked for his cooperation. And he has an interesting problem: answering yes or no, without qualifcation, suggests a false trait that will mislead Jane. And this is not because the eligibility trait is missing;13 it is because she doesn’t know it is missing from her perspective. And so that is what this language game is all about: show Jane the absence of the functional trait (eligibility). And it requires Jake to say something qualifed: (a) “He is a bachelor, but not for you.” (b) “He is and he isn’t.” (c) “It depends upon what you mean.” (d) “Only technically.” (e) “He is a gay bachelor.”

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But what happens if you call someone a “bachelor” when everyone knows that the person is not eligible for anyone? In other words, how is this language game played? Problem 5.5. The University has a written rule that does not allow bachelors in the sorority house. One day, the Pope visits the campus and agrees to speak inside the sorority. Does the rule prohibit the Pope from doing this?

Let’s confess something: it seems strange to call the Pope a bachelor. There is a dissonance between language and social context—something isn’t right. But our issue is still the same: how to successfully speak of the traits being implicated. The issue is what to do with a conception of “bachelor” that is missing both functional and impressionistic traits, but still has all of the (key?) operational ones.14 Some will no doubt be tempted by this charm: “He meets the strict defnition (an unmarried man),15 and therefore counts.”16 But there are several problems here. This doesn’t change the fact that you still have a substantially restricted set of traits. And so, calling the Pope a bachelor for this reason alone seems to create an empty technicality.17 The grammar becomes like that of a lawyer or an IRS (Internal Revenue Service) agent. The real question, then, is whether we want to summon that sort of behavior into this social context. When strict defnitions are offered merely for their own sake—as though they are a law in language—this is called formalism (chapter 12). To Wittgensteinians, it is a dire confusion that generally drives us nuts. This is because the idea of “defnition” is thrown at us not unlike the materials lawyers use in law books—we get the feeling that the matter is out of our control. Wittgenstein writes, “The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results.”18 But this matter is in our control. We can read the policy to mean only eligible bachelors. If we were prudent, we might even read it to include de facto cases (Tiger Woods). And in each of these speech acts all that we are doing is setting forth the conception of “bachelor”—the Legos—to which the policy must speak. And this only says that we refuse to speak of this isolated and barren set as “counting.” What is at issue here is not truth, but vernacular. “All well and good. But isn’t he still a bachelor?”—Not in this sense. Don’t equate truth with being technical. Technicality, too, is but an arrangement of traits. It is thus wrong to say that we are making an exception to the rule (for the Pope), as though we are deciding the case on what the lawyers call “policy grounds.” For the truth of the matter is that we are merely doing what we always do in acts of ordinary speech: selecting a vernacular for the traits

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in question.19 And this is just what judges do when do when reading the US Constitution, as I showed in my frst book, The Flexible Constitution.20 Problem 5.6. Can a female be a bachelor?

As I was writing this manuscript, I had thought the answer to Problem 5.6 was “no”—the female is a bachelorette. But much like the term “actress” is slowly leaving our lexicon in favor of unitary terms (women are actors), so too are there uses of “bachelor” that now involve females.21 And this explains why Cameron Diaz was once acknowledged in print for being the “most successful female bachelor”;22 why the expression has emerged in music;23 and why several books bear the title “bachelor girl” (fgure 5.1(E)).24 And so, what is the point? The point is that, in the language game of “bachelor,” we have found no single trait which is common or uniform to all of the ways in which the word can successfully communicate. And that might seem counterintuitive to those who, at frst, thought this word to be different from words like “game” or “chair.” And this raises an interesting question: is there ever something central or common to uses of ordinary words? Is there ever a trait that cannot be taken away? I want to be very careful in the way that I answer this, because even Wittgensteinians sometimes get this wrong. There is no rule here. If there is a word that has a trait or two that cannot be taken away, it is merely because of the way we are culturally and intellectually acclimated in our current arrangements. Intelligibility is not something we legislate for others. It can even change, naturally, as time moves forward. And so our conclusion in this chapter is that meaning is use. And by this we mean that intelligibility is a natural phenomenon that occurs when it does. You can no more create rules or strictures that invalidate it than you could deny an orgasm that did not follow certain formalities. If it happens, it happens. NOTES 1. Cruise’s frst marriage to actress Mimi Rogers ended in 1990 when he was 28 years old. He married and divorced twice more. Clooney became divorced in 1993. His legendary status for making most-eligible-bachelor lists is referenced here: https://lockerdome.com/clickhole.com/7017081967217172 (accessed June 12, 2016). 2. In the 1600s and 1700s, for example, one didn’t have social “live-ins.” When men came courting, it was quickly for a hand in marriage. And if a female didn’t marry, society would think something was wrong with her. The language culture that uttered “bachelor” under these pretenses, therefore, was a different sort of arrangement from ours. It used marriage as a logical barometer for male eligibility.

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3. I found it amusing to see this entry for “bachelor” in Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary: “a man who is not married; especially: a man who has never been married” (emphasis in original). http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ bachelor (accessed June 22, 2016). 4. Duty of Genius, 451. 5. An interesting question is how the language game of “bachelor” works in a polygamous culture. If it works, being married no longer seems to be a trait. And the point here is that we are only describing combinations of traits when the same is intelligible in the context it appears. 6. And even if some fnd it humorous, we must remember that, as Wittgenstein noted, humor is not a mood but a framework—to fnd it funny means you have to understand it. Duty of Genius, 529–30. 7. “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?” Investigations 3rd, 128e (#432). 8. On Certainty, 10e (#61). 9. Deeds are king. See Duty of Genius, 306–8. 10. Wittgenstein compares gestures to utterances: “We say ‘I understand that gesture’ in the same sense as ‘I understand this theme’, ‘it says something’ and what that means is that I have a particular experience as I follow it.” Grammar, 42–43 (#5). 11. “For it is what we learn when the word is incorporated into our language.” On Certainty, 10e (#61). “As long as I can play the game, I can play it, and everything is all right.” Witt & Vienna Circle, 120. 12. Wittgenstein on occasion compared language to money (a medium of exchange). He mentioned it to Bouwsma, who marked in his notes, “We may compare language to money (counters), but then we think of money in terms of something you can get for it and can carry away—a cabbage, a chair, a cigar, etc. But you can also get a seat at the cinema which you cannot carry away at all.” Bouwsma, 14. See also, Investigations 3rd, 49e (#120). 13. Obviously the trait is not missing—he is eligible for gay marriage. But this means he is not eligible to Jane, which is what she is asking in the frst place. 14. Imagine one who thought she could entice a member of the clergy to leave his faith to become married—that it was at least possible. If she holds this conception when calling the priest a “bachelor,” then the eligibility trait would appear the way it would in that context. This is because meaning is use. 15. Verbatim in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., (Houghton Miffin Company, 2000—updated in 2009); and also, in Collins English Dictionary: Complete and Unabridged, 6th ed., (HarperCollins Publishers, 2003). 16. Sharp boundaries are discussed in chapter 10. They draw a line through the social cluster so that every member is on one side of the line or not. 17. It’s a technicality because he only has the bare format of the idea and not its function. The social context is only concerned with people who can function as bachelors. 18. Blue & Brown, 27.

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19. The situation would be different if the policy had already defned bachelor for us. In such a case, the authors would have set forth their own conception. This would create an ethical dilemma over whether to follow the policy or create an “exception.” But as the problem currently exists, with no conception mandated, our job here is no different than in any ordinary case of setting forth conceptions. It is this very distinction that makes the US Constitution “fexible” (see Flexible Constitution). 20. The full citation is at the beginning of the Notes. See also, Bartrum. 21. There is an interesting defnition in Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary for “bachelor” when processed as an adjective: “suitable for or occupied by a single person [a bachelor apartment]; unmarried [bachelor women] [bachelor parents].” 22. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2880901/She-Hollywood-s-successful-female-bachelor-Benji-Madden-finally-tamed-Cameron-Diaz-FEMAILlooks-star-s-colourful-love-life.html (accessed June 12, 2016). 23. There is an Australian pop duo called Bachelor Girl. See: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Bachelor_Girl (accessed June 12, 2016). 24. The interesting thing about this expression is that it tries to override the trait of being male. It’s like “actor-girl.” See Roger Lea MacBride, Bachelor Girl, Little House: the Rocky Ridge Years Series (Baker & Taylor, 2009); Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century (William ­Morrow, 2002); and Kim Van Alkemade, Bachelor Girl: A Novel by the Author of Orphan #8 (Touchstone, 2018).

Chapter 6

Task-Functions

So far, I have talked only about word traits and usage. I now move on to talk about a more diffcult idea: task-functions in acts of speech. WORDS AS DEEDS Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wittgenstein’s philosophy is that words do things. “Words are deeds,” he said multiple times.1 But what does this mean? It means that, for any use of language to have success, it must invoke among the participants a recognized task-function of some kind, however trivial. Wittgenstein repeatedly described language in terms of intellectual tasks. He writes, “When someone interprets, or understands [language] . . . what he is doing is taking a step in a calculus (like a calculation).”2 “I can use the word ‘yellow’” is like “I know how to move the king in chess,” he wrote.3 He regularly characterized comprehension in terms of an action or procedure,4 not unlike “the ability to multiply.”5 As a young man, Wittgenstein thought that the feld of logic could best explain these phenomena.6 This made sense because task-functions sometimes feel like operatives of some kind. But when Wittgenstein becomes older, he reverses the order of this operation. Logic, like math, was not special—it, too, was merely a set of intellectual behaviors (tasks) for which a symbolism had been invented. Just as chess is knowing to properly move the pieces around, algebra is knowing how to correctly make moves with the signs and symbols.7 And so Wittgenstein needed a better word to capture this phenomenon. He chose the word “grammar.” Although this term has its own connotation 59

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for English teachers, Wittgenstein borrowed it to give a name to the actions, procedures, and logics inherent in the things people say.8 Wittgensteinians sometimes call this assertability conditions. It is true, of course, that the idea of grammar was fuid in Wittgenstein’s works.9 The term varied in meaning and even evolved.10 But I want to distance myself from other conceptions that sometimes tempt scholars.11 In this book, “grammar” means only the intellectual tasks needed to make language successful. They come pre-structured in acts of speech and allow words to become deeds. There have been other scholars who have also thought about language in terms of deeds or tasks, such as British philosopher John L. Austin.12 But the approach presented here differs in material respects. All utterances are deeds (tasks), not merely some.13 And the idea specifcally involves operations or procedures that are intellectual in nature, not mere social behavior for its own sake. It is important to understand that Wittgenstein is not denying that the taskfunction is an intellectual process. He writes, “It looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.”14 Using the example, “I have just remembered x,” he says, “To deny the mental process would mean to deny the remembering; to deny that anyone ever remembers anything”15—which he wasn’t doing. What Wittgenstein is denying, however, is that language comprehension occurs through some ghostly or “occult substance.” 16 Imagining an inner mysterious process always gets in the way of what is actually transpiring.17 Comprehension merely amounts to “a particular experience”18—what he ultimately calls a “connection”—that allows language to become “translated into . . . behaviour.”19 And that is what the task-function is for: it reveals the “actual transactions” of speech acts, like an accounting book.20 To show this idea better, I now ask my reader to consider the following examples. EXAMPLES Below are three problem sets that involve the verb “is.” The point is to see the action or procedure that underlies the verb in its social context. To isolate and stress this, I shall use an illustrative notation that involves a verb/object pair written in a pretend syntax of a computer command. This notation will be used throughout the manuscript whenever I need to stress a task-function. Problem 6.1. When asked a question about presidential nicknames, a professor replies, “Ronald Reagan is the ‘Gipper.’” And in a comic book, Gwen Stacy

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fnds hidden evidence and says, “Peter Parker is Spiderman!” What is the difference in the intellectual task of each assertion?

Both sentences have an identical structure (if you were to diagram them), but the thinking task inherent in each is different. When telling the student that “Ronald Reagan is the Gipper,” the professor speaks of a social nickname, not of the flm Reagan starred in that gave him the name.21 The task is to associate the label (sound) with the person: MEMORIZE(label). But Gwen Stacey’s statement is different: she is stating a revelation. She is saying, in essence, “Peter Parker is the person who has been doing all of these things in the Spiderman costume!” This is like saying, “David Berkowitz is the Son of Sam!,” where one does not mean to say what his nickname is, but rather what his deeds were. Label association is not the point. The taskfunction is something like: TELL(news). Problem 6.2. Imagine someone saying “Kennedy is Irish”—what is grammar of this assertion?

To answer this question, we need to know the social context. For example, if the statement was a revelation—if DNA evidence had revealed something that we otherwise thought not to be true—the task would be similar to Gwen Stacy’s utterance in the prior problem. It would thus have journalistic grammar. It would be reporting that x’s descendants had, in fact, come from this set of peoples, after all (a revelation). But in the ordinary case, where we already know that Kennedy was Irish, the utterance probably concerns membership. It’s like saying, “Harry is in Gryffndor” or “Rocky is Italian.”22 These assertions have an affliation grammar. The task-function is something like STATE(affliation).23 Problem 6.3. When asked which highway was the quicker choice to travel from one city to the next, my father replied, “It’s six of one and a half dozen of the other.” When teaching units of measurement, a school teacher said, “six is a half dozen.” What is the difference in the grammar of these two assertions?

The difference is never something socially overt. It’s not that one is teaching inside a classroom and another happens outside of school. The difference is always what the person is doing with the intellect in the social context during an act of speech. In the frst case, the father is weighing the effciency of transit across two thoroughfares. The grammar is one of comparison-andcontrast. The task-function is something like COMMENSURATE(options). But this is not what the teacher is doing. She is showing a measurement tautology. You do not need to weigh two options when equating values of

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measure. The task is more like a translation. Imagine for a second what it is like to translate an English word into Spanish—at least where the translation is clear. This seems rather similar to what the teacher is doing intellectually when equating units of measurement. The task-function is something like: TRANSLATE(expression). So, what have we learned in all of these examples? Task-functions reveal the “actual transactions” of speech acts, like an accounting book.24 They not only allow language to be intelligible between speakers,25 but they provide the social cue for what the reply behavior should be in the language game. In this way they show us the kind of thing the utterance is (what it purports to be),26 which gives us clarity.27 Task-functions, therefore, are never something on the surface of the language, like the sentence structure, or something formal, like a defnition of the terms. Rather, they constitute the very intellectual steps necessary to process the matter correctly.28 They are, in short, what the speech act is doing in the social context. We are boiling it down to its basic “thing,” which is why Wittgenstein once said, “Essence is expressed by grammar.”29 “THE CONNECTION” There is something that is simply vital to everything I am describing in this chapter that I must now pause to stress to my reader. It is what Wittgenstein called “the connection.”30 This is a cognitive phenomenon that occurs in real time whenever someone understands something. Thus, even when something simple as a task-function is understood, Wittgenstein believed that it occurred in a “fash”31 and was not merely a reaction to a social norm (a refex or automata). He said: The connection exists now, so that it seems as though as long as I do this thinking, this connection exists. Whereas, if we said it is a connection of convention, there would be no point in saying it exists while we think.32 . . . What we call “understanding” is not the behaviour . . . but a state of which this behaviour is a sign.33

This is in contrast to a view Bertrand Russell had once held, which characterized language comprehension as a refex (behavioristic). Russell had said, “There is no more reason why a person who uses a word correctly should be able to tell what it means than there is why a planet which is moving correctly should know Kepler’s laws.”34 Unfortunately, many scholars make the mistake of thinking that Wittgenstein was in sympathy with this sort of view. The trend now is to claim that

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Wittgenstein championed an “anti-intellectual” philosophy where thinking and speaking were ultimately founded upon primitive, pre-linguistic, preconceptual behaviors not unlike those of “infants and non-human animals.”35 Quite simply, this is inaccurate.36 It misunderstands that the predicate of Wittgenstein’s entire corpus is seeing connections properly.37 And although task-functions are indeed a way of getting to the bare rudiments of communication, this reductive process does not espouse something “anti-intellectual,” as I now hope to show more clearly. Problem 6.4. Suppose that you know that your professor hates the view that global warming is a hoax. Because you want to make him perturbed, you raise your hand in class and argue that global warming is a hoax. Predictably, the professor goes nuts. What was the grammar of your argument?

This problem shows us two things: that fnding a task-function is a reductive process, but not one that is anti-intellectual. I begin by noting that the student’s mental state is insincere. Although his argument has the meaning it does when not offered as a hoax, it is nonetheless governed by an ulterior dynamic. It is being controlled by something. And this means that the devious behavior becomes the central thing that defnes the language game and provides the cue for what the reply behavior should be. For if the professor sees that the argument is a hoax, the keys to the behavior have been located. An astute professor would, in fact, side-step the student’s argument. So what does this mean? It means that the focal task in Problem 6.4— the grammar—is something like: IRRITATE(person). And although this introduces the idea of an ulterior task-function, which admittedly opens a Pandora’s box,38 the point for now is only this: a connection was required. The professor not only needs to be acculturated to this sort of behavior, but skilled and adept in a certain way. He or she needs to be experienced so that the task-function can be diagnosed. And this, quite simply, requires an act of intelligence. And even if the professor had failed in this respect—let’s say he acts predictably and addresses the argument irately (to the student’s delight)—our laughter would indicate only that the professor had been duped, not that he had been automated (a Pavlov’s dog). That is to say, we would laugh because he could have known better. Therefore, far from his behavior being a reaction to a stimulus, we shall rather say that we expect certain lights to come on. And we expect this every time a person correctly diagnoses the focal task of a speech act. It doesn’t matter if some lights only require ordinary illumination. Thus, had the student not been insincere—had the matter not been a hoax—the professor’s correct reaction would have entailed seeing that cue.

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That’s the key: one is always expected to intelligently diagnose the focal task of any language game. And this requires what Wittgenstein called “a connection,” which is usually seen in a “fash.” And I must also stress that catching the grammar of a speech act is a skill. It requires a certain kind of acculturated profciency. You have to develop an acumen for seeing the task that emerges in what Wittgenstein called the “language game.” And although it is true that fnding a task is a reductive process, this view endorses neither an automated nor conditioned outlook— and also not its opposite: a “ghostly” subjectivity. Wittgenstein tried to walk a tightrope between these two pitfalls.39 And lastly, I shall say that philosophers who insist on characterizing Wittgenstein’s philosophy as “anti-intellectual” also seem to carry with them a curious association. They seem to insist that bedrock philosophical questions—such as, “Do I exist?,” “Is reality real?”—require some sort of ratiocination. Wittgenstein, of course, thought it a confusion to subject such questions to ratiocinating behaviors.40 But this doesn’t mean he is denying “reason”;41 it means he is denying philosophy—and we must not equate the two. The truth is that Wittgenstein was simply germane with reason.42 NOTES 1. Culture & Value, 1945, 46e. See also, Investigations 3rd, 146e (#546). 2. Grammar, 51. 3. Grammar, 49. And, “The question ‘what is a word?’ is analogous to ‘what is a piece in chess.’” Grammar, 121. 4. “It is as a calculus that thinking has an interest for us; not as an activity of the human imagination. It is the calculus of thought that connects with extra-mental reality.” Grammar, 160. “For us language is a calculus; it is characterized by linguistic activities.” Grammar, 193. 5. Understanding language is not a conscious state, “it’s much more like the understanding or mastery of a calculus, something like the ability to multiply.” Grammar, 50. 6. See generally, Monk, 3–11. And Avrum Stroll also notes, “Of course, in that early work he meant by ‘logic’ the formal language that Whitehead and Russell had developed in Principia Mathematica.” Stroll, 139. 7. To see Ray Monk characterize Wittgenstein’s views about mathematics, see Duty of Genius, 306–8 and 418. 8. This was a point that Moore had trouble grasping. See Occasions, 69. 9. On occasion, Wittgenstein characterized grammatical propositions as being “self-evident.” He also had called them “concept-forming.” And he also had called them “rules.” He ultimately found the concept not to be governed by something fxed. See Duty of Genius, 468–69. 10. See Duty of Genius, 467–68.

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11. In this book I never use the word “grammar” to mean procedural as opposed to substantive statements; something self-contained or fxed—like a tautology—or something true only by virtue of a rule. The problem is that these conceptions try to differentiate from among operations or tasks, when, in truth, the whole idea is lexicographic: it never draws a line between one way of making sense versus another. This is why Wittgenstein wrote: Why don’t I call cookery rules arbitrary, and why am I tempted to call the rules of grammar arbitrary? Because I think of the concept “cookery” as defned by the end of cookery, and I don’t think of the concept of “language” as being defned by the ends of language. You cook badly if you are guided in your cooking by rules other than the right ones; but if you follow other rules than those of chess you are playing another game; and if you follow grammatical rules other than such and such ones, that does not mean you say something wrong, no, you are speaking of something else. Grammar, 184–85. Grammar does not tell us how language must be constructed in order to fulfll its purpose, in order to have such-and-such an effect on human beings. It only describes and in no way explains the use of signs. . . . The rules of Grammar may be called “arbitrary,” if that is to mean that the aim of the grammar is nothing but that of the language. Investigations 3rd, 138e (#496–97).

12. See Austin. 13. Austin’s early work had been confned to only those utterances that constituted offcial behaviors, such as when you accept a contract offer (“I accept!”). He called this a “performative utterance.” Austin, 4–5. In his later view, however, Austin takes the position that all acts of speech perform social functions of some sort, and he even created a typology for the idea. Federica Berdini and Claudia Bianchi write concerning Austin’s later views, “All sentences are tools we use in order to do something—to say something is always to do something. . . . As we said, in How to Do Things with Words Austin draws the distinction between constatives and performatives merely as a preliminary to the presentation of his main thesis, namely that there is a performative dimension in any use of language.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2b, http://www.iep.utm.edu/austin/ (accessed August 8, 2016). 14. Investigations 3rd, 103e (#308). 15. Investigations 3rd, 102e (#306). He also says that there needn’t be “a mental process of thinking, hoping wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc.” Blue & Brown, 41. 16. Thinking is not something ghostly or ethereal. Grammar, 108–9; Blue & Brown, 5–6. 17. Investigations 3rd, 102e (#305). 18. Grammar, 43. He’s talking in the passage about the curious relationship between understanding a gesture and understanding a word. When you understand a gesture in the same way that you understand a theme or a sentence, a connection occurs—something he calls “a particular experience as I follow it.” 19. Grammar, 67. 20. “Grammar is the account books of language. They must show the actual transactions of language, everything that is not a matter of accompanying sensations.” Grammar, 87.

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21. Reagan is the actor who played George Gipp in the 1940 flm, which caused him to carry the nickname. It would be easy for you to not know of the flm, but still know of Reagan’s nickname. For years, that is the way it was for me. Being in college in the 1980s, I knew his nickname, but never heard of any such flm. 22. It’s not that we could not imagine a different grammar (script) here; it is that, if we did, we would merely be imagining a different social context. We would only be saying to each other: here is what my imagination can do in this situation. But this very possibility supports my position. For if we did successfully imagine the utterance to be doing something different, we would need to capture that thing in a task-function, for demonstrative purposes. That is the only thing transpiring here. I’m simply trying to shovel out the intellectual behavior that I see in the context, and punctuate it for the reader, so that the idea of grammar can be taught better (isolated). 23. Some may say, “How come the task-function isn’t stating heritage?” In the context I have imagined, heritage is being used as an affliation. But if there is a different use, simply put, we would have a different notation. The task-function is only meant to mimic what is being done, intellectually, in the usage. 24. Grammar, 87. 25. Grammar, 63. 26. “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.” Investigations 3rd, 116e (#373). 27. Wittgenstein writes, “If however, you make the grammar clear to yourself, if you proceed by very short steps in such a way that every single step becomes perfectly obvious and natural, no dispute whatsoever can arise.” Witt & Vienna Circle, 183. See also, Stuart G. Shanker, Wittgenstein and the Turning Point in the Philosophy of Mathematics (SUNY, 1987), 30. 28. Wittgenstein writes, “One would like to speak of the function of a word in this sentence. As if the sentence were a mechanism in which the word had a particular function. But what does this function consist in? How does it come to light? For there isn’t anything hidden—don’t we see the whole sentence? The function must come out in operating with the word.” Investigations 3rd, 149e (#559). 29. Investigations 3rd, 116e (#371). I take the fact that he italicized that word to be just as signifcant as the sentence itself. 30. Duty of Genius, 291. 31. “‘Is thinking something [that is] going on at a particular time, or is it spread over the words?’ ‘It comes in a fash.’ ‘Always?—it sometimes does come in a fash, although this may be all sorts of different things.’” Aesthetics, 68. See also, Lecture on Ethics during the middle period, a sentence of which says, “I at once see clearly, as it were a fash of light.” Quoted by Drury in Recollections, 83. 32. Aesthetics, 68. 33. Grammar, 84. 34. Russell, 138. He continues, “So far, all the uses of words that we have considered can be accounted for on the lines of behaviourism” (139–40). 35. William Child, Wittgenstein, ed., Brian Leiter (Routledge 2011), 251–52. Child’s mistake is to situate Wittgenstein’s thoughts into predefned schools of thinking. But this doesn’t describe Wittgenstein; it describes the way that the people who

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organize with a fxed set of boxes think about these issues. And by this I am not saying that Wittgenstein is perpetually elusive—a tempting charm that we often hear—I am rather saying that his philosophy was premised upon abnormal resonance in aspect and sensitivities to context (part I). So you cannot take him as being a registered affliate of any preexisting opinion-frame that appears in disputes about mind or language. 36. Seeing Wittgenstein as a behaviorist “is a mistake that could not possibly be made by anybody who knew Wittgenstein or who understood what kind of man he was.” Monk, 96. Wittgenstein’s philosophy obviously has elements that are in sympathy with behaviorism, but also elements that are not. He made that specifc point in Philosophical Investigations (#307). Wittgenstein offers a middle-ground position. 37. Duty of Genius, 441. 38. This maneuver has important implications for when a person behaves not only insincerely, but with “possessed” belief states. This would include cases of zeal, insecurity, ideology, dogma, fxation, and so on. These things can hijack an assertion so that it becomes governed or infuenced in some way. And this has great implications for the subject of character. For if you believe that meaning is use, you will have no choice but to see all sorts of controlling intellectual tasks in people, which then make you see patterns of problematic behavior when they say things. And though this will surely relegate you to an island, you at least know that seclusion has an interesting relationship to truth. For just as meaning is use, character, too, is the way you behave. 39. Monk writes about lectures Wittgenstein gave that focused upon “those who assert and those who deny the existence of mental processes.” Monk then boldly states, “Wittgenstein wanted to do neither; he wanted to show that both sides of the issue rest on a mistaken analogy.” Duty of Genius, 477. 40. Stroll, 121–49. 41. The seminal remark that causes some philosophers to say this is #475 in On Certainty, in which Wittgenstein imagines humans as having no ratiocination powers whatsoever. He goes on to conclude that the foundations of language would still emerge. But what he is really saying is that formalism never produced language— task-functions did. Language was never “deduced.” And from this foundation the rest was built upward. I don’t read the remark not as denying intelligence; I think it says something about engineering (form follows function). One should also note that the remark was written without editing about three weeks from his death, and was prefaced with this: “[Here there is still a big gap in my thinking. And I doubt whether it will be flled now]” (62e). 42. If I were to use a label here it would probably be “realism” as that term is understood in legal theory, not philosophy (proper).

Chapter 7

Picturing

So far, I have covered two of the three important components in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: traits implicated by word use and task-functions that occur in communication. We are now ready to talk about the third and fnal component—something called “picturing.” There is a phenomenon in psychology that involves a “mental picture” fashing before the mind’s eye. This can be blatant or subtle. A good example comes from famous cognitive linguist George Lakoff. He writes, if you are told, “Don’t think of an Elephant!,” an elephant is usually pictured in the mind as a refex.1 Lakoff posits an explanation in brain science for why this is so.2 Wittgenstein also knew well of this phenomenon. He writes, “If I say, ‘A rose is red in the dark too’ you positively see this red in the dark before you.”3 Picturing is a natural experience that occurs during certain kinds of thinking. And it isn’t limited to seeing a sole image. When you read a newspaper article, for example, a scenario might come to mind (conjecture) about facts not mentioned. Your imagination becomes involved. Literature relies heavily on this phenomenon—the reader flling in gaps. Indeed, daydreaming and certain kinds of paranoia actually involve extremely elaborate mental picturing and scenario. As an example, consider how movie creators have portrayed space travel. When the original television show Star Trek aired in the 1960s, the creators held a picture of space travel that was like that of a craft submerged in water (submarine). The ship moved slowly. Weapons were launched from a chain of command requiring organizational labor. By contrast, in the movie Star Wars that frst appeared in 1977, space travel was pictured like that of air fight. The ships zoomed by; the weapons fred instantaneously, like guns. To produce each cinematic vision, the creators had to indulge a picture of space travel in the mind’s eye. 69

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But why do I call this a “picture” and not merely an assumption? Because this is more descriptive of what actually transpires. A scenario does emerge before the mind’s eye. Perhaps we speak of it as a concept or a “vision.” But it is, in fact, a mental picture that is perceived and which, in the case of the movies, was reproduced cinematically. Wittgenstein knew that picturing was a natural phenomenon in the human intellect. He said that “pictures . . . give us pleasure, occupy our minds”4 and was the very thing that constituted the imagination.5 He also could not help but see images and scenarios when learning even seemingly mundane subjects. An example is his contrast of a double negative in mathematics, which yields a positive value, versus something “doubly negative” outside of math. As he thought of this, different pictures fashed in his mind. The former, he said, “turns the sense through 180” degrees (a full rotation), while the latter is like “a shake of the head” (Gosh!).6 Because Wittgenstein experienced pronounced and resonating mental images during an act of contemplation (chapter 2), his philosophy was always concerned with the role that this phenomenon played in comprehension and reasoning. He knew it affected our assertions7—pictures were at the center of our views in science, religion, and metaphysics.8 But his verdict about the phenomenon remained uncertain: sometimes it could enhance comprehension while other times it was the sole source of our confusion. An example of when picturing is “good” can be found in Wittgenstein’s consideration of the commutative law for multiplication. This holds that (a x b) = (b x a), or 5 x 4 = 4 x 5. Wittgenstein saw that this mathematical expression merely fipped rows for columns, as depicted in fgure 7.1. His point was that, if this picture emerged in the mind when learning the rule, the idea would become better realized. Without the picture, however, only a rote chore remained (the calculation checking out). Wittgenstein spoke of this heightened experience as “seeing connections.”9

Figure 7.1  The Commutative Law for Multiplication. Source: Author.

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But Wittgenstein also understood that pictures could deceive us. In fact, much of his philosophical method was devoted to pointing people to latent pictures that caused them to hold problematic beliefs. For example, he once asked students to imagine a cord that was stretched tightly around the earth at the equator. He then asked how much above the earth the cord would become if you increased the length by only one yard, but kept it taut and circular. His students answered that the difference was miniscule or imperceptible. Yet, the actual distance is nearly six inches—an answer that surprises everyone.10 Wittgenstein then declared his point: “This is the kind of mistake that occurs in philosophy. It consists of being misled by a picture.”11 An excellent example of how picturing can transform our thoughts can be found in George Lakoff’s book The Political Mind. He talks about how most people imagine evolution to have occurred in species. They imagine a dog-eat-dog world (survival of the fttest). Yet, Lakoff says, another idea is possible: species may have survived through environmental coordination, not selfshness.12 They may have benefted from what he calls a reciprocally nurturing ecological niche.13 But to bring this idea to life—to make it not sound like word fuzz—Lakoff does something blatantly Wittgensteinian: he forces a picture onto the mind’s eye. He writes: Consider a mountain on an island in the South Seas, where the rain falls on one side and it is dry on the other. Suppose the island has green and brown moths. In the rainforest, the green moths are less likely to be seen against the vegetation than the brown moths, and the birds will pick off the brown ones more easily. On the dry side, the brown moths will be hidden from the birds, but the green ones will tend to stand out and be eaten. Does this mean that the green and brown moths are “competing” against each other—in a life-and-death struggle with each other—with the green winning the literal struggle against the browns in the rainforest, while the browns overcome the greens on the dry side of the mountain? Come on! That’s a ridiculous way to think of a species thriving when it fts an ecological niche, and another species surviving less well—or dying out—in that niche. “Struggle,” as Darwin said, is a misleading metaphor.14

Having just explained what picturing is, I now move on to integrate this discussion with the last chapter. How is picturing different from task-functions—or better yet, how do the two relate? PICTURES VERSUS TASKS It is important to understand two things: (a) not all thinking involves picturing; and (b) task-functions are something separate (independent). Because

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this is simply critical to understanding Wittgenstein, I ask my reader to consider Problem 7.1. Problem 7.1. In late October, you are at work, inside an offce that has no windows. You have to fnish the monthly reports for your boss. A coworker comes in and says, “It’s snowing outside.”15 When hearing this, what happens before your mind’s eye? I don’t mean how you might react (joy, surprise); I mean what happens during understanding?

The point of the problem is to differentiate two kinds of thinking (cognitive paths). The task-function being communicated—the grammar—is journalistic: TELL(news). And it is one thing to comprehend only this, which requires communicative acculturation. But it is another thing to also see a picture fash before the mind’s eye—“snow”—independently of this.16 It is possible that the sentence thrusts this image upon you separately from comprehending the task. When is it most likely that only task-functions, and not pictures, are perceived in communication? Probably with rote thinking or during repetition.17 Suppose an experienced waitress takes your drink order. You say, “Just water.” Hearing this all day may increase the chance that pictures are squelched. The utterance becomes processed, in blank, as FETCH(item). Wittgenstein himself offers an interesting example of a communication that occurs, as he puts it, without an “experience-content (images for instance).”18 If you say to someone, “Wait for me by the bank,” no image of “bank” is likely pop up in the ordinary situation where the location is not in doubt. Instead, one hears it only as directions in a sequence: “use this anchorprocedure.” This is like saying to a student in class who wants to set up an appointment, “When you arrive, check in with the secretary.” Instead of a picture emerging of the secretary or location, this might be processed like a list: “fnd secretary frst, then go to offce” (steps). But notice how Wittgenstein’s example might change if you say, “Meet at the restaurant”—What restaurant? “Jimmy’s”—Oh okay. Now perhaps the picture of Jimmy’s does emerge. The difference is that you did not know where the anchor was. Wittgenstein also stressed that you don’t need to see a picture to understand a speech act.19 And even when a picture intrudes upon you, he writes, “it may be of no use at all.”20 An example is the word “cube.” The picture may suggest a use, but we can use it differently.21 Many ice cubes are not actually “cubes,” though they may be cubical. But even though we have the ability to ignore a picture,22 they remain so potentially effcacious in our psychology that even distortions of them can create their own infuence.23 An example is the cubicle in offce space, which began as an offshoot (distortion) of the

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Figure 7.2  Wittgenstein’s New System for Critical Thinking. Source: Adobe Stock.

cube’s picture. Wittgenstein writes, “We do not realize that we calculate, operate, with words”—the task-functions—and “translate them sometimes into one picture, sometimes into another.”24 And so what is the point? The point is that we have this pictorial intelligence that happens independently of perceiving task-functions. Wittgenstein says the two are separate in the way that thinking is separate from talking.25 Cognitive scientists, too, sometimes reference this duality in the human mind. Famous linguist Steven Pinker once differentiated between what he called “combinatorial reasoning”—something that facilitates calculation or rules—versus “associative memory,” which involves stored mental images.26 I discuss his distinction more in chapter 10. But for now, I end this chapter being content that the three core phenomena in Wittgenstein’s philosophy are now unveiled. They are depicted in fgure 7.2. The reader should know what it means to understand (a) the social traits implicated in word use; (b) the task-functions found in communication; and (c) the picture, if any, that emerges in the mind’s eye. Wittgenstein once described this as “sentences, pictures, actions” which lead us to “a multitude of familiar paths.”27 NOTES 1. Lakoff, 232–33. 2. Because most people don’t have any actual relationship with elephants—as they do with, for example, dogs—people with lesions in visual regions of the parietal cortex may lose the ability to recognize an elephant, since visual imagery is part of the meaning. Lakoff, 233.

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3. Investigations 3rd, 141e (#514). 4. Investigations 3rd, 142e (#524). 5. “The mental picture is the picture which is described when someone describes what he imagines.” Investigations 3rd, 115e (#367). 6. “We connect different images with the two negatives,” Wittgenstein writes. One “turns the sense through 180” degrees, which is why two of them restores the thing to its original position. The other, however, “is like a shake of the head. And just as one does not annul a shake of the head by shaking it again,” so, too, one doesn’t cancel out this negative with a second one. Investigations 3rd, 148e (#556(c)). 7. For example, the picture people hold about the earth, he said, was an “inherited background” that determined our beliefs concerning it. “But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.” On Certainty, 15e (#94). 8. “What am I believing in when I believe that men have souls? What am I believing in, when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture . . . the application [of which] is not easy to survey.” Investigations 3rd, 126e (#422). 9. People sometimes talk about creative mathematicians who can “intuit” answers before they fnd them. See, for example, how author Sylvia Nascar characterizes famous American mathematician John Nash: Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The fashes of intuition were non-rational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists . . . Nash saw the vision frst, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward. A Beautiful Mind (Touchstone, 1998), 12.

10. See David H. Allen, How Mechanics Shaped the Modern World, Springer (2014), 244 and Clifford Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics (Sterling Milestones), Sterling (2009), 162. 11. Malcolm, 53. 12. Lakoff, 204. 13. Lakoff, 203. 14. Lakoff, 202. 15. See Investigations 3rd, 139e (#501). 16. This can happen to the speaker or the listener. I’ve tried to avoid ownership here on purpose. There is no need to draw a boundary here. 17. I’m thinking of the expression “troll” when applied to website commenters. Before the expression “trolling” was common, the term was funny. The picture of a troll was placed in this spot, like calling someone a cretin or a “discussion-board terrorist.” But the fact is, as “troll” regularized, it just became a second-hand term for a certain kind of internet behavior. I think it lost the funny picture. 18. Investigations 3rd, 217e. 19. He writes:

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There is a lack of clarity about the role of imaginability in our investigation. Namely about the extent to which it ensures that a proposition makes sense. . . . It is no more essential to the understanding of a proposition that one should imagine anything in connection with it, than that one should make a sketch from it. . . . Instead of “imaginability” one can also say here: representability by a particular method of representation. And such a representation may indeed safely point a way to further use of a sentence. On the other hand a picture may obtrude itself upon us and be of no use at all. Investigations 3rd, 120e (#395–96).

20. Investigations 3rd, 120e (#397). 21. “The picture of the cube did indeed suggest a certain use to us, but it was possible for me to use it differently. . . . What is essential is to see that the same thing can come before our minds when we hear the word and the application still be different. Has it the same meaning both times? I think we shall say not.” Investigations 3rd, 54e (#139). 22. “Can there be a collision between picture and application? There can, inasmuch as the picture makes us expect a different use, because people in general apply this picture like this. . . . I want to say: we have a normal case, and abnormal cases.” Investigations 3rd, 56e (#141). 23. When addressing how pictures can point the way to further uses, Wittgenstein writes, “And such a representation may indeed safely point a way to further use of a sentence.” Investigations 3rd, 120e (#396). 24. Investigations 3rd, 131e (#449). 25. Investigations 3rd, 217e. 26. Words & Rules, 278 and 284–85. 27. Investigations 3rd, 144e (#534). I confess to taking this passage at its word. Transitions can point us to three things.

Chapter 8

Therapy

I have now completed my explanation of the three basic targets of Wittgenstein’s method: (a) the social traits implicated in word use; (b) the intellectual tasks signifed in communication; and (c) the picture in the background of the mind’s eye. In previous chapters, I had also contended that Wittgenstein was abnormally sensitive to perceiving each of these, and that his entire philosophy was nothing more than demonstrating this acute perception. In what follows next, I show how all of this affects critical thinking. My claim is that how we confront assertions must change. Most critical thinking courses train students to focus upon “the argument itself.” They stress the marshaling of evidence, the discipline of inference and the avoidance of fallacy. And they stress dissection—arguments have pieces (premises, defnitions, logical steps, conclusions, etc.). But Wittgenstein shows us that much more is needed. Ours is an introspective investigation. The focus is upon what the intellect is doing underneath the act of speech and whether the same is perspicuous. Wittgensteinians, therefore, do not engage in debate; we engage in a kind of therapy. This doesn’t mean “psychological therapy”;1 it means showing that something unfortunate is occurring in the task(s) offered, the word traits implicated or the picture conjured in the mind’s eye during the behavior of assertion (making claims). So how do you do this therapy? There are six features that need understood before anyone could credibly attempt it. The features concern not merely the three targets to be “doctored,” but also what tools we select for the work, and why. I shall begin discussing the former frst, and then speak more broadly about methods and technique.

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THREE TARGETS One target of Wittgenstein’s therapy is the traits associated with word use in various language games. Wittgensteinians often build a conceptual map for how these traits fuctuate in and out. This is called a social reconstruction. The process begins with a paradigmatic case or ordinary conception of something and then works its way into extension. In chapter 5, for example, my discussion of “bachelor” began with a dominant specimen and ended with more esoteric uses. I did this because my paramount concern was to show how word traits fuctuated in related language games (sense shift). I shall do this again in chapter 12, where my concern is the word “knowledge.” (In this book an easy way to identify this procedure is to look for the Legos.) It is important to understand that the starting point—the paradigm case—is never “special.” It is used merely for comparative and instrumental purposes. The only reason we posit centrality is to see the proximity that this way of speaking has to the traits in play in other uses2—it’s purely therapeutic. As Wittgenstein says: The only way for us to guard our assertions against distortion—or avoid vacuity in our assertions, is to have a clear view in our refections of what the ideal is, namely an object of comparison—a yardstick, as it were—instead of making a prejudice of it to which everything has to conform. For this is what produces the dogmatism into which philosophy so easily degenerates.3

Some Ordinary Language Philosophers don’t understand this. They make the mistake of thinking that the paradigm case is prescriptive or privileged in some way—that it is a more correct usage.4 But this is not true. The dominant case is only a sense of talking like any other, which is why, at times, we distinguish it as such.5 Another thing to understand about this investigative procedure is that it never involves a fxed or closed language game. You would never limit your inquiry to how “bachelor” was used in the past only or which use is most popular. Rather, you always ask, if such-and-such a use would occur, what would happen? The goal is always what is intelligible in the context. This is because you want to see if subtracting this or that trait can still produce success—or perhaps, what success becomes in such a scenario. This distinction is important in the feld of philosophy of law, where originalists routinely make the mistake of thinking that a plain word in the US Constitution has a fxed sense.6 They call it the word’s “original meaning.” I wrote about this in The Flexible Constitution.7 The fact is that plain words can always involve dynamic trait substitution.8 George Washington (or whomever) could understand an unusual sense of “liberty” as easily as he could the word “lunch,” though he may fnd both disagreeable. Escaping the dynamic of fuctuating traits, quite simply, is diffcult (see chapter 11).

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The second object of Wittgensteinian therapy is to locate the task-function in play in an act of communication. This is a reductive process. You must boil down the speech act to its basic set of cognitive operations (directions). When you do this, you are looking for the key to make not only an acculturated response, but an optimal one. The task-function provides the social cue for our reply behavior in the language game. This is referred to as locating one’s grammar. I used this technique in several places. I introduced it in chapter 6 (“Taskfunctions”), and I use it heavily in chapter 11 (“Designation and Specimen”). I also use it in chapter 10 (“Defnition and False Dispute”) and chapter 9 (“Meaning and Intent”). I even at times refer to it as the “anchor” of the entire method, suggesting it is most important.9 I should note that this type of investigation becomes messy if the person’s mental state is possessed or fxated in certain ways.10 This is because it is always laborious to get another to see that he or she offers such tasks. And the diffculty arises from the fact that this needs shown and not merely asserted. The hope is for the person to realize that his intellect is behaving this way and to stop it. Wittgensteinians are not likely to mess with possessed belief states because of the pointless nature of the labor. We are very much confned to dispositions that are in good faith. Sincerity is simply a prerequisite to everything we offer. The third object of our therapy is a person’s pictorial frame. When we attempt to doctor this, our aim is to shift a person’s entire aspect for something. Creative and imaginative scenarios play a more direct role. Wittgenstein himself used to make students imagine false scientifc facts.11 When using this procedure, we are literally trying to force an alternate picture upon the mind’s eye. This can be dangerous because some people do not like it. Our aim is to build pictorial capacity and help the person develop a better eye for something. George Lakoff provided an excellent example of this therapy in the previous chapter. He wanted us to reimagine how “evolution” is pictured. So he imposed an imaginative scenario involving brown and green moths.12 The point was to lessen the prejudice caused by the other picture that had held us captive. This is precisely what pictorial therapy is for: to plant a competing picture in the mind. I use pictorial therapy quite heavily in my discussions about framing (chapter 13), religion (chapter 15) and ethics (chapter 14). I now wish to move on to discuss more broadly our methods and goals. METHODS AND GOALS One of the most critical things to understand about Wittgenstein’s method is not merely its target, but its means. At the outset one must understand that

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our approach is anti-theoretical. This is why I have so many examples and problem sets in the book. Wittgensteinians believe that philosophy must be done on the ground. We reason from something insular, not general. Concrete examples are always our canvass.13 Wittgenstein described this as proceeding with a “series of examples,” where “problems are solved (diffculties eliminated).”14 The reason we favor the insular is that our goal is only for you to see a perspicuous connection among idea elements. Wittgenstein writes: “A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’. Hence the importance of fnding and inventing intermediate cases. The concept of perspicuous representation is of fundamental signifcance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things.”15

Wittgenstein’s emphasis upon “intermediate cases” is important. The picture I have in my mind is of someone in a room in the total dark. It seems like being blind. And to lead the person to the door, when you yourself are not in the room, requires that you frst talk about something short of the door, so that the frst step can be taken. We cannot call this type of approach Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP),16 as some have done. A better name for our method might be something like Intermediate Case Therapy (ICT). I should also note that Wittgenstein became quite irritated whenever his students tried to transform his method into a formula or a school.17 Therapy cannot become orthodoxy. It must be an actual addressing of the problem. The reason why schools of thought are disfavored is that they encourage something external to do the thinking when we want you to inspect the connections. The goal is to experience a better realization by fortifying your qualitative acuity. Theoretical generalization (doctrine) cannot do this because it substitutes “connection” for the allure of nickel-plated words and the charm that something else can think for you. And so, our instrumentalities are different. We use creative scenarios, simile, aphorisms, and statement-comparison as means to “jolt” one’s perception (realization). And we direct these toward some intermediate step necessary to free one from closet thinking—“to shew the fy the way out of the fy bottle,” as Wittgenstein wrote.18 And fnally, when we do this, we take no position on the underlying matter. Our intervention is always instrumental. “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher,” Wittgenstein writes.19 Another thing that must be understood is that we are not doctoring something on the surface. We are not saying that a premise is fawed or that evidence is lacking—which both may be. Arguing about surface material is like wrestling in the mud. Although this, too, could have therapeutic benefts—people could come to see the light—it rarely does. And this is because debating is itself

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a behavior where one is encouraged to harden or protect a stance (“win”). The better way, Wittgenstein says, is to get at the root of the matter20: Getting hold of the diffcult deep down is what is hard. . . . Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the diffculty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish.21

And the skills needed for our therapy are different from those needed for “debate.” Translating speech acts into task-functions is largely a reductive process. It requires experience to start seeing through a premise and into the intellectual behaviors to which a person appears clutched (see Problem 6.4). And seeing social traits fuctuate across contexts requires a qualitative sensitivity. And seeing how the imagination suggests or pictures something in real time requires keen introspection. This is why Wittgenstein had thought he had reduced philosophy to a mere set of special skills.22 He called it “a ‘sort of thinking’ to which we are not accustomed and to which we have not been trained—a sort of thinking very different from what is required in the sciences.”23 And it should be remembered that the goal of the therapy is only clarity. It is neither refutation nor precision. For if a person has a fog in mind and says so with his language, the goal is for the two of you to be clear that only such a fog exists. So it is clarity that we aim for, not precision. And the ultimate goal, then, becomes peace, not “winning.” For once each side is clear about the matter, there is nothing more to dispute—even if you remain in disagreement. Our method brings peace and quiet, because these are the natural ends of a mutual understanding. And this will mean that many of our disputes in philosophy, politics, religion, ethics, and so on are simply not needed. Wittgensteinians are sometimes called “quietists” because this is so often what success is for the therapy: quietude (silence). CHALLENGES One unfortunate side effect of this therapy is that it can cause irritation for both sides. This is because our method directly probes acumen. So if one repeatedly becomes attenuated to another’s insuffcient skill, a sense of irritation can result for both. An important question to ask is: does the therapy work? There are times when Wittgenstein assumed it would work automatically. Once the knot

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was revealed in your thinking, he reasoned, the matter would immediately straighten itself out. “Your mental cramp [would be] relieved” and you would see the issue better,24 with the problem “vanishing.”25 But there are other times when he is less sure. Maybe the problem won’t go away. He writes in 1940, “All we want to do is straighten you up on the track if your coach is crooked on the rails. Driving it afterwards is something we shall leave to you.”26 So it is possible that those who don’t drive well will simply become crooked again. And this seems to be one of the great challenges of the method. When one is shown a simile, an imaginative scenario, and so on he or she may simply not be impressed. I would argue this occurs frequently. But there is a good reason why: the entire approach is predicated upon seeing connections.27 As Ray Monk notes, “What is required for understanding here is not the discovery of facts, nor the drawing of logically valid inferences from accepted premises . . . but, rather, the right point of view.”28 The aim of the method is to “change the aspect under which certain things are seen.”29 But because these connections require perspicuity—which itself requires abnormal sensitivities—some (many?) may have trouble seeing the matter in the requisite way.30 Wittgenstein knew his philosophy would only work if “a light shines on it from above,” and if it did not, he would only be regarded in history as “clever.”31 Taking all of this into consideration, I myself see this therapy as having three broad stages (see fgure 8.1). At the outset (Stage #1), the goal is to simply show the person that tasks, traits, and pictures occur as a phenomenon during an assertion. If realized, this person should then see that views themselves are not grounded in the earth, but upon a platform of sorts, which can put zeal in check. In Stage #2, the person goes back to the drawing board. The point is to see alternate ways to picture and behave toward the matter. New orientations (frameworks) become realized and idea elements are connected differently. In this stage, the person seeks greater breadth.32 But what does it take, then, to get the best answer—to climb the mountain and throw away the ladder? That can only come from connoisseurship, described in chapter 14. At that level, one not only knows how to perceive all

Figure 8.1  The Three Stages of Wittgensteinian Therapy. Source: Author.

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sides of an issue at their very best, but can pick among the possible arrangements authoritatively (as an expert does). But this doesn’t mean that the fnal opinion is “right”; it only means it is excellent. And that is the key: truth can only be excellence. We can do no more. NOTES 1. When it was alleged that Wittgenstein’s new thinking was a form of psychoanalysis, Wittgenstein pointedly stressed, “They are different techniques.” Malcolm, 56–57. 2. This passage from Lars Hertzberg is helpful here. We look at circumstances to become clear about concepts; we do not look at them to adjudicate what they mean: The circumstances do not defne the standard against which the meaningfulness of the concepts is to be adjudicated; rather it is only by taking note of the circumstances that we can get a clear picture of those concepts: we see them for what they are in the context of life in which they have a use. Lars Hertzberg, “Very General Facts of Nature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, eds. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford, 2011), 353.

3. Culture & Value, 1937, 26e. 4. Sally Parker-Ryan notes the following concerning OLP scholars: The contention “ordinary language is correct language” forms the rationale, or justifcation, for the method of the appeal to ordinary language. This is a basic and fundamental tenet on which it is safe to say all Ordinary Language philosophers concur, more or less strongly. However, it has been often misunderstood, and the misunderstanding has unfortunately in part been attributable to the early Ordinary Language philosophers. The misunderstanding lies in confating the notion of “correctness” with the notion of “truth.” OLP, 3c.

See also, later in the same section, Malcolm claimed a semantic prohibition of some kind against “formulating the skeptical thesis in the frst place—since it requires the non-ordinary use of language.” OLP, 3c. 5. See Problem 10.3. See also Flexible Constitution, 50. And were we to focus only upon the central case, so that it had our sole gaze, we would fnd fuctuations here too (Problem 5.2). One wants to say: our eyes would merely gaze at smaller marks on the ruler instead of the larger ones that run further rightward. 6. Flexible Constitution, 8–9 and 33–55. 7. See also, Bartrum. 8. Flexible Constitution, 2–3 and 47–51. 9. See Problem 9.4. 10. I cover insincere (controlled) mental states in several places. See Problem 6.4, 10.5, and 13.2. 11. “If anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize—then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are

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used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.” Investigations 3rd, 230e (xii). 12. See chapter 7, right before Pictures Versus Tasks. 13. This is why I have written this book with problem sets and hypotheticals. 14. Investigations 3rd, 51e (#133). 15. Investigations 3rd, 49e (#122). 16. Sally Parker-Ryan notes that this moniker was originally a form of derision. She writes, “It is important to note that the Ordinary Language philosophical view was not developed as a unifed theory, nor was it an organized program, as such. Indeed, the fgures we now know as ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophers did not refer to themselves as such—it was originally a term of derision, used by its detractors.” OLP, main entry (second paragraph). 17. Bouwsma, 11–12. In fact, Sally Parker-Ryan specifcally notes that OLP today is regarded “foremost [as] a methodology.” This is one of the key features that separates Wittgenstein from some of his heirs. 18. Investigations 3rd, 103e (#309). 19. Zettel, 81e (#455). 20. “One keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations. One doesn’t put the question marks deep enough down.” Culture & Value, 1947, 62e. 21. Culture & Value, 1946, 48e. 22. Moore in Occasions, 113. 23. Moore in Occasions, 113. 24. “Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the feld of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.” Malcolm, 50. 25. “Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.” Culture & Value, 1946, 48e. 26. Culture & Value, 1940, 39e. 27. Duty of Genius, 441 and 531. 28. Duty of Genius, 530. 29. Duty of Genius, 508. 30. Duncan Richter accurately notes, “Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, both early and late, is notoriously diffcult to understand.” Richter, 9. 31. “Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. . . . And if the light from above is lacking, I can’t in any case be more than clever.” Culture & Value, 1947, 58e. 32. Notice that even very smart people are no doubt consumers on so many things. It would be quite strange for someone to have an answer to everything—for if he did, the grammar here would remind one of the Dollar Store. It would not be unlike a child showing his rock collection. So even for smart people, consumption is the way it works for the great many of the beliefs that are in social currency.

Part III

POST-ANALYTIC THOUGHT

Chapter 9

Meaning and Intent

In this part of the book, I am no longer concerned with explaining the three core concerns of Wittgenstein’s thought. Instead, I want to take this discovery—what I call post-analytic thought—and apply it to specifc subject areas of concern. My claim is that the following topics have been forever transformed by this new method of investigation: language meaning, defnitions, formality, designation, conceptual investigation (how to do philosophy), value judgments (ideology), ethics, and religion. I begin with language meaning and the role that state of mind plays. SUBJECTIVITY Throughout history, the role that mental state plays in language has been the subject of much controversy. Disputes have centered upon whether the speaker had to have an objective and reasonable mindset or could simply have anything in mind he wanted for his language (“subjective”). I begin with the subjective views and work my way toward the objectivists. Problem 9.1. Read this passage from Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. What would a Wittgensteinian say in response to Humpty? “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected. 87

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

The frst thing to note is that the passage in Problem 9.1 is truncated. In the full passage, Humpty makes a perfectly acceptable use of “glory” (see endnote).1 But he never tries to explain his use to Alice, and, instead, claims autonomy over the matter. And so the colloquy is not about how he actually used the word; it is about whether one can autonomously declare what words mean. If Humpty is saying that he can use “glory” to signify any task-function, implicate any traits and see any picture, then he could speak his whole language with this one term. The simple fact is that no person can make himself autonomous in any language market merely through declaration. This would be like a seller in a free market declaring that his goods had to be purchased. Such a thing could only be bluster (as a behavior). It is sometimes mistakenly said that Wittgenstein’s philosophy endorses this autonomy. This is a gross misunderstanding that Malcolm addressed rather well: I think that there was indeed something in the content of his philosophy that, improperly assimilated, had and still has an unfortunate effect on those infuenced by it. I refer to his conception that words are not used with “fxed” meanings, that concepts [need] not have “sharp boundaries.” This teaching, I believe, produced a tendency in his students to assume that precision and thoroughness were not required in their own thinking. From this tendency nothing but slovenly philosophical work could result.2

So what is the point? The meaning of “glory” simply cannot be declared separately from its usage. “One always has to look at its use and learn from that,” Wittgenstein says.3 So it’s not what Humpty says the word means that matters; it’s whether or how his use was intelligible in the context.4 And the only time he actually used it with Alice (in the full passage), it was fne. So we can just take all of this as bluster. Problem 9.2. Read this excerpt, written by an originalist law professor. Is he right? The Constitution, a statute, and a grocery list are in reality no different from an unintelligible string of letters—e.g., xbrzal—or some set of mysterious marks— e.g., Δ ¥ ≡ +—which we need the authors’ key to decipher. No text can by itself

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declare the language, idiolect, or code in which it is written or even that it is a text. . . . But severed from their authors’ intended meaning, the words will not themselves constrain. How will we know what language they are in? Is the Constitution in English. . . . Perhaps it is Martian.5

This view is called by some “the intentionalist thesis.”6 It claims that sentences are hieroglyphic (“barren marks”) until the declarant reveals the meaning, like a girl popping out of a cake. In essence, the argument treats all language as a private code. And what it really says is that all of the taskfunctions that I have been appealing to in this manuscript are either private or foreign, so that each of us is blind to one another’s intellectual tasks. Wittgenstein disposes of this idea rather easily. He writes, “But if you say: ‘How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?’ then I say: ‘How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?’”7 The point is that language isn’t experienced as scribble in anyone’s mind.8 And even if it was, the declarant could never reveal “what he really means”—because that, too, would seem like scribble. Through what medium would the explanation occur?9 How could scholars ever decipher hieroglyphics? The intellectual tasks of language cannot ever be “private” where two people share the same form of life (same species). Each of us uses the same underlying process of acculturation and the same neurological constituence to understand the marks and noises we exchange (language)—though our skills may not be equal in this regard.10 Perhaps philosopher Lars Hertzberg says it best: “Language is not what enables us to communicate; rather, since we are able to communicate, there is language. Or, differently put, language is not the reason we stay on the road; rather, language is what we call this staying-on-the-road.”11 And so, if it happens that one of us is unsuccessful in being understood, it is only like a basketball player missing a shot—it isn’t otherwise an “alien state.” This means that there isn’t any curious mystery within a speaker that makes language effcacious.12 Such a picture indulges folk psychology (a little man inside the head), as shown in fgure 9.1(A). And Wittgenstein rightly counsels us against such a thing.13 OBJECTIVITY I now move on to discuss objectivity. Bertrand Russell wrote in 1921, “A word is used ‘correctly’ when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended.”14 This is an objectivist view. It stresses that language is merely the intended infiction of normal results upon people. If we break it down, three elements emerge, as shown in fgure 9.1(C).

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Figure 9.1  Mental States in Language. Source: Image A is art work licensed by Colin Batty © 2018 Peculiarium.com. Image B is a Gavin Statue by Campania International.

I contend that Wittgenstein has rendered this model antiquated. To show this, I ask that my reader indulge the remaining two problem sets in this chapter. Problem 9.3. Green ideas sleep furiously. Is this sentence meaningless? Explain your answer.

It used to be that some academics would argue that certain word pairs were necessarily meaningless or nonsensical.15 Problem 9.3 presents a modifed version of Noam Chomsky’s famous example.16 What could the sentence “Green ideas sleep furiously” ever mean? To provide an answer, I ask that my reader examine fgure 9.1(B) and contemplate this passage of text: The hobbits of the shire loved their rainy spring season because they loved their gardens. In the grey winter cold months, they slept long and dreamt of spring harvest, noting, “Green ideas sleep furiously.” Why did the phrase suddenly become intelligible? It is because a social context was successfully pictured for it. This involves seeing, in a fash, images related to gardening, plants, growing vegetables, and so on, which can become accessed through our picture of hobbit cultural life in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In the right setting, green ideas can sleep furiously.17

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Wittgenstein noted that a picture can provide meaning. “A sentence can strike me as like a painting in words, and the very individual word in the sentence as like a picture,” he writes.18 He continues: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines for information.”—What processes am I alluding to?—The sentences have a different ring. . . . I notice this and I shew it in my face. . . . Sometimes a picture, as it were an illustration, comes to me.19

Poetry and literature rely quite heavily upon this cognitive phenomenon (imagination). And this is why Wittgenstein noted that a rose can have teeth,20 that Wednesday could be fat21 and that the letter e could even be yellow.22 In each instance, creativity is invoked in fnding a way of “making sense.” And so what is the point? Russell’s tools don’t account well for this phenomenon. Language is not, as Russell once thought, the infiction of predictable results upon people. And it simply is not true that results have to be “reasonable.” This is because meaning is a natural phenomenon that occurs as it does (chapter 5). You cannot declare a foul if it occurs outside of an ordinary boundary. Russell’s notion of a “correct use” is thus prescriptive while Wittgenstein lets meaning be whatever it is. And this has implications for what nonsense is. Wittgensteinians do not like this word because it suggests that rules are needed to make sense. Instead, we prefer the term “senseless.” The difference is that the latter only allows language to fail naturally, which means that some combination of the three core phenomena is absent. Either no task-function or picture emerges; and/or no traits can be located. Each possible combination is but a sense in which language can fail. The corollary here is that sentences which convey all three things are the most meaningful—“a signifcant sentence is one which one can not merely say, but also think,” Wittgenstein writes.23 Note that something can be senseless to particular individuals talking to one another or to the overall language market. That is, something might lack intelligibility to you specifcally or it could also be this way (generally) in the language game in question. In real life, however, the latter may be rare because language is remarkably effcacious. Wittgenstein writes, “A word uttered in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a particular meaning in itself”24—that is, some combination of tasks, traits, or pictures can automatically emerge. In fact, the phrasal template game known as Mad Libs25 depends exactly upon this principle for its success. The reason why random combinations of words in a predefned sentence structure causes humor—especially for children—is because strange traits, tasks, or pictures are thrust upon the mind.

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The humor comes when something esoteric or disjointed becomes forced upon you. If the word pairs were truly meaningless—you drew a blank— Mad Libs would not work as a form of entertainment. Having just considered the issue of “reasonableness,” let us now consider Russell’s other notion: intended effect. Problem 9.4. Suppose that I want to distract a golfer as she tees off. So I shout something. Assume two scenarios. In one, I shout, “Yak yak yak yak yak.” In the other, I shout, “Your mother wears combat boots!” What is the meaning of each shout?

Instead of asking what the meaning is, ask this: What is the task-function being signifed? What are the traits supported by the context, and the pictures (if any) that come to mind? Let’s begin with the task, as it is often our anchor. Because the speech act is controlled by a governing behavior, the task-function is something like: DISTRACT(person).26 So this is the grammar for both shouts—the same language game is played in each case. Yet, in the second shout, the danger is that we could misperceive the task-function. We might think the behavior is to insult or frighten: INTIMIDATE(person). This would be akin to “fipping you off.” This misperception is critical, because accurately locating the task is what provides our social cue for the reply. We may not play this language game well, therefore, if we cannot see the task. Notice also that the second shout can support word traits and is in the form of a sentence that has a truth-value (called a “proposition”). Whether your mother wears certain boots is, after all, empirically verifable. And this completely messes up our discussion of “the picture.” In the frst shout, any picture that comes to mind seems accidental. Perhaps the golfer thinks the sound “yak yak yak” to be an animal, and the thought of a bird fashes in the mind. But in the second shout, it is possible for there to be what is called picture-proposition congruence. Even if you don’t actually picture it, you can, in theory, imagine mother in certain disagreeable boots. What do we do with that? First, if we take the matter to be a proposition, we will have misperceived the task-function (again). The person is not offering a hypothesis (a contest for truth). If he was, the task would be something like: TELL(news). And if the golfer thus replied factually—refuting it—the scenario would become humorous, the cause of which is the switching of the task. That is, what would be funny (the joke) would be the perversion of the social cue. This is reminiscent of the point that economist Pierro Sraffa made that caused Wittgenstein to see that his early philosophical work the Tractatus was fawed. Early on, Wittgenstein had thought there was something

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important about picture-proposition congruence. Sraffa, a friend, had replied by giving Wittgenstein a Neapolitan gesture called a “chin fick,” which, although different, is not too far removed from giving someone the middle fnger.27 Wittgenstein was struck by how the intelligibility of these kinds of gestures—for example, “Fuck You!”—had nothing to do with the picture that could be formed from the literal words (self-copulation?).28 Sraffa thus provided him the impetus to begin creating an updated view,29 which held not only that meaning was usage, but that pictures and task-functions worked separately. And all of this feeds very neatly into philosopher Paul Grice. His approach says that “mother wearing combat boots” has both a literal meaning, which he calls “semantics,” and an implicature,30 which he calls “pragmatics.”31 Wittgensteinians tend to disfavor this maneuver for two reasons. The frst is that it is two-dimensional (simplistic).32 The second is that it appears to give literalism preference over context for saying “what language means.” Wittgensteinians think just the opposite: context is king. Therefore it is quite strange in Problem 9.4 to call “mother in boots” the meaning as opposed to what it really is: the imposition of a meaning. Wittgenstein himself actually dealt with this kind of maneuver in an interesting way. He came to see that imposing literalism was imposing a defcient meaning. This is because comprehension has levels: I read a sentence from the middle of a story: “After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before.” Do I understand the sentence?—It’s not altogether easy to give an answer. It is an English sentence, and to that extent I understand it. I should know how the sentence might be used, I could invent a context for it. And yet I do not understand it in the sense in which I should understand it if I had read the story. . . . it’s very clear that the concept of understanding is a fuid one.33

And so, what have we learned from Problem 9.4? I hope we have learned that Wittgenstein’s tools are superior to both the objectivist (Russell) and subjectivist views that predated him. Language meaning is a function of three things: the traits in play, the task signifed and the picture that may emerge in the mind’s eye. And the degree to which any or all of these things are seen goes only to the extent of the understanding. The end result is that language becomes merely a function of how the intellect is used. And the parameters for this social dynamic become brokered naturally by acculturation and skill—not prescriptively or through some kind of formalism. The new model appears as that depicted in fgure 9.1(D). And these tools thus provide an upgrade for how to conceive of a state of mind in language. “Intention,” quite simply, is too blunt of an instrument.34 The task-function is more precise. It tells us the cognitive procedure or step

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necessary for an acculturated comprehension. It is like an executable. And the same can be said for the notion of a “picture.” It is a real phenomenon that can be therapeutically pointed to rather than being a frame-construct in psychology (like an “id,” “ego,” or personality). And so our tools for state of mind are now more articulate. NOTES 1. The colloquy is truncated. It begins with Humpty talking of how non-birthday presents can be given every day of the year except for one (the birthday), but that birthday presents can only happen on one sole day. Presenting this as a paradox, he says, “There’s glory for you!” This is perfectly intelligible; he’s being cynical. I can imagine all sorts of expressions that could do the same thing: “There’s bloody hell for you!” or “How about them apples!” 2. Malcolm, 63. 3. Investigations 3rd, 109e (#340). 4. Also, we must understand that asking whether “glory” could ever mean x merely asks whether a market for something will someday exist. And there is no rule here. If the word does come to mean this, it will be because people have simply become socially acclimated to such a thing. 5. Larry Alexander, “Simple-Minded Originalism,” in The Challenge of Originalism, Theories of Constitutional Interpretation, eds. Grant Huscroft and Bradley W. Miller (Cambridge, 2011), 91–92, n.11. 6. Stanley Fish writes, “If you want to know what the words someone utters mean, you have to know what code or language he is using. . . . In short, intentions are prior to meaning. . . . The system of meanings belongs to [the speaker], not to something called a language.” Stanley Fish, “The Intentionalist Thesis Once More,” in The Challenge of Originalism, Theories of Constitutional Interpretation, eds. Grant Huscroft and Bradley W. Miller (Cambridge, 2011), 102. 7. Investigations 3rd, 139e (#504). 8. Unless, of course, we have a foreign language problem or encounter something hieroglyphic, in which case we have yet to become acculturated to it. 9. “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.” Investigations 3rd, 107e (#329). 10. “Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground.” Investigations 3rd, 109e (#339). 11. Lars Hertzberg, “How Do Sentences Do It,” working paper written in ­January, 11, 2007, http://web.abo.f/fak/hf/flosof/Staff/lhertzbe/Text/sentences.pdf, 19 (accessed June 12, 2016). The paper is about the ridiculous distinction between semantics and pragmatics. See Problem 9.4. 12. “It is no such marvel that a word uttered in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a particular meaning in itself.” Investigations 3rd, 215e.

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13. The remarks below are taken from Last Writings. The references are to pagination. Even if I were now to hear everything that he is saying to himself, I would know as little what his words were referring to as if I read one sentence in the middle of a story. Even if I knew everything now going on within him, I still wouldn’t know, for example, to whom the names and images in his thoughts related (29e). . . . It’s only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me, and in those cases it is not hidden because it is inner (33e). . . . Indeed, often, I can describe his inner, as I perceive it, but not his outer (62e). . . . The “inner” is a delusion. That is: the whole complex of ideas alluded to by this word is like a pained curtain drawn in front of the scene of the actual word use (84e). . . . One could even say: The uncertainty about the inner is an uncertainty about something outer (88e).

14. Russell, 138. 15. This example comes from Bertrand Russell: “Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.” An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (Routledge, 2013), 170. One should note that this sentence, once you break it down, merely says something like this: “the state of having four members can encourage putting things off.” That’s hardly meaningless. 16. The original example was “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It came from Noam Chomsky’s 1957 Syntactic Structures (Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 15. One interesting way to invent a context for this sentence came from a contestant at Standford University in 1985, C.M. Street, who used the picture of a winter onion that had yet to blossom into a fowering bulb. The contestant wrote, “These dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin . . . are labouring . . . to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring fowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” The entry is replicated here: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-457.html#2 (accessed June 12, 2016). 17. Environmentalism offers another picture: green energy, green jobs, green peace. “These green ideas sleep furiously in American culture, where they are poised in the next decade to erupt and transform the energy sector” (makes sense). 18. Investigations 3rd, 215e. 19. Investigations 3rd, 214e. 20. Wittgenstein writes: “A new-born child has no teeth.”—“A goose has no teeth.”—“A rose has no teeth.”—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its beak. Nor, of course, has it any in its wings; but that’s not what anyone means when he says it has no teeth.—Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This is not be absurd, because one wouldn’t have any idea in advance, where to look for teeth in a rose. Psychology I, 24–25e (#117).

See also, Investigations 3rd, 221–22e. 21. Wittgenstein writes: Given the two ideas “fat” and “lean,” would you be rather inclined to say that Wednesday was fat and Tuesday lean, or vice versa? (I incline decisively toward the former). Now

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22. “If I say ‘For me the vowel in e is yellow’ I do not mean: ‘yellow’ in a metaphorical sense,—for I could not express what I want to say in any other way than by means of the idea ‘yellow’.” Investigations 3rd, 216e. 23. Investigations 3rd, 140e (#511). 24. Investigations 3rd, 215e. 25. Mad Libs is a humorous game for children wherein words are selected at random to create funny meanings. A similar idea can be found at this website: http:// writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm (accessed June 12, 2012). 26. I covered insincere tasks in Problem 6.4. 27. Duty of Genius, 260–61. The gesture, called a chin fick, has various meanings, from “I could care less” to something more aggressive (“Fuck off!”). I’m emphasizing a slightly different gesture in this paragraph to make my point. 28. This is my own interpretation, but see Malcolm, 69. And I don’t think it makes a difference whether the story involved “logical form” or “grammar,” as Wittgenstein may have spoken of the incident either way. Problem 9.4 shows that a statement can have the logical form of a proposition, yet not involve such grammar (task-function). And it also can invoke real meaning, with the picture of the proposition having nothing to do with it. This was the ultimate paradox that struck Wittgenstein. The form was of an empirical state of affairs, yet the grammar was not—and the picture of the form was irrelevant. And yet, all of this was sayable in Tractarian terms, meaning it was not “outerwordly.” 29. Duty of Genius, 261; Malcolm, 15–16; and Investigations 3rd, vi (Preface). 30. Paul Herbert Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard, 1989), 22–40 (Chapter 2). Grice’s real example is the sentence, “He took out his key and opened the door.” Grice noted how the mind is led to believe that the person opened the door with the key—and yet he may not have (it could have been unlocked). Grice then reasoned that two things must exist: what the sentence (alone) says and what is implicated in the context. Griceans call the former semantics and the latter pragmatics (“implicatures”). 31. “In all of these examples, according to Grice, information is communicated, not by the semantics of the sentences alone, but by the pragmatic process he calls conversational implicature.” OLP, 5. 32. See Sally Parker-Ryan’s encyclopedia entry: “Hence the Gricean has a problem in accounting for a semantic-pragmatic distinction in the content of speech-acts.” OLP, 5. 33. Grammar, 43. 34. “An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If . . . chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question.” Investigations 3rd, 108e (#337).

Chapter 10

Definition and False Dispute

In this chapter, I want to show something important about defnitions and false disputes. My thesis is as follows. Disagreements about ordinary words are neither predicated upon “defnitions” nor something factual. Rather, they stem from the way that the intellect processes these words in the language game. This means that appeals to “standard defnitions,” and even in some cases, to facts and science, are completely misplaced. These are false problems wherein people talk past themselves. And they do so because they lack the perspicuity needed to see this. FAMILY RESEMBLANCE Problem 10.1. A young child wanders into the room. She sits on a living-room beanbag and says, “My chair!” What other items will the child successfully call “chair”?

The opening salvo that Wittgenstein uses in Philosophical Investigations is a quote from Saint Augustine that mistakenly assumes all nouns to be objectname associations.1 But in Problem 10.1, the child isn’t saying the name of something; she is making an association. She sees that the beanbag has a suffcient similarity to the chair in the social context. As I write this book, for example, the item in fgure 10.2(A) is successfully being called a “chair,” not just by children, but by merchants and their consumers:2 (I ask that my reader examine the fgure). Famous linguist Steven Pinker believes that this phenomenon is caused by associative memory, which functions as a “pattern associator.”3 We group things into social clusters.4 This helps us deal with repetition in 97

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our environment.5 It keeps our experiences from becoming arbitrary. Consider how a computer organizes its “experiences”—everything is in serial, alphabetical, or numerical bundles. If we did this, our whole form of life would seem different. So, the child is making a social association. The task-function is STEREOTYPE(chair). Notice how this changes the concept of a task-function slightly compared to other parts of the book. In the next chapter, for example, I will state that this same behavior—saying, “That’s a chair”—has the task-function: SAY(object).6 The difference is that, right now, I am not concerned with scripting a social behavior (talking). Instead, I’m concerned with how an association (cluster) is being cognitively realized. Perhaps this is the best way to say it: the full task-function for the child—the complete set of intellectual steps—is STEREOTYPE(chair); SAY(object).7

Figure 10.1  Conceptualizing Social Clusters. Source: Author.

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What is critical to understand about social clusters is that no bright line shows which items count and which do not. This is what allows one to say that a throne is a “chair” or that pat-a-cake is a “game.” Figure 10.1(A) provides a conceptualization:8 Wittgenstein called this phenomenon “family resemblance.”9 It was so called because members of the social cluster bear some similarity to one another not unlike the way a family does. Notice, for example, how the pictures of the Kennedys in fgure 10.2(C) resemble one another in a manner not unlike the way the “chair family” does. Wittgenstein writes, “The members . . . have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap.”10

Figure 10.2  Examples of Family Resemblance. Source: Image A is by Powell®, reproduced with permission; and Image C, the photo of the Kennedys, provided by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. All other images are from Adobe Stock.

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FALSE DISAGREEMENTS Reasoning with family resemblance terms can be confusing. There are two basic issues. The frst is the failure to see what the intellect is doing to the cluster (perspicuity). And the second is the failure to see whether this behavior is helpful (therapy). In what follows next, I will cover situations that involve fve different cognitive tasks. For each, I not only claim that no factual dispute exists, but that the matter has nothing to do with “differing defnitions,” as is commonly thought. All that is happening is that two people are parsing a social cluster in alternate ways. Problem 10.2. A young boy on a boat sees a dolphin for the frst time. He gets a great look at it and says, “What an interesting-looking fsh!” The boat captain interjects, “It’s a mammal.” Who is right?

The standard reply is to say one of two things: either the boy is factually wrong, or he is using “nonstandard defnitions.” Both of these views are wrong. The boy’s intellect is simply stereotyping “fsh.” He’s merely saying that the animal resembles things in his mind that are socially called “fsh”—and that this one looks interesting to him. The task-function is STEREOTYPE(fsh), which is the brain task that creates family resemblance. But is he wrong? The answer is that he cannot be wrong because the grammar will not permit it. Dolphins do look “fshy” to the untrained eye. The boy merely speaks with an impressionistic vernacular. “But isn’t he scientifcally wrong?”—No, he is not. He has offered no revelation in the biological sciences upon which a thesis could be given any sort of trial. He isn’t saying whether the animal breathes air, nurses its young, or has warm blood—because he knows of no such thing. Nor is he offering a new taxonomical program. He merely speaks of the animal using an impressionistic brain task that produces a lay vernacular. OLP scholars seem to think that the boy is guilty of using a “non-standard use.”11 Sally Parker-Ryan takes the position that an OLP scholar could only see this as “ordinary language” if there was a recognized discourse where dolphins are spoken of as fsh. Otherwise, she claims the boy is misusing language. And in a very interesting passage, she even suggests that OLP has a condition for when lay people can speak differently from scientists. They can only do so if they are talking about different things12—such as “empty space,” which means something different in physics than it does ordinarily. My point is quite simple. OLP is being prescriptive, and Wittgensteinians could never agree to that. The mistake is to think that the scientists are not themselves talking. For they merely offer technical conceptions—they lay down no vernacular

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laws. What the boy is doing is perfectly intelligible and is the very same brain task the child uses in Problem 10.1. If there was a science of chairs, there would be a technical use there, too. We therefore cannot say that an impressionistic vernacular is inherently wrong—a child’s sense of “fsh” entering the lexicon doesn’t hurt anything. And we could never tell him to suppress the natural way the intellect works—“Stop doing that with your brain when you see this animal!”—because there is no moral opprobrium requiring thought police. Of course, we could offer more information—the boy may want to speak differently after knowing more. But what we cannot do is correct him, because we have no warrant to do so. This is where the boat captain makes his mistake. He points to social authority for something he falsely thinks is in issue. His comment should have only amounted to extra social information, the same as if he had said, “They eat plankton.” And so both talk past themselves, like one who misperceives a smile to be firtation. Wittgenstein writes, “In a conversation: One person throws a ball; the other does not know: whether he is supposed to throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the ground, or pick it up and put it in his pocket, etc.”13 Problem 10.3. One day, when shopping for dogs, a father and a daughter encounter the specimens in fgure 10.2(B). The daughter says, “Daddy, which of the dogs should we adopt?” He says back to her, “Goodness, the ratty-looking ones on the left aren’t the ‘real dogs.’” While not expressing a preference for which to adopt, the daughter claims the “ratty-looking ones” are real dogs. Who is right?

A common mistake is to say that the father is wrong, because, according to canine science, the creatures on the left in fgure 10.2(B) are real dogs. Why is this a mistake? Because the father isn’t offering a revelation in canine science. He’s not contradicting any factual assertion scientists make. And neither does he harbor a non-standard defnition. Rather, he is merely saying that his favorite dogs are social exemplars. It’s the same vernacular where one says of a Cuban cigar, “Now that’s a cigar!” The person doesn’t mean that the non-Cubans are not “cigars”; he means only that archetypes really capture the essence of the idea (hit the spot). Or like one who says, “Now there is a real man”—she doesn’t mean that the others are not “men”; she means that stereotypical ones are quintessential to her. But what task-function is involved? This is a bit tricky. Although the father is offering a social stereotype in the world of dogs—he has a bona fde dog prejudice—that is not what his intellect is doing to the cluster. If he were doing that, all cluster members would become included, not thrown out,

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because that is the task that creates the cluster. Instead, the father is focusing his mind’s eye upon dominant specimens, forcing other members to fade into the background. See the depiction in fgure 10.1(C). The task-function is EXEMPLIFY(dog). This is what creates the quintessential vernacular. What about the daughter? She doesn’t seem to be saying that the disfavored specimens resemble dogs, like the boy and the dolphin in Problem 10.2. She’s probably just pointing to what she was taught in school: TELL(social authority). So she is like the boat captain who cannot see that the issue in fact has nothing to do with social authorities (dictionaries or science). They both talk past themselves. Problem 10.4. Suppose that I walk into a store that sells only chairs. I say to the owner, who is an expert, “I want to buy this chair” (pointing to fgure 10.2(A)). He replies, “That’s not a chair; it’s a lounger.” Who is correct?

The owner is an expert in chairs. So he has a practical problem that you and I do not: he has to differentiate his inventory. Because he deals with chairs over and over again (repetition), he has developed a professional “eye” for the subject—something that has to do with connoisseurship (chapter 14). And this means he speaks with the lexicon of a chair afcionado. He can regularly tell you with an air of confdence: (a) “That’s not a chair; that’s a seat.” (b) “That’s not a chair; that’s a stool.” (c) “That’s not a chair; that’s a throne.” (d) “That’s not a chair; that’s a lounger.” But what task is his intellect using? He is not using a rule for classifcation (e.g., “All chairs have legs”). Not only would this edict not classify properly, but it isn’t the way he is “seeing connections.” Rather, the owner is showing a profciency for subfamily resemblance. For just as the Kennedys have family resemblance, so too do Edward Kennedy’s children resemble his portion of the lineage slightly distinctly, in their own way. It requires subtlety to see this degree of resemblance. To develop this eye, you need requisite experience or training (chapter 14). The extent of this nuance allows you to curate each subject not unlike a master of paintings who sees subtle variety among specimens even of the same genre. The intellectual task therefore involves differentiating by subfamily, as shown in fgure 10.1(B). The task-function that I imagine is CURATE(chair). And so, here we are again. We have two different senses of talking—different vernaculars—caused by the person’s grammar. There is no factual disagreement and no issue of defnitions. Rather, we merely have

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different uses. And this means simply that different intellectual behaviors are being deployed upon a social cluster. One offers a lay or simple sense— STEREOTYPE(chair)—while the other offers an aesthetical grammar: CURATE(chair). Let’s move on now to consider an important question: is there ever a wrong way to speak about family resemblance? BOUNDARY AND PURPOSE When people speak differently about social clusters, an important question must be asked: is the behavior they exhibit helpful to the context? The answer will be based upon the sort of work needed for the problem at hand. In the prior examples, vernacular preferences were socially functional—bona fde communication could occur. But for some situations—particularly, expertise—we often need to do more than just communicate. We have to solve different sorts of problems and accomplish specifc kinds of labor. And this means we may need to parent the cognitive task that the person has summoned for the problem at hand, which means we must approve or disprove of the chosen brain behavior. Problem 10.5. The following disagreement occurs between a professor of American political thought and a conservative A.M. talk radio host. The host says that Democrats who have advocated for big government programs, like national health insurance and high taxes on the wealthy, are “socialist.” In reply, the professor disagrees. Those Democrats have merely been “liberal”: they never advocated for total government spending in the US to be above 50% of GDP. “Socialism,” the professor says, “does not occur until the government controls more than half of the private sector.” Who is right?

There is something in language that we call a sharp boundary. This device draws a clear line through all the members of a social cluster so that some are on one side while the rest are on the other. Think of it as an actual fence, as depicted in fgure 10.1(D). The task-function that I imagine is: IMPOSE(rule). Both Wittgenstein and Steven Pinker14 agree that people routinely draw these sorts of boundaries. Pinker believes that boundaries come from “abstract, combinatorial reasoning”15 that have practical use—they facilitate deductive, computational, logical, and mathematical tasks. But Pinker notes something rather interesting that Wittgenstein, writing almost 70 years earlier, agreed with.16 “When we use a system of rules, we have to turn off the family resemblance system17 . . . [so that] a grandmother doesn’t have to be grandmotherly nor a president presidential.”18 So we have two choices: leave it as a cluster or mow a line through it.

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In Problem 10.5 the public policies that are of concern are, roughly, progressive taxation, income redistribution, social “safety net” programs19 and the regulatory state.20 What we are talking about, therefore, is a policy set. Because countries vary in the degree to which they indulge this policy set, it is possible to conceptualize relative commitments on a spectrum in onedimensional space, as depicted in fgure 10.2(D). If we do this, like scholars of politics sometimes do, the intellectual task is: CURATE(policy set). Like the chair afcionado in Problem 10.4, relative differences (nuances) for each cluster member are attenuated by the “trained eye.” But note that the professor in Problem 10.4 has gone further than this. He has not merely conceptually differentiated—he has proposed a specifc cut point. He has stated a rule for socialism. No country can be socialist until the government controls at least half of the economy. The professor therefore has imposed a bright line, which, as I have said, is a sharp boundary. So who is right in Problem 10.5? What I have been arguing all along is that we cannot understand “right” until we frst understand what each person is doing with their intellect in the speech act. The radio host is speaking impressionistically toward the policy set and has given the cluster a name. The taskfunction is: STEREOTYPE(policy set); SAY(label). And so, we must now reformulate the issue. Is it helpful to use a child’s intellectual task in this discourse? This is the central thing that a Wittgensteinian would want to point him to. We would want to show that his lexicon has left no apparent words for the degree of the thing being objected to. We would try to show him that this vernacular cannot really say anything remarkable in political philosophy, other than registering a kind of protestation for the policies in question. And perhaps that is what his language game really is: a protestation. And if this means that his assertion is insincere or controlled in this respect, we would use our crude reductionism (Problem 6.4) to say that his focal task is, in truth, something like this: CONDEMN(policy set). But this is only true if his mindset is not immediately reachable for the proposition at hand.21 Of course, it is also true that more is happening here than just how he behaves toward the cluster. The host is trying to force a picture onto this social context—a behavior I discuss in chapter 13. Right now, I am only concerned with what he is doing cognitively to the cluster and whether it helps, not with the picture he has in his mind’s eye. As I stated in chapter 9, our therapy sometimes has different targets. So what is the conclusion? First, vernaculars exist not for themselves, but for the kinds of communicative work that need performed. Biologists cannot treat dolphins as fsh, despite the fact that STEREOTYPE(fsh) is intelligible. Neither science nor biology could function well with a child’s vernacular. Secondly, we have learned, once again, that meaning is use. So, if a person

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doesn’t want to use a scientifc lexicon even when talking about the very same things that science does, the only issue is whether: (a) the speech act is understood; and (b) the intellectual task is helpful in the social context. To this end, I want to briefy mention a short anecdote. I recently attended a training conference for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). I learned something interesting. In jurisdictions where it is illegal for faculty to unionize, they form what is called an “advocacy chapter.” This entity does everything a union normally does: it collects dues, bargains collectively, protects academic freedom, and so on. But it is not recognized in labor law or by the National Labor Relations Board. You therefore cannot seek government protection if a university bargains in bad faith. Yet, there are examples of advocacy chapters being just as effective as a “formal unions” (Fairfeld University). And so, we have a family resemblance issue for what a “union” is. Here’s my point. People not in the AAUP might productively speak of the advocacy chapter being a union—it’s done by lay folks all of the time. The task-function would be STEREOTYPE(union). But within the AAUP itself, a sharp boundary is always policed. “Advocacy chapters are not unions,” they say to you (over and over). Quite simply, this is a very important point when you attend a training conference where you are learning the mechanics of each way to organize. And this, I think, explains why and when sharp boundaries are best used. Specialized publics simply have special speaking needs that lay people may not. And so the boundary does important work for them. And this is what the issue is in Problem 10.5 Problem 10.6. What is happening to the social cluster in this argument: “All science is an attempt to establish statements concerning patterns in empirical states of affairs.22 Therefore, political science is ‘science.’”

The person is not imposing a sharp boundary because no fence or cut point is imposed through the cluster. Instead, the person is offering an umbrella for the whole family. It would be like saying that a pamphlet is a book, and then adding, “Books are bound pages that fip to the next side when you turn them.” This is called a reference phrase. All that it does is provide a rough description for an entire social cluster. The task-function is STEREOTYPE(science); REFERENCE(cluster). So, it is the stereotype script that forms the cluster in the frst place, clumping together specimens that have a social resemblance. That is how political science becomes included. And then, the speaker simply points to this cluster with the phrase. No doubt the person who makes this argument is not aware that only such a thing has occurred. Because, a person often makes an argument like this

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under the impression that something more remarkable has been said. It usually comes to us under the confusion that a defnition has been given, and that the same constitutes some sort of authority (Problem 5.5). But, in truth, all that exists is a child’s brain task which then points to the social assemblage (cluster) under the confusion that an authority has licensed something. What the person really wants to say is that we should regard political science as science—that we should see it in a new sort of light. This is called an aspect sight (seeing as), which is covered in chapter 13. Until then, we must be content to say that such aesthetical visions of “political science” could never come to us through a fat. In other words, the matter would need its own legs. NOTES 1. The quote reads: When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. . . . Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signifed; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. Investigations 3rd, 2e (#1).

2. Marketed by a company called Powell, the item’s offcial name is the Anywhere Lounger Bean Bag. It is listed by various merchants as a beanbag chair. Google it and look at the images. 3. Words & Rules, 278. 4. He writes, “We live in a lawful world in which traits tend to hang together in the same way in many objects. . . . Our mental categories are useful because they refect the lawfulness of the world” Words & Rules, 282. 5. He writes: We cannot bring every object home and put it under a microscope or send tissue samples out for lab testing. We have to observe a few traits that the object wears on its sleeve and infer the traits that we cannot see directly. Good categories let us do that. If Tweety has feathers and a beak, Tweety is a bird; if Tweety is a bird, Tweety is warm-blooded, can fy, and has hollow bones. Bad categories do not: If we knew only that Tweety’s name begins with a “T,” nothing of interest would follow. Words & Rules, 281–82.

6. See Problem 12.4. 7. I should like to call this a “script.” A person’s script would be the complete set of executables in play in any act of behavior. 8. This is a simplifed cluster; many more members exist. One is advised to Google “chair” and check the images to see what qualifes these days. 9. “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.” Investigations 3rd, 32e (#67).

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10. Blue & Brown, 17. 11. “The way to understand what is meant by the ‘ordinary use of language’ is to hold it in contrast, not with ‘technical’ use, but with ‘non-standard’ or ‘non-ordinary’ use.” OLP, I, Introduction. 12. “The lay use of the term is perfectly adequate for the uses it is put to, and the meaning of the term in science would not allow speakers to express what they mean in these other contexts.” OLP, 1. 13. Culture & Value, 1948, 74e. 14. Pinker writes: People can learn categories with clean defnitions, crisp edges . . . such as “odd number.” They can learn that a dolphin is not a fsh, though it has a strong family resemblance to the fshes, and that a seahorse is a fsh, though it looks more like a little horse. They can understand that Tina Turner is a grandmother, though she lacks all the usual traits, and that my childless great-aunt Bella was not a grandmother, though she had gray hair and made a mean chicken soup. Though people refer to women in their third trimester as “very pregnant,” they also understand what it means when parents say to their daughters, “You can’t be just a little bit pregnant.” Words & Rules, 274.

15. Pinker says of sharp boundary words: they “are part of a system of interlocking rules that churn out handy deductions or computations”; they are “the product of their own rule systems”; they “allow you to deduce the unobservable”; they “[are] combinatorial and recursive”; and they “allow us to reason about an unlimited range of cases.” Words & Rules, 284–85. 16. Wittgenstein writes in Investigations 3rd ed.: For I can give the concept “number” rigid limits in this way, that is, use the word “number” for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we do use the word “game” (#68). . . . To repeat, we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose). No more than it took the defnition: 1 pace = 75 cm. to make the measure of length “one pace” usable (#69).

17. He mentions research subjects who saw the same terms as having sharp or fuzzy boundaries. He writes, “So they must have been capable of turning their fuzziness on and off. Family resemblance categories are real, but so are classical categories; they live side by side in people’s minds, as two ways of construing the world.” Words & Rules, 275. 18. Words & Rules, 285. 19. Examples include workers compensation, unemployment compensation, social security, health insurance, and poverty spending. 20. If government controls more GDP, it is probably regulating more as well. 21. Of course, the line between sincere and insincere is sometimes blurred when people take on complex psychological states. But this only means that there is a contest within them as to which task-functions ultimately “win out.” Our therapy would want to point them exactly to this concern (task confusion). 22. Referring to Freeman Dyson’s essay, “Manchester and Athens” in his Infnite in all Directions (Perennial, 2004), 35.

Chapter 11

Designation and Specimen

This chapter is mostly concerned with uses of language that attempt to isolate a specifc specimen. I will cover rigid nomenclature, proper names, and labels. RIGIDITY There are certain kinds of words that either resist family resemblance altogether or perhaps have very small families. This phenomenon is called rigidity. Technical or scientifc-sounding words can often accomplish this. Consider, for example, hydrogen peroxide. The molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to two oxygen atoms (H2O2). It seems diffcult for either “peroxide” or H2O2 to develop more than one sense in the language game. In fact, the symbolic notation seems invented specifcally for that purpose. Problem 11.1. You are dining with a physicist at a restaurant. You order water to drink, but the waitress brings you a cup of ice. The following dialogue then ensues. Read it and indicate who is right:

You: That’s not what I ordered. Physicist: Yes, it is. You: This isn’t water; it’s ice. Physicist: Ice is water.

Just as in the last chapter, there is no factual dispute here. To see this one must isolate the intellectual task in the acts of speech. When you were presented with an array of drinks on the menu, but said that you only wanted 109

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water, the task was choosing the default liquid: CHOOSE(default).1 This is not unlike a multiple choice question where one picks “none of the above.” The physicist, however, is speaking of the chemical structure of water (H2O). So when he says that “ice is water,” he can only be saying that the molecule is present in the cup. But you have not ordered the molecule; you’ve ordered the requisite liquid. What task-function is the physicist using? He is making a constitutive statement; the chemical structure is what the substance reduces to. The task-function is something like: REFERENCE(atomization). But note that this is only the task-function if he knows of the chemistry of water. Suppose you are dining with a layperson who had only memorized this from high school. If such a person makes the same utterance, the task-function would be TELL(social authority), because the mind’s eye is only pointing to something told by an accredited source. And this is important because Wittgensteinians always stress the kind of connection that is seen for the proposition at hand. The fact is, people who point to social authorities when speaking of “knowledge” only engage in that sort of behavior during such speech acts. And so what a person means (and knows) is manifested in what their intellect is realizing. Problem 11.2. What does “H2O” refer to in fgure 11.1(A)?

This cannot refer to the molecule, because, otherwise, non-drinking water could be in the bottle. This is simply a fun and fashionable way to market this beverage. The chemical notation is being used, essentially, as a nickname. It has become a mere social phrase in popular behavior. And so, if I want to order this beverage, my calling for it by this name would involve the task SAY(label), not REFERENCE(atomization). And this means that “H2O” has developed more than one sense in the language culture (unlike H2O2). It is never the signs and symbols that determine this, but rather the intellectual task in play concerning them. As I have said before, there is no rule here for whether rigid nomenclature becomes socially susceptible to alternate tasking. It is purely a function of the way that people are acculturated in these language games. Problem 11.3. After discovering that your arterial pH is below 7.35, the doctor says “You’ve got acidosis.” What does this mean?

“Acidosis” is a term the medical community uses to describe when blood is too acidic. It is defned as arterial pH below 7.35.2 But you have two possible grammars here: (a) the measurement only; or (b) requisite acidity that is merely evidenced by the measure. In the former, the intellect is doing a rote task (checking the reading). You have acidosis merely because

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Figure 11.1  Images that Concern Rigidity. Source: Image A H2O Basics®, Image B taken by Jim Johnson.

you have the score. In fact, this is all that acidosis actually becomes (having the score). The behavior is clerical. It would be similar to the way the IRS speaks of many of its terms. When people behave toward any term in a way that mentally erases its associated concept, they create an operational defnition. I prefer the word “tautology” here. The behavior is something like: CONFIRM(value); SAY(label). But in the other way of behaving, the number isn’t God—the concept is. You use the number to form a larger picture about the metabolic state. You not only verify the number, but you also verify in your mind’s eye that the standard is correctly serving the larger ideal (too much acid). It would be this task that allows one to say whether the diagnostic value needs adjusted, as medicine has done with high blood pressure. The task-function here is more encompassing: JUDGE(acidity). When we are good enough to judge the rules for something, this is called connoisseurship (chapter 14). It requires a trained eye for the subject. And so, when the doctor tells you that you have acidosis, the question is whether her behavior is a kind of automata—“the reading says”—or is inherently insightful about the idea of metabolic acidity. In the latter scenario, the number becomes sort of like her secretary. Problem 11.4. Assume that a person knows mathematics extremely well and is not mistaken when saying, in complete sincerity, that 8 x 3 = 38. What would be the grammar of this proposition?

If the person insists that 8 x 3 = 38 and has not committed an error in mathematics, then we can be sure that she is doing something other than multiplying.3 Perhaps she is reverse-pairing the two quantities, so that 6 x 1 = 16 and 38 x 45 = 4538. The task-function here would be something like REVERSE-PAIR(items), which is not mathematics. To do math, you must be using “math tasks.” And that means this: the task-function for 8 x 3 is merely just MATH(8 x 3).

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Problem 11.5. A worker for the Social Security Administration says to a coworker, “Claude Pepper is Social Security number 232-45-6934.” What is being referenced, Pepper or the number?

In special circumstances, the use of numerals can be names. I’m thinking of how I sometimes speak of Walter Payton. When I say, “There’s ‘34,’” I am not referencing where Payton is in a numerical sequence; I’m using a nickname that glorifes his jersey. The same is true when I say of Mario Lemieux, “There’s old ‘66.’” But in the ordinary case, the use of numbers is for sequencing. When the Social Security worker tells us of Pepper’s number, he is likely speaking not of Pepper, but of his assignment in a sequence of some kind. And this happens despite the fact that, in English, the syntax places Pepper on the left of the verb and the number on the right. The issue is similar to whether something is either the variable or its content in computer programming. In PHP, for example, the two statements below are different. In the frst, Pepper is the variable, and in the second, it is the content (variables are on the left):   $Pepper = x;  $x = “Pepper”; PROPER NAMES There are two basic features involved in a proper name. If I say “Johnny Cash,” there is: (a) the actual person so named (the bearer); and (b) the social traits associated with him or her.4 With respect to this, two types of language games are common. In one, the bearer is not allowed to separate from his or her traits; in the other, separation is mandatory. If I am asked in ordinary conversation, “Who is Jocelyn Wilson?,” I know I am being asked to reference a specifc person. So I reply, “Oh that’s my daughter; she’s in law school now.” The task I have performed is referencing a bearer through the use of social traits: REFERENCE(Jocelyn). Notice that I am not referencing the traits; I am referencing her—the traits are merely how I point her out. Wittgenstein notes two interesting things about this. The frst is that the social traits that can reference people are not fxed. How Jocelyn is identifed from one speech act to the next involves a grab bag of attributes that can fuctuate not unlike family resemblance (chapters 4 and 5). Sometimes, traits {a b c} might be used while at other times a different combination {a, d} might be used. This is just like a normal family resemblance situation, except that the specimen always stays the same. The bearer and the grab bag of

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traits are stuck with each other—they are not allowed to separate. I call this a bearer-call. In these language games, there is a cluster of social traits, but not a cluster of specimens. That is what makes this use of language unique. The second point Wittgenstein notes is that even the wrong traits can be used in such games. For example, suppose I am asked who the famous person was who died today, and I reply, “John Lennon, the Beatles guitarist and singer for Wings.” The inaccurate trait5 doesn’t matter so long as REFERENCE(John Lennon) is successful in communication. Of course, it does matter if it isn’t successful—that is, if the person thinks that Paul McCartney died. But so long as the right payload is successfully delivered, the inaccurate trait is treated (socially) as a kind of surplusage6 that can be fxed after the fact.7 The reason why false traits are allowed is because the speech act is not actually asserting these traits. Instead, it is simply using them as an instrument to deliver a payload. That is to say, it’s merely inculcating another’s intellect with the right person (turning on lights). A better example can be found with George Washington and the story of the cherry tree. It is a social myth that Washington chopped down the tree and admitted it because he could not tell a lie. Yet, this false fact can be used as an instrument to socially reference him, because this is what the grammar of bearer-calls consists of— referencing him. Problem 11.6. “Jimmy Connors doesn’t seem like ‘Jimmy Connors’ today.” What does the term “Jimmy Connors” refer to in each use?

There are some types of language games where the bearer and his social traits do separate, as Wittgenstein well understood.8 This is such a situation. In problem 11.6, Jimmy Connors the person doesn’t actually get to be Jimmy Connors the social traits. In other words, he is being uncharacteristic.9 This is called a juxtaposition. The task-function is JUXTAPOSE(bearer, traits). Some may ask, “Aren’t we stereotyping Connors—why isn’t that the taskfunction?” Although it is true that Connors is being stereotyped in a sociological sense, that isn’t the way the stereotype script works. We cannot confuse the idea in sociology with the idea in cognitive linguistics.10 The task-function STEREOTYPE() is what allows various specimens to become grouped into a cluster. But we don’t have multiple specimens in this case—there is just one person. So, what we are actually doing as a behavior is juxtaposing the bearer against his traits. This is what the intellectual task is. Problem 11.7. Think of the legendary things associated with the biblical character named Moses (saved the Israelites, gave the Ten Commandments, etc.). Suppose for argument’s sake that these legendary events were fctitious, but that

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a person named “Moses” actually existed for whom the events were fabricated. In this situation, did “Moses” really exist?

The answer depends upon what it means to ask this question. One could speak of it either way. One could say, “Yes, Moses actually existed, but he didn’t do any of those famous things.” Here we speak of the historical Moses. The task-function would be REFERENCE(Moses), and we would then correct his social traits, as we did for George Washington and the cherry tree. Or one could say, “No, there was no ‘Moses’—‘Moses’ was a lie” (note the quotation marks).11 The task-function here is JUXTAPOSE(bearer, traits). So, to answer the question, we must frst select a grammar. And note that this dynamic isn’t limited to famous people. When my daughter isn’t her usual self, I can easily say that in language too. To see other popular examples, I direct my reader to this endnote.12 Problem 11.8. Some believe that Frances Bacon, and not Shakespeare, was the true author of some of the fnest works in the English language, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. If someone was convinced by this evidence and said, “Bacon is ‘Shakespeare’”—who is “Bacon” and who is “Shakespeare” in the sentence?

The term “Bacon” is a bearer-call. But we are also awarding him certain social traits that belong to Shakespeare. And so the task-function is something like: REFERENCE(Bacon); IMPOSE(traits). The notation is slightly different from a juxtaposition because we are not comparing a bearer to his own traits; we are taking those traits and putting them on a new bearer. And so the full task-function would become something like: TELL(news); REFERENCE(Bacon); IMPOSE(traits). Problem 11.9. If Batman moved his operation to a hotel, where would the Batcave be? If Sauron vacates Mordor, is it still “Mordor”? If the Devil leaves Hell, is it still Hell?

Proper names work exactly the same no matter if they concern people or places. So if a bearer-call is being asked for, the location is the space so named. And so Mordor is always this region here: REFERENCE(Mordor). The grammar is no different from saying, “This is Los Angeles.” But if the place and its traits are allowed to separate, one could say, “It just isn’t Mordor any longer without Sauron.” The task-function would become JUXTAPOSE(place, traits). But what does it mean to say that the new place to which the person moves is x? This should be like Bacon being Shakespeare—we are taking

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a new place and giving it another place’s social traits. And so if I say that this hotel is now “the Batcave,” meaning the place where Batman has his operations set up, the task-function is something like REFERENCE(hotel); IMPOSE(traits).13 Having fnished discussing proper names, I now move on to discuss labels. LABELS Problem 11.10. Read the argument below. Is it convincing? Why or why not? Soccer is more deserving of the name “football” because foot-and-ball describes better what transpires on the feld of play. In American football there is very little kicking of the pigskin. The ball advances by running and passing. Thus, the American label has an accuracy problem. Other sports have accurate labels— e.g., baseball, volleyball, basketball, dodgeball, racquetball, skydiving, hang gliding, stickball, horseshoes, handball, etc. Same with these words—keyboard, turf toe, headphones, crosswalk, stoplight, etc. These are all English compounds. An accurate compound for American football would be “tackleball.”14 Therefore we must change the name of this sport. The NFL must become the National Tackleball League. Only soccer should be called “football.”

Etymology tells us that in medieval times the term “football” was used to distinguish when a sport was played without horses.15 Aristocrats usually enjoyed games on horseback, such as polo and jousting. But the peasantry played games without horses, like running around in a feld with a ball. And this class of game was thus called foot-ball. Therefore, this term has an archaic picture, which, if revived today, would render it an accurate compound of sorts—making it not so different from “basketball” after all. So does this solve the issue? I want to suggest that this sort of answer is against everything I stand for in this book. It does not solve the problem; it merely throws sand in our eyes. It feels as though we have been handed a hall pass or a doctor’s note (a social excuse). The real issue, as always, is what the intellect is doing in the speech act. For the person in Problem 11.10 has chosen to read a label when using it. And that’s exactly what the dispute is—are you supposed to read labels? There are numerous examples of where we don’t read the compounds of a name. Parkways are not places to park. A shooting star is actually a meteor. A grapefruit isn’t a grape fruit. Tinfoil is made of aluminum. English horns neither are English in origin nor are horns. And people in need of a tissue often ask for a Kleenex. And this is because the task-function used for labels is most often exceedingly simple: SAY(label). As Steven Pinker writes,

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“In modern English, names are meaningless noises. . . . As with onomatopoeia . . . names are mentally registered as stretches of sound, not canonical roots, and hence do not hook up with roots with the same or similar sounds in memory.”16 But, unfortunately, there are times when we do read a name when using it. Tennis is a good example. I’m a tennis player, and I cannot stand it that general athletic shoes (sneakers) are very often called “tennis shoes.”17 When I walk into a store and ask if it sells tennis shoes, I’m always forced to hand waive: “You know, the ones specifcally made for tennis and not for running and jumping?”18 I then complain to myself that my shoe is more deserving of its name, and when I think this, I read the label as I contemplate. I once encountered a scholarly paper that contained a faux pas. When referencing inhabitants in West Africa on one sole occasion, the author used the term “African Americans.” The sense of the term obviously meant “black,” and the author probably thought it was a respectful way to communicate that. Yet, to others, a dissonance occurred: people in West Africa are not “Americans.” This is similar to those who call North American aboriginal or indigenous peoples “Indians”—a raging historical inaccuracy. And this doesn’t just happen with people. Turkeys are not actually from Turkey; they are fowl from North America that were initially sold through Turkish ports when frst appearing in Europe, and thus became so named.19 Note that this is exactly the issue at the heart of the controversy concerning the name of the Washington Redskins. If you read the compounds when saying the name, the mind hears “the red skins.”20 But if you do not read the compounds, the matter does not become the sum of its parts. It’s just a noise for something. It would not be unlike saying that a classroom had “a green blackboard,” which is said quite easily. This reminds me of a newspaper story in North Carolina where the headline spoke of the popular “Batcave” in the state, when it meant only a bat cave. If you saw the sign in fgure 11.1(B), what would you think the city was named after? So here is the point. Sometimes, the mind’s eye reads a label during its use.21 When doing so, the task-function is READ(parts); SAY(label). And if we had a perspicuous attention to this, certain kinds of arguments would become silenced. Because, if someone argued that a label had to be accurate, they would in essence be arguing that labels must be read when used. But this isn’t true: sounds don’t need to be read to be successful. In fact, that is the way labels work most of the time as a communicative phenomenon. And so it would be quite curious to argue for the regimentation of the mind against its natural inclination. Such a thing would seem authoritarian: “don’t mentally process this way.” But does this answer work well for the Washington Redskins? It is certainly true that Redskins fans no more read the label of their team than Reds

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or Browns fans do. And that if these labels were read when used, one could easily imagine a social arrangement where offense occurred.22 But the other side of the argument is also revealing. Are not Redskins fans telling opponents of their moniker that they should not read the label? The diffculty here is that memories of the past may cause one to automatically hear the word parts.23 Perception might become attenuated. And thus it becomes diffcult to say that in such situations people must internally police this impulse, for this seems to be as callous as the opposite was authoritarian. And so this particular issue is less an argument about whether labels have to be read (as an edict) and more of an argument about social propriety. “But then, have we solved anything?”—Who said anything about solving? We have obtained clarity. We now know exactly what kind of issue this is. And it was not etymology that provided our answer—it was grammar. That is the point I am making, for we now can see perfectly well what happens if someone objects to a label purely on the grounds of accuracy. Wittgenstein and the new method of inquiry is what provides our resolution: Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turnings, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points.24

NOTES 1. Why isn’t the task-function SAY(label)? Because you are not being asked what something is called. If you were dining with a Spanish-speaking person, and she asked, “What is the word for aqua?,” and you replied, “water,” the task-function would be to say the label. 2. See generally, Barbara L. Bullock, Pathophysiology (Lippincott, 1996), 219; and Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis (accessed June 12, 2016). 3. “A proof in mathematics does not establish the truth of a conclusion; it fxes, rather, the meaning of certain signs. . . . [M]athematical propositions are grammatical. To deny, for example, that two plus two equal four is not to disagree with a widely held view about a matter of fact; it is to show ignorance of the meanings of the terms involved.” Duty of Genius, 418. Therefore, 8 x 3 = 24 is not a “truth,” it is evidence that we have all learned the right behavior (multiplication). 4. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein writes about these two separate things: “[We confuse] the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N.N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies” (#40, 20e); and “In a sense, however, this man is surely what corresponds to his name. But he is destructible, and his name does not lose its meaning when the bearer is destroyed” (#55, 27e).

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5. Lennon didn’t sing for Wings; McCartney did. 6. Wittgenstein writes: Consider another case. When I say “N is dead,” then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name “N:” I believe that a human being has lived, whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, who (2) looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name “N” in social life.—Asked what I understand by “N,” I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my defnition of “N” would perhaps be “the man of whom all this is true.”— But if some point now proves false?—Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition “N is dead” false—even if it is only something which strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental?—If I had given a defnition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it.’ . . . And this can be expressed like this: I use the name “N” without a fxed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands upon four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles). Investigations 3rd, 36–37e (#79).

7. This is analogous to a convention in business law. In some circumstances the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) allows the terms of contracts between merchants to change after a contract is already formed. This makes capitalism among business entities easier to play. So, just like proper names, if you ship the wrong information, it can be amended upon delivery, so long as the shipment does the job. 8. He writes: We said that the sentence “Excalibur has a sharp blade” made sense even when Excalibur was broken in pieces. Now this is so because in this language-game a name is also used in the absence of its bearer. But we can imagine a language-game with names (that is, with signs which we should certainly include among names) in which they are used only in the presence of the bearer; and so could always be replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and the gesture of pointing. Investigations 3rd, 21e (#44).

9. Perhaps he is not giving 100 percent. Maybe he is hitting with topspin and a western grip. 10. See references to Pinker and “pattern association” in Problem 10.1. 11. Note how this language game transforms form and function. Moses is in the right format (the bearer so-called), but not the right function (he’s ordinary). We can invent a language game that reverses this. Suppose we discover proof that the universe was created by Mother Nature instead of God. And suppose upon learning this one exclaims, “Mother Nature is ‘God!’” The idea here is that God is what God does. This example has “God” performing the right function (creation) but not in the proper format (wrong bearer). 12. Similar games can be played with Jack the Ripper, Messy Marvin, or Denice the Menace. In each case, social traits are so popular that the bearer is named for them. Can Denice be who he is without being a menace? It depends upon the grammar of our question. If a bearer-call is the point, Denice is always this person so named. But if a juxtaposition is the point, he can easily shed his most famous traits. And yet, the name for that set of traits can still live on. 13. What happens if someone disputes that the hotel is the Batcave, and I say in response, “The Batcave is where Batman does all of his work.” The task-function here seems to be IMPOSE(rule). See Problem 10.5.

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14. Rugby doesn’t work (in theory) because that is the name of the school where “tackleball” originated, not a picture of its behavior. At least that is true if someone knows this. Otherwise, perhaps one could assume that “rugby” is a foreign word that is like “rough ball.” 15. Bill Murray, The World’s Game: A History of Soccer (University of Illinois Press, 1998), 2. 16. Words & Rules, 155–56. 17. See Dale Coye, “The Sneakers/Tennis Shoes Boundary,” American Speech 61, no. 4 (Winter, 1986): 366–69. 18. Tennis shoes have soles that are tough but fat. If the sole is not level, as in the case of shoes made for running and quickly stopping, the edgy or mountainous protrusions cause scuff marks on the court. Also, tennis requires lateral movement more than support for jumping and launching forward. Clay court shoes are, I think, worse in this respect. 19. See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=turkey (accessed June 20, 2016). One could easily imagine a hypothetical situation where people from Turkey took offense to this. Think of what it would be like if cows were called “Americans.” 20. This is the effect when you buy red skin potatoes. The two words stress the skin. If they were called Redskin potatoes, the matter becomes more blurry. One might think it a surname. Just like Wilson may have originated in medieval times as the son of Wil, so might this be Red’s kin. Or perhaps Mr. Redskin invented a new way to grow potatoes, and they named it after him. Or some might think it affliated with the football team (Redskins’ potatoes). 21. This discussion is related to one in cognitive linguistics about how the brain processes morphemes. Consider the word unlockable. It has two morphemes attached to the root: un- and —able. Each performs a logical operation: un- means “not or opposite”; —able means possible. Depending upon the order of operations, “unlockable” might mean something verb-possible or adjective-opposite. That is, it might mean an item impossible to secure (un + lockable) or an already-secured item capable of being opened (unlock + able). So, if the locks are broken on your car, the doors are unlockable, meaning anyone can get in. But if you are given the combination to a safe, it now becomes unlockable, because only you can open it. See Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams, Content Words and Function Words, 9th ed., (Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 95–96. 22. It is true that the Cleveland football team was named after its owner, Paul Brown. But it is also true that the surname Brown originally referred to complexion and hair. At some point it became the fourth popular name for African Americans. Notable fgures include James Brown, Ron Brown, Jim Brown, and so on. I want to suggest that the question of whether the Cleveland Browns football team has an objectionable name would seem to be based on two social phenomena: (a) whether people begin to read the name when saying it; and (b) whether this picture then causes a social concern (see chapter 13). 23. And the issue here is that certain pictures comes to mind. See chapters 7 and 13. 24. Culture & Value, 1931, 18e.

Chapter 12

Conceptual Investigation

Philosophers have historically asked “wonderment questions,” such as what is knowledge, what is law, what is ethics, what is . . . justice, science, democracy, thought, time, beauty, “the good,” reality, truth, and so on. These questions were at times asked with an attitude of bewilderment, and sometimes perfect defnitions, universals, rules, essences, or formulas were sought.1 After Wittgenstein, this behavior becomes inherently problematic. Wonderment questions can only mean one of two things. Either there is a foreign language problem, where the English label in question has never been learned—which is not a philosophical problem (and can thus be set aside). Or there is a need for a social reconstruction. This is where we investigate the traits that belong to the word in the language games of concern to us. This is our new approach to conceptualizing. The topic I have chosen to demonstrate this comes from the feld of epistemology, which is constantly asking, “What is knowledge?” If Wittgensteinians populated this feld, countless of these kinds of discussions would cease. And what is said here will be applicable to other disputes that dwell upon the meaning of any ordinary word. It will have the effect of bringing closure to what otherwise had encouraged perpetual dispute. As Wittgenstein said, “I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled.”2 Problem 12.1. Assume that this statement is both true and has suffcient warrant: “I couldn’t see it before, but now I fnally know how to win the game.” What set of traits is implicated by the word “know”?

We begin with a conception of a dominant specimen, much like in chapter 5 with “bachelor.” The person in Problem 12.1 begins in a situation 121

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of doubt, not knowing how to win. She then learns, with the solution being accurate and her reasons sound. And there are two separate tests that can be applied to her claim, after the fact. We are able to say that (a) it was true that she could win; and (b) her reasons for believing so were also suffcient. And from all of this, the following fve traits emerge, which are also depicted in fgure 12.1(A): (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Doubt Removed. Rivals defeated; Truth. The discovery was true; Belief. She thought it so; Grounded. She had good grounds; and Validated. Social authority agrees with her grounds.

And now I shall begin the process of messing with (substituting out) these traits for the instrumental purpose of mapping various language games that use the word “knowledge.” To begin that process, consider the next problem: Problem 12.2. Someone asks you what time it is. You look at the clock in ­ fgure 12.1(B) and say, “It’s eleven.” Unbeknownst to you, the clock is broken. It stopped working last night after you went to bed. However, the real time actually is eleven o’clock, which means that your answer is correct. Did you really know what time it was?

Figure 12.1  Conceptions of Knowledge. Source: Adobe Stock.

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Problem 12.2 concerns something that philosophers call “lucky knowledge.”3 We do not have a paradigm or perfect case because the clock is broken. So perhaps we shall say that you really didn’t know the time. This is because we cannot validate the grounds of your claim, after the fact. We are like offcials looking at an instant replay. Our task-function is something like: VALIDATE(reasons). With this behavior, we stress that it is not good enough for your answer to have been both accurate and based the usual authority. We are saying that you simply got lucky, and this cannot count. But suppose someone took the position that the accident created knowledge.4 Some uses of “know,” after all, involve stating the truths of accredited authority only. This is all that knowing actually is in some contexts: SHOW(social authority). If this were a game show or an exam, for example, credit would have to be given for this sort of answer. Students are always hoping for dumb luck on exams. The issue is whether we stress your merit in the situation or simply stress the form of the outcome. This is not unlike a frame shot in tennis, where you win the point with a mishit. If someone asks whether you won, you could reply either way: “Not really; I got lucky,” or, “Yes I won the point.”5 The same is true of a professor who grades a test answer. Suppose the answer is wrong, but it isn’t the student’s fault. The professor might judge the answer “correct” for reasons of general propriety. Here the sense is of something being administratively correct. The task-function is: JUDGE(circumstances). Australian philosopher Stephen Hetherington engages in a line of reasoning that is like this. He wants to look broadly at circumstances. Think of all the things you can do with your “accident” in Problem 12.2. You can correctly plan the day—when to do laundry or start working. You can correctly believe that the lunch hour is coming soon. Perhaps you know the television shows that are on at this time. And look at what supports you. The time probably wasn’t a huge surprise in real life. I mean, you had to know the hour was somewhere in this neighborhood (if your day was routine). Perhaps without the clock, you thought it was somewhere between 10:00 a.m. and noon. So, when you looked, it was only to fnd the precise time.6 The point is that you have so much legitimate stuff associated with the luck that Hetherington wants to say that you actually did know.7 Because I am Wittgensteinian, I would differ in one crucial respect. Hetherington apparently is arguing for a substantive conclusion in the feld of epistemology, whereas I am merely trying to show that these are two different senses of talking. At issue—always—is how to speak of the traits implicated by the social context. And so, if Hetherington says that you “accidentally knew,” using a circumstantial modus, while another person says that you didn’t “technically know,” due to a missing trait, each is speaking of the same thing—the same set of facts. All that is happening is that the sense of

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“know” has become subtly different in each use.8 And so the point becomes the vernacular one prefers for the situation, and why. What ultimately protrudes upon us is an issue of normativity (aesthetics). The reason why Hetherington speaks the way he does is because his attitudes are different. But it is one thing to say we should socially treat the wellbehaved lucky knower as being the same as the paradigm case for reasons of fairness. That is like advocating for a public policy. But it is another thing to say the lucky situation is the paradigm case. Even Hetherington is not saying this.9 So if the traits in context are understood (clear), this is not a dispute about “what knowledge is,” but appears to be a dispute about the demeanor that should dominate the circumstance. Hetherington seems to argue for a kind of civic sensitivity.10 But the point that I now make is quite critical. In normal cases, it is context that controls this, not morals or formalism (rules). We calibrate our behavior based upon the social cue that we locate. When a dog learns the word “treat,” for example—associating the sound with a stimulus—we say he “knows the word.” But if you or I knew this word in exactly the same way—the same realization11—people would speak of a cognitive defciency of some kind (low functioning).12 And so, in real life, the vernacular we choose here is probably not unlike how one chooses a manner of dress for the right occasion. Our logic is one of ft or the hue we want to emphasize. Unless, of course, there is a specifc objective at play, such as a game show, a trial, an exam, and so on—in which case this need may force our lexicon. Thus, I applaud Hetherington’s desire to make his feld less robotic and to challenge our social inclinations. But my point is that only these specifc objectives can be in play, because there is no genuine controversy here about “what knowledge is.” We can speak of the situation either way and know perfectly well the traits that are implicated. EXTENSION Language puzzles involving “knowledge” are seductive because of the nested games one can play with each sole trait in the paradigm case. Truth, for example, has more than one sense. It can be binary in some situations (yes or no) and a matter of degree in others (somewhat true). The same with “justifed” (grounded). This word plays a game of where to draw the line on a spectrum. You could argue how tough the bar should be13—reasonable, high, or perfect (certainty)—and what each of these ideas themselves should mean. And so, these isolated games become encapsulated inside the larger dynamic.

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It is because of this that family resemblance cases easily abound. People speak of some things being known better than others (degrees of knowing), and of partially knowing. Imagine a scholar who believes in a correct mathematical truth for reasons that are half wrong.14 “It is what it is,” as Bishop Butler says15— he merely knows what he does. In fact, we could even imagine a sense of speaking in which critical traits are removed, just as with the word “bachelor.” Problem 12.3. Suppose one had an intuition that her spouse was cheating, which later proves true. And she says to herself, “I knew it! I knew it!”—what does the word “know” mean?

This speaks of intuitive knowledge. It says that, even with the failure to obtain proof, the potential for proving was always there, had the person acted upon the intuition. Wittgenstein writes, “One says ‘I know’ where one can also say ‘I believe’ or ‘I suspect; where one can fnd out.’”16 And note how the logics of this resemblance work. Of all the other intuitions held, this one seemed more pronounced. Perhaps detectives can attest to how some hunches seem better than others. Because there is a sense of coronation among rivals, the matter mimics the way knowledge feels. And this is what allows us to successfully speak of these traits as being a kind of knowledge (See fgure 12.1(C)). And the same for one who might say, “I knew it, deep down, even though I never came to believe it”—what does this mean? It says that social pressure prevented him from subjectively endorsing the matter. Had he only listened to his inner voice, he would have believed the rival account. And so he knew it in a counterfactual sense—the pieces were all right there for him the whole time (fgure 12.1(D)). And so the issue is never “what is knowledge”; it is what traits are in play when the word is used in the social context of concern to us. And if we are not inclined to speak of this set of traits in that way, the issue merely becomes the vernacular we prefer, and why. FORMALITY There is a group of analytic scholars in epistemology who are mostly preoccupied with devising a rule for what “knowledge is.”17 They have been doing this for decades.18 Knowledge, they say, is a belief in a justifed truth not unlike the way a bachelor is an unmarried, adult male. My fear is that this approach suggests that social traits are fxed19—that knowledge isn’t a family resemblance term—or that a sharp boundary must be imposed for its own sake (formalism).20

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Whenever a philosopher proffers a rule—for example, that knowing cannot involve luck21—we have to ask two questions. Do you mean that there are no situations in which people speak this way? Or do you mean only to say what a strict conception entails? And then we must ask a follow-up question: are you prescribing this conception or merely locating its sense?22 Because, even the paradigm case does not involve traits that are prescribed. Whatever traits “strict knowledge” has comes from the language games where people speak in strict senses. So this, too, is a social reconstruction; it is not deduced geometrically. And if epistemologists do legitimately disagree over what a strict conception is, or which should be “offcial,” does this not seem eerily similar to the dispute in Problem 5.2 over whether a perfect bachelor must be eligible for frst-time marriage (only) or any marriage? The fear is that this sort of thing degenerates into an esoteric dispute among prudes. What is important to understand is that the failure of an expert public to agree upon which conception of knowledge (or bachelor) they favor doesn’t mean that either we or they fail to know what knowledge (or bachelor) is, even for dominant specimens. It merely means that traits fuctuate in the way they do, and that some prefer to speak of certain traits in this way. And the only way to resolve this sort of problem when it occurs between experts is to treat it as aesthetical disagreement, a subject I deal with in the next two chapters. For here is the truth of the matter. There are only two types of possible disagreement about any family resemblance term: (a) what traits exist in the speech act of concern to us (factual disagreement); and (b) what to call them (vernacular disagreement). But this doesn’t mean that there are not better ways of speaking. It only means that expert disagreement over (b) takes us into the realm of aesthetical judgments (chapters 13 and 14), which involve either a highly esoteric conception23—about which other connoisseurs may disagree—or a desire to promote different social attitudes (being less snooty). And so, analytic philosophers, despite their formalistic style, can only ever hope to offer an aesthetical critique, though they may not see it this way. And if they do not, we must pose one fnal interlocutory to them: do sharp boundaries require a social need (Problem 10.5)? Because, I cannot fnd an honest comparison in real life where, outside of analytic philosophy, a social organization works to set forth a sharp boundary for the offcial use an ordinary word, for its own sake. For comparison purposes, consider the idea of contraband in the feld of criminal law. When drugs are made illegal in statutes, they are listed by their chemical properties. Marijuana is thus described formalistically. But once “synthetic” marijuana emerged on the scene, a loophole was created. You could in theory spray the insecticide Raid® onto some grass in your

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lawn, roll it into a cigarette, and smoke it—and you would get a buzz. But this isn’t “marijuana” or any other specifcally prohibited substance. And so, lawmakers had to go back to the drawing board and pass new legislation so that no loophole existed. And so now we have “synthetic marijuana” included in the prohibition. What is my point? My point is that the rule must cover all situations. There must never be a faw in what is and is not the case. But all of this happens because of the way that legal language games are played.24 What excuse do the analytic philosophers have? Why do we need a feld to congregate a rule for when someone “knows”?25 Wittgensteinians do not like formalism because, to them, it all seems so pointless. CONTEXT Problem 12.4. A philosopher makes this claim: “I see my hand; I therefore know it is real.” (Assume that his sight is accurate.) How is this different from the paradigm case in Problem 12.1?

This problem arises from an argument advanced by a famous British philosopher, G. E. Moore,26 whom Wittgenstein knew well. The issue at hand (pun) is “context.” In what social situations do we fnd ourselves saying that we know we have a hand? Is there an honest situation of doubt? We could imagine an odd scenario: perhaps a surgeon was about to sever your hand before putting you to sleep. When you awoke and saw it, you said, “I know I still have my hand.” But even here, this seems only to say that there had been no surgery. In the normal case, you don’t need to see your hand to know that you have it.27 You no more need to see this than to see your fngers to know if they are bent.28 And so the problem is that our context is not genuine.29 And this is a huge problem for Wittgensteinians. Lars Herzberg describes it this way: [Our] critique . . . [is] meant to focus our attention on the actual situations in which people use words because they have something to say to one another, rather than, as has been the tradition in philosophy, limit our attention to the objects about which we are speaking. This means that speakers and listeners are placed in the centre of our enquiry. On this reading, the problems of philosophy are to be resolved, not by conceptual analysis in the abstract, but by listening in on the conversations carried out by particular people in particular situations, in order to take note of the role of the words of our language in those contexts.30

And so if doubt is postured here—like in cases where one plays “devil’s advocate”—the intellectual task in the speech act could only ever be that (posturing). And it would not be cured by looking at your hand, because the assertability conditions being used—this game—would allow you to posture

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doubt upon your sight as well.31 The task-function is thus something like: FEIGN(scenario). And if you were not feigning, the situation would be even worse: you would be offering a child’s grammar. This is because no material difference would exist in your thinking task compared to a very young child who, when looking around, says, “That’s a tree,” “That’s a cup,” “I see my hand,” and so on.32 The task-function would be something very simple: SAY(objects).33 Compare this to the children’s game that is played on long trips in a car. You look for license plates to see who can name the most states (“There’s Alabama!”). The task in this game is a bit different because you end up looking for needles in a haystack. But that’s exactly the point. In Problem 12.4, this dynamic is reversed: you look at the haystack and say, “There’s hay!” And that is why this grammar would seem so peculiar in real life. And so, if a child had said “I know I have a hand,” we would only smile. This is because we understand his grammar. But for the philosopher, the issue becomes one of confusion—because we fear he cannot see the task-function he is using. Wittgenstein writes: What I am aiming at is also found in the difference between the casual observation “I know that that’s a . . .” as it might be used in ordinary life, and the same utterance when a philosopher makes it. For when Moore says, “I know that that’s . . .” I want to reply, “You don’t know anything!”—and yet I would not say that to anyone who was speaking without philosophical intention. That is, I feel (rightly?) that these two mean to say something different.34

And perhaps the central issue with the intellectual task that the philosopher has put in play is that, all along, he has assumed it to be “proof.” Now this is quite curious. In real life, when people try to prove something, they take other things—such as existence—as a given. For example, “I know how to drive to Dayton, Ohio” assumes that thoroughfares exist; it doesn’t try to prove that the roads are “real.” Wittgenstein writes, “I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is [real?]. Am I also convinced that the earth exists? . . . The existence of the earth is rather the whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief for me.”35 This means that the philosopher’s behavior is not unlike trying to prove a stipulation, which is pointless. The whole reason why stipulations exist is that they don’t need proved—that’s why they are “stipulations.” Imagine a party to a trial spending time proving something that was stipulated. It would be regarded as both strange and irritating. The only traits that seem in play, therefore, are the ones listed in fgure 12.1(E), which I ask my reader to examine.

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“But I thought meaning was use?”—Quite correct. If there are real contexts where people speak of knowing they have hands, so be it. But in this situation, the philosopher is proving something self-evident by feigning to us, or he is using a child’s grammar. And that is meaning-as-use, because that is what he is doing. Ours is not a thesis in favor of free language. We offer nothing more than tasks, traits, and pictures. And Wittgensteinians also know better than the OLP scholars, who would turn this entire issue into a matter involving the philosopher’s diction, accusing him of a “non-standard use.”36 For this is not what the issue is. The whole problem is the failure to be perspicuous enough to see how the intellect is behaving in the context. The philosopher simply cannot see himself. And when we show him this, it is important to understand that we are not refuting him. What we are doing is no different in kind than saying he has food on his mouth. We are saying he has dressed himself unsightly in the assertion. We point merely to the propriety of his intellectual behavior and nothing more. And even here we are not shaming him. We are only trying to get him to see connections better. NOTES 1. See Duty of Genius, 337. 2. Drury recalls him saying, “Yes, I have reached a real resting place. I know that my method is right. My father was a business man, and I am a business man: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled.” Drury in Recollections, 110. 3. See, for example, the essays by Stephen Hetherington and Duncan Pritchard in Chapter 7 of Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 2nd ed., eds. Matthias Steup, John Turri and Ernest Sosa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 152–64. 4. Hetherington, 76–128. 5. Stephen Hetherington has a similar example. Instead of a fuke shot, he thinks of something exceptionally unorthodox: Think of someone . . . who has learnt how to play quite well the standard shots within some sport, such as cricket. At times, a situation will arise for him where only an abnormal shot would succeed. At such a moment, though, only the exceptional player will even think of playing such a short, let alone be able to play it. Imagine doing exactly that. Imagine others observing this. They may well react by saying, “No, no. That simply wasn’t a cricket shot. I don’t know what that was. . . .” Would such a dismissive reaction show that the shot was not really a cricket shot? No. Manifestly, the shot was abnormal, perhaps requiring exceptional luck for its being successfully performed. But we need not infer from this that it was not “really” a cricket shot. Hetherington, 126.

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6. Look at what this has done to alter the framework for perception. We have humanized the situation, and, as such, are encouraging the reader to root (subtly) for an award of “knowledge.” We have manipulated the aspect-picture (chapter 13). 7. Hetherington, 147 and 219–40. 8. Hetherington specifcally champions the idea that his feld must pay attention to other senses of the word. He writes, “We should be willing to consider the possibility of having to recognize there being more fexibility in how we do and may use the term ‘knowledge’ than contemporary epistemology would have us believe there is.” Hetherington, 150. 9. “Undoubtedly, such beliefs have epistemic faws. At best, they are epistemically ‘second rate’.” Hetherington, 116. 10. I take Hetherington merely to be trying to sensitize his feld. He directly appeals to it being composed of “well intentioned . . . ‘liberal-minded’ epistemological thinkers.” And he then chastises their refusal to accept lucky knowledge by saying they are simply “not ‘liberal’ enough.” Hetherington, 116 (emphasis in original). 11. The picture here is no doubt behavioristic: stimulus and response. The taskfunction would be REACT(stimulus). The difference between us and the dog when hearing “treat” is not that we couldn’t do something similar. It’s that, if we did, it would be that sort of reaction (brutish? childish?). So if a person could only react in that way, we would speak of a problem, not of “knowledge.” Another way of saying it: we expect different task-functions with this word, as well as implicated traits and perhaps pictures. We expect, one wants to say, a form of life. 12. Hetherington, too, speaks of calibrating “knowledge” to the worlds we fnd (forms of life?). He says that getting a little lucky in a fuky world is as much “knowing” as getting everything right in stable world. I would indeed be in sympathy with the idea that assertability logics matter most. Hetherington, 140. 13. Hetherington, 13–14. 14. Hetherington, 91. 15. Bishop Butler’s famous phrase is, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Wittgenstein wanted this as a motto for his later philosophy. 16. Investigations 3rd, 221e. 17. Hetherington refers to this as the “absolute illumination.” Hetherington, xi. 18. Hetherington, x (a restricted discussion of “what knowledge is” that has been “heated, frustrated, and protracted”). 19. This is called the “standard analytic conception.” Hetherington, 1–12. 20. Hetherington, 12 (see note 16 and also the reference to “sharply distinguishing features—some vital marks, some core components”). 21. See Hetherington, 76, note 2. See also, this encyclopedia entry: “An adequate analysis of knowledge must succeed in specifying conditions that rule out all instances of knowledge-destroying epistemic luck,” using “necessary and jointly suffcient conditions.” Mylan Engel Jr., “Epistemic Luck” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/epi-luck/ (accessed August 3, 2016). 22. Hetherington complains about analytic philosophers essentially wanting to codify their “intuitions.” He sums up the feld’s logic like this: “There could not be normal knowledge within such a situation. Therefore, there is no knowledge at all

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there.” Hetherington, 127.If philosophers do give us a prescriptive boundary—that is, one divorced from actual social situations—the question becomes how this would be different from those who say, for example, that marriage is a union between two people of opposite sexes. Both draw a sharp boundary based upon “intuition.” The only difference is that the one uses classicism for the prescription while the other uses formalism. 23. See Hetherington’s suggestion that some epistemologists have “semantic idiosyncrasy” in their preference. Hetherington, 149. 24. Flexible Constitution, 9, 34–36, 148, 159, 177. 25. This seems to be what Stephen Hetherington refers to as the feld’s “mistaken conceptual core.” Hetherington, xi. 26. Malcolm, 87. 27. It would be the same as saying I swear I have a hand, I swear I am in pain. There is no need to swear of such things in the normal case. On Certainty, 26e (#181). 28. See Malcolm, 48–49, discussing whether you know your fngers are bent. If you cannot coronate a belief here, you can speak of this as something else. 29. Stroll, 145. 30. Lars Herzberg, “Language-games and private language” in Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, ed. Kelly Dean Jolley (Routledge, 2014), 50. 31. Wittgenstein writes, “If I am now in doubt whether I have two hands, I need not believe my eyes either. (I might just as well ask a friend).” Investigations 3rd, 221e. See also, Stephen Hetherington, Yes, But How Do You Know? Introducing Philosophy Through Sceptical Ideas (Broadview Press, 2009). 32. Try this as an experiment. Wherever you are reading this book, take a pause. Look around. Start saying out loud whatever you see—and be sure to be doing exactly that as an activity. This is a game where you pay attention to things that comprise your immediate visual feld. 33. Why don’t I script the task-function as SAY(label) or REFERENCE(object)? The answer is twofold. First, I scripted SAY() for situations based upon immediate perception only. I scripted REFERENCE() when the matter felt as though you were being a librarian or an encyclopedia. For example, who is George Washington—“the frst president of the United States.” REFERENCE(George Washington). These sorts of tasks feel like test answers. In contrast, with SAY(), the behavior requires much less capacity: you just pronounce a visual cue. Try this experiment: say the frst thing that comes into your head. Are you referencing it or just spitting something out? This is close to what I have in mind for the difference between the two notations. And let me offer a second point about labels. Suppose I ask what the Spanish word is for “water.” When you say “agua,” your attention is not upon water, but upon a word for something. It feels almost like looking in the mind’s closet. So this is another reason why the task-function is SAY(label), not REFERENCE(object). 34. On Certainty, 52e (#406–8) 35. On Certainty, 28e (#208–9). 36. Malcolm apparently would have accused the philosopher of using words in a non-standard way while pretending it to be “ordinary.” To rectify this, he wanted the term defned: “the philosopher’s sense cannot replace the ordinary sense—though it can be introduced independently and with its own criteria.” See OLP, 3a.

Chapter 13

Aspect and Framing

In the next two chapters, I will break fresh ground. I shall no longer be concerned specifcally with language and meaning. Instead, I shall take up what I think is the most consequential of all the topics Wittgenstein could offer: aspect and framing. It is this faculty in humans, as I will show, that causes value judgments, attitudes, ethics, political ideology, and even religious belief. What is aspect and framing? Let’s begin toward the back end of Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein famously ponders the difference between seeing something in simple perception versus seeing it as something.1 One of his examples is Joseph Jastrow’s “duck-rabbit,” which can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit, as shown in fgure 13.1(A),2 which I ask my reader to examine. It is important to understand what this issue isn’t about. It’s not about the optics3 or even about drawings. It is concerned with the broader intellectual phenomenon4 of perceiving an aspect.5 This involves realizing a framework even though other framings may be possible. Wittgenstein uses many different kinds of examples, such as seeing a resemblance among people or things;6 seeing a solution to a puzzle;7 children treating a chest as a house during play;8 getting the right tempo in music;9 or an expert who knows when an animal’s behavior is “hesitant.”10 Each of these realizations involves pictorial intelligence,11 which means they involve a cognitive phenomenon12 that I described in chapter 7. Your mind sees something in a fash—an image, a scenario, a framework, and so on. And this whole line of investigation then naturally feeds into two large subject areas. The frst is about matters that are value-laden and possessory: ideology. The second is about something insightful and liberating: aesthetics (ethics). I shall cover the former in this chapter and the latter in the next. 133

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Figure 13.1  Images that Concern Framing. Source: Image A: German magazine, Fliegende Blätter, Image B: Author, All other: Adobe Stock.

IDEOLOGY To understand ideology, one must understand two simple premises. The frst is that humans have no choice but to rely upon aspect-frames as a way of digesting complex information. For almost any issue, a picture lies in the background of the mind’s eye. George Lakoff is of the view that the human brain is specifcally structured to learn this way.13 And the second point to understand is that what ideology really is, as a behavior, is nothing more than the desire to control what picture (aspect) dominates a social context. That is, I want is my picture to dominate your brain when a certain kind of issue arises in society.

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Problem 13.1. In 2013, an American citizen committed the Boston marathon bombing. Should this be considered “terrorism” or “crime”?

From prior chapters, we know that there is a sense in which the bombings can be spoken of as “terrorism” and a sense in which they could be said otherwise. So long as the same set of facts constitutes either way of speaking, this should not be a problem. It should only be vernacular disagreement. But that’s not how it actually works. And this is because of pictorial intelligence. If we see the Boston bombing as crime, the picture of copsand-robbers dominates the social context. We are saying that we want this behavioral response to apply here. But if we see it as “terrorism,” a more ominous picture dominates. And we will end up with different social policy depending upon which picture wins. A good discussion of this problem can be found in a recent book by philosopher James Garvey.14 In one chapter, when discussing framing, Garvey references a study involving a newspaper story about a crime wave in a city.15 Two frames were used to describe the same facts. If the story described the outbreak as “a wild beast,” readers were more likely to support solutions involving police and incarceration. But if the outbreak was described as a “virus,” readers were more likely to support social programs designed to fx and heal the problem. The point is that frameworks are manipulative. The picture that dominates the social context will suggest “solutions” of one kind or another. Or as Wittgenstein writes, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”16 What do we do about this? Problem 13.2. When discussing the subject of very early-term abortion, a person claims to be “pro-life.” What does this expression mean?

Problem 13.2 is about the abortion debate. In the early part of pregnancy, there is something called an embryo. If a person is “pro-life” with respect to this entity, the sense of life should only be embryotic. In other words, it should be no different than saying one is “pro-embryo.” But why don’t people see it like this? The answer is that a picture intrudes into the background of the mind’s eye: a tiny little person hiding somewhere and being oppressed. Compare this to the picture that emerges when you say “pro-embryo.” In my mind I see something tadpole-like—something in a pre-stage of being.17 If I say an embryo is a person, I create nothing but disagreement. But if I say I am “pro-life,” I can skip the issue and try to force a picture onto a social context. And that is exactly what this language is for. And this is what ideology is as a behavior. One wants to say: ideology is rude.

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Notice how the picture of “pro-life” can change outside of its social context. I can imagine a person who never killed bugs claiming this phrase as a sort of patriotism for all living things. And I can imagine the phrase being coopted by liberal thinkers in support of poverty programs and education spending. But this misses the point entirely. In the abortion context, the expression is not a philosophy. Its sole purpose is to force a picture upon a social context. That is why arguments about logical contradiction never work. But what is the solution to all of this? George Lakoff’s answer is different from Wittgensteinians’. Lakoff believes that frames control us. As he rather boldly puts it, “To be accepted, truth must ft people’s frames. If the facts do not ft a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.”18 This means that, for him, the only solution is to use counter-frames. And so if someone says they are “pro-life” with respect to an embryo, you would reply that you are “pro-choice,” which forces a picture of freedom upon the social context. In such disputes, people are not talking past each other as they were in chapter 10; they simply register an affliation. It is like saying, “I’m Mormon.” The diffculty here is that the two central issues in play never become inspected—namely, (a) that a cognitive phenomenon called “framing” is occurring; and (b) what status embryonic life should actually have. And this results in blind disagreement. For Wittgensteinians, the only true cure for people possessed of a unitary aspect is therapy. And to what end? To show the person that a picture frame encapsulates the matter and that other pictures are possible. And this is true for both sides. And so with respect to the pro-life person, we might show that, for example, after four weeks, embryos achieve the size of a poppy seed. And we don’t say this as a fact or as trivia (or even science)—for none of that concerns us right now. Instead, we show the matter with something like the picture shown in fgure 13.1(B), which I ask my reader to examine. What does looking at this picture do? Unlike Lakoff’s prescription, which is limited only to the library of frames already inherent in the other person’s memory—pushing alternative buttons—this is a new picture. And it directly confronts the image of a little person hiding somewhere, being oppressed, which is latent in the psychology of the pro-life language game. And one thing this will tell us is whether our interlocutor is even open to looking at alternative aspects.19 For if not, you have close mindedness (obstinacy) as the core behavior, something which requires real therapy (psychological). Wittgensteinians can only hope to doctor those who come to us in good faith. The rest we leave to other professions. “But does this new picture resolve the problem for the good faith debater?”—Of course not. It only leads to other discussions, such as when “souls” emerge or what “discrimination” is. And a host of new pictures will

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emerge here, too. We will fnd rival aspects in every subject encountered. In fact, there is no such thing as a unitary aspect for any of our beliefs. For part of what connoisseurship is, is skillfully navigating alternate frames before selecting one (chapter 14). How well one does this is what makes him or her truly intelligent. And that is our point: we seek only to capacitize ways of seeing (aspects) rather than criticize them. Our goal is for you to see not only more than one way to frame something, but to see it in the same light as the other person does who advocates for a frame that you disagree with. And this should force both of you into connoisseurship (expertise) if you want to fnd frmer ground. It should force passivity upon you, making you feel doubt-ridden. Only the doubt-ridden, counter-valued thinker has legitimacy in his or her choice. Anything else is simply “bias.” What is critical to understand is that aspects are never a matter of stipulation. They are not subjective or “personal.” They are not simply what you get to declare as “your values.” Seeing something as something requires a capacity for intellectual discernment. In this way a value judgment is no different from any other act of intelligence—there are better and worse efforts. Wittgenstein well understood that not all frameworks were equal. Some required a creative imagination.20 Others required the mastery of a technique21 or even expertise.22 And he writes in 1949 that we have no choice but to engage in pictorial discernment if we are to become better thinkers: “It is true that we can compare a picture that is frmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we always eventually have to reach some frm ground, either a picture or something else, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition.”23 And this has implications for anyone who espouses a political ideology, whether Democrat, Republican, or whatever. Wittgensteinians like myself simply cannot abide people who choose not to inspect their aspect-frame. For this refusal is simply facile behavior that is not unlike a pathology. If Wittgenstein leads us anywhere in politics, he leads to a kind pragmatism, where doctrines, theories, unitary aspects, and a priori thinking are put in check.24 And this is why Wittgenstein once aptly noted that we cannot treat the ideas of politics differently from other ideas.25 “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.”26 Therefore, our approach provides a clear separation from the position George Lakoff takes. And it separates us from George Orwell,27 too, whose famous novel 1984 depicted language as something that controlled people. To a Wittgensteinian only the unsuspecting become bamboozled by language. For if you develop a perspicuous sensitivity for tasks, traits, and pictures, language cannot bewitch you.

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SUPERIOR ASPECTS? What does it mean to say that one picture is superior to another? How do we improve our discernment for aspects? My argument in the remainder of this chapter (and in the next) is that four qualities matter most: ft, breadth, expertise, and profundity. I begin with the frst two in Problem 13.3. Problem 13.3. Suppose you have a retirement account that has a diversifed portfolio. Each year, 10% of your income goes to the purchase of stocks and bonds that are held for the long term. Is this gambling?

What does it mean to say yes or no? If humans did not have pictorial intelligence, and they called the above scenario “gambling,” the sense would be limited only to the traits in play. And so I might say it is a form of “innocent gambling,” while another says, “It’s not gambling—it’s investment.” In prior chapters we noted that this was not a factual dispute; it was merely two different vernaculars that spoke of the same thing.28 But the fact of the matter is that we do have pictorial intelligence. And so the issue becomes not the traits implicated in the social context; but the aspect we should have concerning them. And if we have good attitudes toward investing, our picture of the retirement account is probably not unlike the one in fgure 13.1(C), which is not a picture of gambling. But what pictures do we hold for gambling? Some no doubt have visions that favor it, but, more commonly, the picture is of a reckless social vice, not unlike the one in fgure 13.1(D), which I ask my reader to examine. And so the question becomes: is there any way this picture can be applied here? Is it possible to see even cautious investment as pernicious gambling? What would it take—what connections would have to be seen among idea elements—for this picture to take hold? One answer is provided by Thomas Jefferson. In the late 1700s American plantation owners tended to see the buying and selling of stocks as being both gambling and pernicious. This was for two reasons. First, the fnancial sector—stock markets, banking, and fnance—were new institutions that were just being constructed in America.29 Even corporations were something new.30 Second, the plantation state saw these institutions as threatening to the way agrarian economics had traditionally worked (bound labor, slavery, bartering, and consignment31). Plantation owners were in debt to banks and fnancial houses, and they therefore felt subjugated to this new form of economic power.32 They saw fnance capitalism as being a political enemy. And this set of attitudes made them think that even ordinary kinds of stock trading were traitorous. It was not unlike a Hatfeld seeing a McCoy in his very own neighborhood. Jefferson characterized trading stocks as the

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“criminality of this paper system.”33 Once people started buying, he said, it corrupted them. “The spirit of gaming, once it has seized a subject, [was] incurable.”34 He equated investment with squandering.35 It made no sense for the populace of a poor country to divert resources “to be employed in gambling,”36 which is what the new fnancial institutions37 and “paper money” amounted to.38 And when the frst stock correction occurred, he saw it as proof that the nation’s fate depended upon “the desperate throws and plunges of gambling scoundrels.”39 And so what is my point? Seeing even cautious stock trading40 as pernicious gambling—an aspect sight—grew out of a social and cultural arrangement (a form of life). Because there were political stakes, the attachment became affectuous (passionate). And what the plantation owners therefore wanted was to have this picture dominate the social perception so that certain kinds of public policy would prevail. There are thus two concepts here that can help us understand aspect-frames and political disputes. The frst concerns the ft of a picture, which is called congruence. Jefferson’s picture simply doesn’t ft well in our social arrangement. This is because we are acculturated to common investment behaviors. Our forms of life are different. But this doesn’t mean that a rival aspect cannot come into play even in our own age; it merely means that certain things would have to transform all around me with respect to what people believe and behave. We would have to become pointed in some strange way (reoriented). Congruence (ft) should be contrasted with another quality: being able to see alternate or rival frameworks. Too often we dismiss someone as fanatic without seeing the connection of their idea elements. To understand another’s picture, you have to understand a set of experiences which may at frst be unknown to you. The term for seeing rival aspects is fuency. If you have a fuent attitude about something, it means that, whatever framework you do adopt, you at least know of the connections for seeing it otherwise. And this capacitates you, so that, whatever choice you make, it will be more intelligent. And so we have two concepts that can help us grade our dispositions: congruence and fuency. There is yet a third with which I shall now close this chapter: profundity. ASPECT CHANGE There is an important concept in framing that I have yet to discuss. It’s called an aspect change. This is where one’s picture of something markedly alters. There are two types of these changes: those accompanied by a

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sense shift in words (different traits) and those occurring without sense shift. The former is quite common, but the latter is not. Let’s consider the ordinary version frst. Problem 13.4. Suppose that you see a billboard with this message: “What is life if not a gamble?” What is the sense of “gamble” in the message, and what picture, if any, comes to mind?

In the message above, the sense of gamble has changed from our previous discussion. It no longer means a compulsive, self-defeating behavior defned by ineffcient risk. And so our picture of pernicious gambling is now gone. In its place, we have two new and important concepts: (a) the uncertainty inherent in life; and (b) the need to take pre-structured chances. And although this sense of “gambling” bears family resemblance to the other, the picture suggested to us has now changed, as shown in fgure 13.1(E). We are led, in short, to a see the idea of “opportunity.” This is called an aspect-shift. The picture changed simultaneously with the shift in the lexicon (word sense). Quite simply, when the word traits changed, we adjusted our frame accordingly. But the other kind of aspect change that I mentioned is much more drastic. It is called aspect-reversal. In this situation what changes is us, not the sense of a word. It requires that a person feel gripped or bitten by an extraordinary experience, which completely transforms the prior outlook. Wittgenstein describes the feeling of wonderment this way: When someone who believes in God looks around him and asks “Where did everything that I see come from?,” “Where did everything come from?” he is not asking for a (causal) explanation; and the point of his question is that it is the expression of such a request. Thus, he is expressing an attitude toward all explanations.—But how is this shown in his life? It is the attitude that takes a particular matter seriously, but then at a particular point doesn’t take it seriously at all, and declares that something else is even more serious. In this way a person can say it is very serious that so-and-so died before he could fnish a certain work; and in another sense it doesn’t matter at all. Here we use the words “in a profounder sense.”41

What is important to understand is that aspect-reversal requires profundity.42 And this means that you cannot convey the transformed perspective even with wonderment terms (saying, “It’s profound”). Ordinary language, as such, seems to fail. Wittgenstein writes, “Here too it is not a matter of the words one uses or of what one is thinking when using them, but rather of the difference they make at various points in life.”43

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Two examples come to mind. One is aging. The changes you experience in life with age, and how the same alters your perception, can only be well understood with age. And telling a teenager this (just saying it) does nothing to allow the person to actually see it. The second example concerns drastic events, such as rape or the Holocaust. The aspect-reversal caused by this sort of enormity can only be understood if one can see how the experience altered the connections in idea elements.44 Without this, the onlooker suffers from aspect blindness—where, again, mere words will fail us. There is an interesting example of aspect blindness in a conversation Wittgenstein had with his friend Maurice Drury.45 Wittgenstein once confessed that he suffered from “morbid fears” both as a child and when he was student at Manchester. Regarding the former, a patch of plaster had fallen from the lavatory in his home, and the resulting pattern had reminded him of a monster. “It terrifed him,” Drury recalled. But then Wittgenstein made a strong interjection that concerned any sort of morbid fear that a person might acquire in life. He said, “You will think I am crazy, you will think I have gone mad, when I tell you that only religious feelings are a cure for such fears.” But when Drury said he understood the point, based upon what he knew of the spirit of religion in Ireland, Wittgenstein became angered. He was agitated that Drury couldn’t feel what he was saying—he could only process it from facts stored in trivia. It would be like a priest who never married saying to spouses struggling through the experience, “I hear people say things.” Aspect-reversal cannot be seen without the requisite connection. Having fnished my discussion of aspects and frameworks, the time is ripe to consider connoisseur judgment and a subject called ethics. NOTES 1. See Investigations 3rd, 193e–214e. 2. The image apparently frst appeared in an 1892 German humor magazine Fliegende Blatter, October 23, 1892, 147. It was later picked up by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899. See John Verdi, Fat Wednesday, Wittgenstein on Aspects (Paul Dry Books, 2010), 2–3; and Paul Sillitoe, “Indigenous Knowledge,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Anthropology, eds. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern (Taylor & Francis, 2004), n.1. 3. Staring further or shorter of the plane of regard would not help if one had never had any familiarity of rabbits or ducks. See Investigations 3rd, 207e (toward the bottom of the page). Also, this affect can happen outside of the context of optics. Wittgenstein writes, “Could I say what a picture must be like to produce this effect? No. There are, for example, styles of painting which do not convey anything to me in this immediate way, but do to other people. I think custom and upbringing have a hand in this.” Investigations 3rd, 201e.

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4. A good indication of this comes from Wittgenstein’s focus upon the duckrabbit’s eye. Take a look at it—which way is it looking? I’m not asking for anything factual. I’m asking for you to see what your mind is doing when it sees the eye’s direction as a rabbit versus a duck. (This is the kind of stuff that makes me love Wittgenstein). See Investigations 3rd, 205e. 5. He writes, “[The] causes are of interest to psychologists,” but, “we are interested in the concept and its place among the concepts of experience.” Investigations 3rd, 193e. And also, “Our problem is not causal but a conceptual one.” Investigations 3rd, 203e. 6. Investigations 3rd, 193e and 197e. 7. Investigations 3rd, 196e. 8. Investigations 3rd, 206e. 9. Investigations 3rd, 206e. 10. “For how could I see that this posture was hesitant before I knew that it was a posture and not the anatomy of the animal?” Investigations 3rd, 209e. 11. “The concept of an aspect is akin to the concept of an image. In other words: the concept ‘I am now seeing it as . . .’ is akin to ‘I am now having this image.’” Investigations 3rd, 213e. 12. “The fashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought.” Investigations 3rd, 197e. 13. Lakoff, 33, 233–34, 258–59, and 261. He writes, [Aspects] structure the whole system of thought, though they rarely show up in the language of the discourse they are structuring. Where they show up is in the forms of reason used and in the coherence of apparently disparate ideas. . . . If you strip away . . . [the aspect], it’s not clear how you could think about communication or communicate what communication is. (258–259)

14. See Garvey’s discussion of Lakoff and framing. The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants to Change Your Mind, (Icon Books, 2016), 120–32. 15. Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning,” PLos ONE 6, no. 2, (2011): e1682. 16. Investigations 3rd, 48e (#115). 17. These pictures obviously vary with experience, training, and information. I don’t know how a scientist or doctor may picture a human embryo. This gets us into expert or connoisseur judgment, and the depth or qualities of the aspect that is seen. 18. Geroge Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Chelsea Green Publishing (2004), 17. 19. I fnd this to be dangerous in the age in which we live. More and more, people do not want their pictures messed with. See either of these (accessed July 12, 2017): (a) http://drwilson.squarespace.com/invited-talks/ (b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW_qT7_yYzs&feature=youtu. be&list=PL-wNvmZzK2ZyJbLs2XrJAp3rNrsh_prpx 20. See Investigations 3rd, 200e and 207e. I would pay particular attention to contemplating all of the aspects that Wittgenstein mentions for the triangle on 200e. Go through the labor of seeing each one.

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21. Investigations 3rd, 208e. 22. “It is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of, such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience.” Investigations 3rd, 209e. 23. Culture & Value, 1949, 83e. 24. Scholars of politics who are infuenced by Wittgenstein vary in their degree of commitment here. Some only appear to be against “overt” or self-contained theorizing. This is the view Christopher C. Robinson expresses in Wittgenstein and Political Theory; The View From Somewhere (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 178. Such a view would fnd solace in a criticism that Wittgenstein once levied against Marxism, as told by Rush Rhees. It was too doctrinal. Recollections, 206. Wittgenstein liked the idea of a humane and egalitarian society, but he criticized the means by which Marx tried to establish the outcome as a postulate. Marx was offering orthodoxy when he could only ever offer an aesthetic. Robinson does offer some insights that I agree with—for example, that scholars need a “perceptual sensitivity” to understand politics (p. 151). But I would never speak of this as better theorizing; I would speak of it as connoisseurship. 25. One of Wittgenstein’s close friends, Rush Rhees, an American philosopher and former pupil of Wittgenstein, tells an interesting story of a conversation that occurred in 1945. Rhees said he wanted to join the “Revolutionary (Troskyist) Party” because he was in agreement with the “chief points” of this political program. And this is how Wittgenstein responded: [He] stopped walking at once and grew more serious—as he did if you mentioned a problem that he’d thought about: “Now let’s talk about this,” [he said]. We sat down on a park bench. He got up almost at once, because he wanted to illustrate what he said by walking in different directions. His main point was: When you are a member of the party you have to be prepared to act and speak as the party has decided. . . . Whereas in doing philosophy you have got to be ready constantly to change the direction in which you are moving. At some point you see that there must be something wrong with the whole way you have been tackling the diffculty. You have to be able to give up those central notions which have seemed to be what you must keep if you are to think at all. Go back and start from scratch. And if you are thinking as a philosopher you cannot treat the ideas of communism differently from others. Recollections, 207–8.

26. Zettel, 81e (#455). 27. George Orwell, 1984 (Signet Classic, 1961). 28. We are each behaving differently toward a social cluster. I’m probably doing something like STEREOTYPE(gambling) while the other person is either drawing a sharp boundary or differentiating. If a brokerage expert told me that “investment isn’t gambling,” this seems similar to the chair professional who differentiates stools and chairs (Problem 10.4). Investment is a subfamily that is quite unique, we would be told. And so the task-function would be CURATE(risk). 29. Hamilton, 291–408. 30. “Governor George Clinton . . . distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic

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programs.” Hamilton, 201. “At the time, few corporations existed, and those mostly to build turnpikes.” Hamilton, 354. 31. Consignment was the system southern planters used to market their cash crops through London. It works like a barter. You have to ship the goods at your own expense to a London agent, who, on your behalf, determines the market price and fnds a buyer. You retain ownership until the goods are sold. You don’t get any cash in return. Instead, you get a credit slip for consumer goods that are shipped back to you. So the crops go over, get sold, and you get items like Wedgwood china, leather saddles, suits, spices, works of art, and so on. It’s an elaborate barter system. See Joseph Ellis, His Excellency George Washington (Vintage, 2005), 48–51. 32. “Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors. He once said mordantly that the Virginia planters were ‘a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.’ By the late 1780s, as tobacco prices plummeted, Virginia planters struggled to repay old debts to London creditors.” Hamilton, 313. 33. Hamilton, 383. 34. Hamilton, 359. 35. Hamilton, 358. 36. Hamilton, 358. He later wrote, “Ships are lying at the wharves, buildings are stopped, capitals are withdrawn from commerce, manufactures, arts, and agriculture to be employed in gambling.” Hamilton, 361. 37. Hamilton, 399. 38. “He warned Washington that paper money was ‘withdrawing our citizens from . . . useful industry to occupy themselves and their capital in a species of ­gambling, destructive of morality, and which had introduced its poison into the government itself.’” Hamilton, 380–81. 39. Hamilton, 382. 40. Of course, in Jefferson’s day, not all of the trading that occurred was cautious. Because it was new, there were get-rich-quick investing behaviors that actually caused the frst stock bubble. Hamilton, 380–82. But the difference is that Jefferson never drew a factual distinction between good and bad investing behavior, as Hamilton did. Jefferson was against the whole system. 41. Colour, 58–59e (#317). 42. “But how do you know such a person wasn’t brainwashed?”—what are you calling “brainwashed”? There would only be one way to know: you would have to replicate the way the person connected idea elements. Surely it is possible to imagine two people who say such a thing, one being brainwashed and another not. And if this cannot be imagined, you have only said that you, yourself, have no conception for profundity. 43. Colour, 58–59e (#317). 44. Former president Bill Clinton once remarked on a talk show how an invasion of aliens would radically alter our perception—humans would want to bury their disagreements with each other and “band together.” This is another good example of an aspect-reversal. 45. See Drury in Recollections, 100–101.

Chapter 14

Connoisseurship and Ethics

In this chapter, I explain not only what a “connoisseur judgment” is, but its signifcance. And then I relate everything said so far on pictorial intelligence to a subject called “ethics.” I shall conclude with the point that ethics, strictly speaking, is merely connoisseurship in disguise. EXPERTISE Wittgenstein always maintained that philosophy was not an information branch. As such, it would make no sense to say, “I don’t know if I know something—or even if I exist—because I have not studied philosophy.”1 But at the same time, he thought that philosophy, properly understood, was looking at something the way a person does with a trained eye (a connoisseur).2 He frst noticed the curious relationship between connoisseurship and philosophy in 19363 and offered a course on the subject in 1938.4 The title of the course was “aesthetics.” By this, Wittgenstein didn’t mean something limited only to art appreciation. He meant, more generally, the kind of understanding for which appreciation of paintings, poems, and so on is only an example. Other examples include knowing how to be a good tailor or seamstress. It applies to anything where an “eye” or “taste” for the thing in question develops.5 In fact, Wittgenstein’s approach to aesthetics really has nothing to do with art per se, but rather with the intellectual activity undertaken by connoisseurs of something. The lectures are actually about what artisan judgment is (insight). The frst thing to understand is that certain kinds of aspects are necessarily hidden from lay people. This doesn’t mean that they do not understand facts or information—which could also be true—it means that they cannot see 145

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how to picture it without training. The aspect itself requires an orientation.6 An example would be a mother who knows what her child wants merely by having learned to read his face, or an expert in painting who can identify authorship merely by looking at the work of art. These judgments are not “mere opinion”; they are a specialized form of aspect sight.7 Simply put, the person has acquired a perspicuous “eye” for the subject.8 Once you acquire this sort of vantage point, certain prerogatives follow. You are able to judge the rules for the subject instead of simply being regimented. That is, you know when a rule needs violated (when it is wrong). This means that the concept of a rule is something inherently intermediary rather than supreme. And by this I don’t mean that all rules are standards, because standards are clearly different. What I mean is that our frst method for becoming acculturated to something—to knowing it—involves learning the rules. We learn its regimentation. But after this is mastered, the next step is to acquire an eye, not a mere opinion, for when the rule is wrong.9 Let’s consider cooking as an example. I am an abysmal abomination at this activity. My choice is to either follow the recipe or gamble on my own derivative. If I am cooking for others, I surely had better follow the rules handed to me. But a real chef—he is capable of seeing faws in the recipe he is handed. And he knows instantly not only what derivatives are possible, but how to execute it. One wants to say: he knows the alchemy of pallet. And so we are talking about two things here: becoming insightful with regard to how to see something and acquiring expert judgment concerning it. If we combine this with material from the previous chapter, we now have four basic qualities that can make one person’s aspect more insightful than another’s, as shown in fgure 14.1. We must be careful, however, not to misunderstand this. A common confusion is to think that people are connoisseurs, as if they are “ubermen.” This is not true. Connoisseurship is merely an intellectual skill that comes from the requisite training and experience. It is a natural phenomenon. All that connoisseurship really is, is an extremely capacitated opinion, the foundation of which is something Wittgenstein called “imponderable evidence.”10 But this doesn’t mean that experts are always “right”—they, too, can fail. And there are two reasons why. Either the person is assuming the mantle with

Figure 14.1  Four Qualities of Better Aspects. Source: Author.

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partial skill or training—for example, if I pretended to be a chef after taking a class or two.11 Or, the person is simply a bad chef. And here we mean that all experts are not equal. As Ray Monk notes, the value of the evidence will always vary with the quality of the connoisseur.12 So you are sometimes left with a so-so expert in the way that one can receive an unfortunate haircut from a salon. MORALIZING Wittgenstein long held that ethics, properly understood, was merely connoisseurship in disguise. He wrote as early as 1916,13 “Ethics and aesthetics are one,”14 and he never appeared to change this view. Ethics, properly understood, is simply a type of intellectual judgment that involves a learned capacity for pronouncing an opinion. That is all that there is to it. This is of immense importance because many academics in our age still insist in partitioning the intellectual universe into two spheres: the factual and the normative. The latter, they say, is governed by one’s “values,” as though the whole thing reduces to ingrained likes or pleasures. Everything I have been writing in the last two chapters is trying to dispel this charm. In truth, there is no honest segregation here. The intellectual universe cannot be partitioned because connoisseur judgment is a skilled behavior that occurs in the regular course—no matter whether the subject is art, science, politics, or religion. In fact, connoisseurship is probably the behavior that runs the entire intellectual universe. It isn’t something we put in the closet. And so, both the ethical and the non-ethical are subject to the same system of thinking that always exists: tasks, traits, and pictures. This means that our investigation into the ethical remains the very same as it otherwise would be: (a) what is the intellect doing when a claim is asserted? and (b) how can we assist the faculties in this regard? Problem 14.1. Doing x is immoral. What does it mean to say this?

My goal in Problem 14.1 is simple: to show that moral pronouncements are what their grammar is. The bedrock issue is the task-function being put into play. I can think of fve basic, but inauthentic, behaviors that hide within these sorts of language games. The behaviors are fashion, disgust, accreditation, econometrics, and empathy—each of which I shall now explain. One could say that x is immoral and mean only that it does not conform to popular attitudes about propriety. This idea seems to work not unlike the way that simple claims about “fashion” work. The task is to communicate a breach of a social convention: TELL(news). But suppose the reaction is much more

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severe—we express disgust. In this situation the task is merely to report this sensation: REACT(stimulus).15 Malevolence may even be suggested. Still yet another thing that is done is to point to social authority. Whether x is “moral” might rest upon whether it is accredited. The difference between this and the frst behavior (fashion) is that the logic is not about trends in preference; it is about demurring to an institutional authority. We point to the accrediting institution(s) to show the standing of x. I see lawyers do this a good deal when defending fee agreements. The task-function is something like SHOW(social authority). The fourth grammar is econometric. Here the concern is with social utility. Something is “good” if it produces a net gain in total happiness among competing choices. The tools for this sort of thing reside in the feld of policy studies and in cost/beneft analysis. People might disagree on how to operationalize “utility” or what metrics to use, but the task nonetheless is to compare the consequences of choices: COMMENSURATE(options). And the last of the fve inauthentic grammars for ethics is empathy. Here, we speak of morality when our hearts bleed for another’s suffering. The taskfunction is something like SIMULATE(feeling). This task isn’t limited to plight—we can share in a person’s joy, too, because this behavior is all about having an interpersonal connection. My argument is that this isn’t ethics, technically speaking; it’s the behavior of relationship. And although we could surely put forth the postulate that people should relate to one another better, the actual doing of it would be something more like parentage or relationship rather than ethics, strictly speaking. And so my ultimate point is taxonomical. Each of the fve behaviors I have just explained is a stand-alone concern. Fashion, offense, institutional deference, econometrics, and relationship each exist in their own sphere and have their own logics. But there is something much different that is also done with the word “ethics,” which involves directly judging a picture, the task of which is something like: JUDGE(aspect). Problem 14.2. “Eating animals immoral.” How can we judge this aspect-frame?

Imagine someone who became a vegetarian because of health concerns. What pictures might protrude upon the mind’s eye? Perhaps one imagines that certain acids from red meat are corrosive to the intestinal linings or that artifcial hormone injections produce a meat that instigates harmful cell growth when consumed. Maybe we imagine a poisonous chemistry, not unlike what comes to mind when we picture cigarette smoke entering the lungs. And perhaps these images disturb us, because they seem resonate in our psychology (chapter 2)—maybe some even think we are “neurotic.”16

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These pictures are distinct for one major reason: they involve hypotheses. And this makes their appreciation governed by a larger social dynamic. There is a scientifc contest for truth or falsity about the cause-and-effect of substances. As more evidence is taken in, certain pictures become harder to defend (less credible) and can even be displaced by rivals that seem to ft the state of affairs better. But what about pictures that are not explicitly brokered in this way? American philosopher Cora Diamond provides an intriguing example that concerns vegetarianism.17 Her account isn’t about humans wanting to be healthy; it is about welfare of the animals.18 Specifcally, it is about how we picture them. Some animals, such as our pets, are seen as “fellow creatures.”19 They are like friends; we talk to them, and they provide us with “company.”20 We don’t eat pets, Diamond says, because we see them as pets.21 In fact, when they die, we are likely to bury them. This is a perfect example of an aspect-frame—not seeing, but seeing as (chapter 13). Notice how the frame changes once we encounter an animal that is not a pet. To most people the cow, or the lion, is simply one of “the animals.” We even call species that we greatly dislike, “vermin.” And so it is these pictures that most govern whether one thinks that any treatment of an animal—including eating them—is moral. Diamond then goes further. She says that she stopped eating meat when she began to see all animals not unlike the way she sees a pet, as a “fellow creature” in life. To understand Diamond’s point is not to understand “an argument”; it is to understand the life of such an orientation. What would it take for me to become a believer—to live life as though every animal was a fellow of mine? I think of the way that my picture of dolphins changed once I learned of their intelligence, or how watching Blackfsh22 changed my picture of whales. Yet confessing this to someone doesn’t do anything but tell a story; it won’t implant the way of seeing. In truth it’s hard for even me to keep this picture of whales alive because I don’t have enough life experience with them. And so the impact of the movie dims away into a kind of stored information (trivia). What is my point? Firstly, aspect-frames are not capable of being judged until we can replicate their connections. Secondly, what Diamond seems to offer is an aspect founded upon profundity, which means it would require major reversal before most of us could ever be stricken by it.23 What she offers is not a proposition or a “fact,” but rather a transformation. What would my life actually be like if I saw all of the earth’s animals not unlike I saw my dogs?24 This cannot be a mere “position”—to a Wittgensteinian it has to be the actual way that we see things. If I had this plane of regard, would I not also have the weight of the world on my shoulders in

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certain respects?25 Even if I would not, surely, at least, this view requires an uprooting sensibility that would compel signifcant alterations in my life. It cannot be like a wart (an oddity); it must make an overall sense for the how I otherwise see things in life. It must, in short, be real. It seems not unlike one choosing to join the priesthood after being gripped by a transformative way of seeing. And for this very reason, then, I must conclude that Diamond does not really offer us “morality”; she offers something more in the nature of spirituality (a higher plane). And so, what have I just done? Two things have occurred in this section. I have distinguished a “mere picture” concerning a possible state of affairs—acids from red meat destroying the intestinal lining—from seeing a framework (seeing as). And I have curated Diamond’s framework.26 I now know how to handle it (how to treat it). For it belongs to profundity, not truth, and is only accessible to those who, one wants to say, could receive it in the frst place. And only now are we in a position to say what ethics, properly speaking, really is. Ethics is simply the trade among, and discernment for, rival aspectframes. In a manner of speaking it is “picture ftting.” It differs from ideology (chapter 13) in two ways. We are not trying to force a picture onto a social situation—we are not proselytizing—and our intellectual task specifcally requires that we indulge opposite frames. In fact this counter-indulgence is what defnes the activity. One cannot do “ethics” until one absorbs the rival frame, which requires seeing it rather than being hostile to seeing it. Our disposition is as much at issue as is our ability to relate. Only if I can intellectually realize the framework can I then begin to judge it. We can do nothing in ethics until we are at least fuent. That is the very basic starting point. Even something outrageous, like cannibalism, cannot properly be judged until we know of the pictures that its behaviors rest upon. We would need to know something about comparative cultures. One who studied cannibalism would presumably know something about its social construction in a world in which it thrived (ethnography). He or she would know how its adherents regarded the practice; the pictures that supported it; the experiences and histories of such peoples—in short, how this form of life worked. And this is what affords the capacity to critique. Being fuent is therefore what starts ethics. Critique then takes one of two forms, both of which are aesthetical in nature. I may say something about the ft of the aspect in our current arrangements (congruity logic) or about the ft in its own arrangement (absolute worth). For the fact is that some aspects ft scenarios better than others. The picture of the earth being the center of the universe ft a superstitious world better than a scientifc one. Judgments about ft are aesthetical not unlike the kind that people make when putting together a flm.27

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And so, ethics, properly speaking, is simply connoisseurship in disguise. We are only as good concerning it as our “eye” is for the matter in question. As a discourse, ethics surely has more than its share of inadequate connoisseurship. Perhaps some may think that my treatment of Diamond’s framework was poor.28 But aside from these complaints, it is also true that ethics has innumerably lost souls who think that the activity is defned not by picture-appreciation, but by arguments, logic, syllogism, formality, doctrine; or by empathy, special sensitives, or “personal values.” And none of this is true. Ethics and aesthetics are the same thing: both are defned merely by the intelligent discernment for rival aspects. And when we provide that, our judgment can only be shown and not said (declared). For all of the things that truly matter in the academic world reduce themselves to show-and-tell. And these judgments are not “right”; the best we can ever offer is excellence in our discernment. Aesthetics—and as such, ethics—provides no answers; it merely facilitates the individual’s capacity to judge. For Wittgensteinians are always wanting to know what you are doing with your intellect and how this can be helped. NOTES 1. “People sometimes say they cannot make any judgment about this or that because they have not studied philosophy. This is irritating nonsense, because the pretense is that philosophy is some sort of science. People speak of it almost as they might speak of medicine.” Culture & Value, 1937, 29e. (Quotation continues in the next note.) 2. Wittgenstein writes: On the other hand we may say that people who have never carried out an investigation of a philosophical kind, like, for instance, most mathematicians, are not equipped with the right visual organs for this type of investigation or scrutiny. Almost in the way a man who is not used to searching in the forest for fowers, berries, or plants will not fnd any because his eyes are not trained to see them and he does not know where you have to be particularly on the lookout for them. Similarly, someone unpracticed in philosophy passes by all the spots where diffculties are hidden in the grass, whereas someone who has had practice will pause and sense that there is a diffculty close by even though he cannot see it yet. Culture & Value, 1937, 29e.

3. “The queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation (perhaps especially in mathematics) and an aesthetic one. (E.g., what is bad about this garment, how it should be, etc.).” Culture & Value, 1936, 25e. 4. Aesthetics, frst page of the Preface (without pagination). 5. “Ask yourself: How does a man learn to get a ‘nose’ for something? And how can this nose be used?” Investigations 3rd, 228e.

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6. It is preserved and perpetuated in society by experts who write and teach others about it. Persons of judgment emerge to protect and preserve the subject’s integrity (the right way to see it). And you will always see culture revealed in the orientation (it shows itself). Aesthetics, 6–8. 7. A picture that I’m seeing in my head right now is of a skin doctor who has a good eye for when a mole is cancerous. He suspects it before the tests are ordered. Not all who are equally trained have the same discernment in this regard. 8. The very frst time you see the vantage point at this level of appreciation, there is often a “wow moment” (feeling of enormity). Aesthetics, 4–5. But we must not confuse this with a mere bodily sensation. If I bite into a scrumptious chocolate cake and declare my love for it, this is no more an act of connoisseurship than a dog who goes crazy over eating steak. And this is true even if my statement has the form of connoisseurship: “This is the best cake ever made of its type or class!” The taskfunction would only be something like REACT(stimulus). 9. Aesthetics, 5 (#15). 10. Monk, Chapter 11. 11. This is not technically a failure in connoisseurship; it is an impersonation. A man who impersonates a connoisseur can no more cause a failure in aesthetical judgment than a man who impersonates a doctor causes a failure in medicine. 12. Monk, 104. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., eds. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 77. 14. Tractatus, 105 (#6.421). 15. I didn’t script this as SHOW(disgust) because “show” is limited to things that need explained. I also didn’t use TELL(disgust) because that wasn’t really what was happening. The reaction is knee jerk and irascible. You are almost told of the feeling of disgust. So I felt that reacting to a stimulus was the central behavior. 16. I once went to the zoo at a young age and saw a pig eat its feces. For longer than a decade I could not eat pork. 17. See Diamond. 18. But selfshness is not the issue. We can make an ethics out of selfshness if we wanted to. Suppose you became a vegetarian because someone bribed you. What fashes before your mind? A picture of an ecstasy (a vacation home) or of relief (being debt free)? To build this into an ethic, we need to see something as something. And so perhaps this idea enters the mind: “bribery is simply achievement by other means.” Wealth is really what achievement is in life (a reduction)—and the more one accumulates, the better one has “played the game.” What we have here is a picture of survival of the fttest (something not unlike Social Darwinism) along with a dog-eatdog world. “But Is this ethics?”—No, not yet: it is only a stance (a position). For it to become ethics, as I shall show, one must confront this picture. We must compare it to its rivals. Ethics is nothing but the trade in rival aspects. So what is my point? Even people who are bribed see pictures. And if they are of the kind that form an aspect, the only question that remains is whether the person

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is “brainwashed” or has attempted connoisseurship. And if he or she has chosen using connoisseurship, the last question is simply whether his or her eye for the matter (expertise) seems any good. For this is all that ethics really can be at the end of the day: judging aspects well. 19. Diamond, 474. 20. Diamond, 474. 21. “It is not ‘morally wrong’ to eat our pets; people who ate their pets would not have pets in the same sense of that term. . . . A pet is not something to eat, it is given a name, is let into our houses and may be spoken to in ways in which we do not normally speak to cows or squirrels.” Diamond, 469. 22. “Blackfsh is a 2013 American documentary flm directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. It concerns Tilikum, an orca held by SeaWorld and the controversy over captive killer whales. The flm premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2013, and was picked up by Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films for wider release. It was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfsh_(flm) (accessed April 29, 2018). 23. Diamond seems to agree with this. She says that her vision is “more an object of contemplation than observation” (470), which means people have to be thinking in the right way, and that this project “is not usable with someone in whom there is no fellow-creature response, nothing at all in that range” (477). This seems to say that not everyone will be able to see these connections in the way that causes transformation. 24. I dedicated this book to my dog because Snoopy was as much “family” to me as anyone possibly could be. So unbelievably brilliant was this dog that no other canine in my care has yet to bear any other moniker. 25. I might be imagining too much, but I see an almost Jesus-like fgure here. If all of the animals invoke in me the same connection as my dogs, do not all of the people invoke in me the same as family? In other words, isn’t “pet” all about inclusion\exclusion. If I change this dynamic so that every unit gets “promoted,” what happens to the concept of promotion? Does it become empty or does it stay real? That’s my point. If it stays real, it seems like I will be carrying the weight of the world upon me. If every animal is my pet, why is not every human my brother? I say this not as logic, but as how this frame would seem if it were truly lived. 26. See fgure 14.1. 27. It is similar to Ronald Dworkin’s metaphor of a “chain novel,” where you have to ft the next chapter into the story. See Law’s Empire (Harvard University Press, 1986), 229. 28. I admitted that I was not a candidate for such a transformation.

Chapter 15

Religion

Problem 15.1. What is the difference between each statement below? (a) “I believe Casey Anthony was guilty.” (b) “I believe smoking causes lung cancer.” (c) “I believe in my daughter; she’s a good kid.” (d) “I believe in my soul mate; she would never hurt me.” (e) “I believe in God.” (f) “I love you.” Suppose I was a juror in the Casey Anthony case. I heard and fully understood all of the evidence. After studying the same, I say, “I believe Casey Anthony is guilty.” The grammar here is one of induction. The task-function is something like: MARSHAL(facts). But suppose someone looked at a few internet pictures and watched a short YouTube video about the case. And he says to his friends at the bowling alley, “Casey Anthony was guilty.” What is the grammar here? The task-function seems to be something like REACT(stimulus). If you encounter someone behaving impressionistically toward something, it is often nearly impossible to change his mind. Why is that? Basically, it is because of the way that impressionistic intellectual tasks work. You can’t give the person facts, because he simply perceives them as being additional social stimuli that collects with the rest of his exposure. And so you would need to radically alter the total collection to change his impression, because that’s all that his view is—an impression of the collected stimuli. And even if, over time, enough opposite-stimuli was provided—making him doubt whether Anthony was guilty—the person very often will become irritated that his impressionistic task-function produces confusion. 155

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He becomes upset either because he cannot get a clear impression or because it produces a result that makes him less happy. And this is exactly the point: the use of impressionistic thinking has a certain behavioral framework that is associated with it. The only real way to help (in theory) is to show the person that he is doing this, so that the matter could then turn on what his other intellectual behaviors (scripts) might yield. The only hope, one wants to say, is therapy.1 Suppose you had an incredible relationship of trust with a loved one. You say, “I believe in him—he would never hurt me.” Is this an impressionistic statement? Surely we could imagine someone using that task-function. But that isn’t the context I want you to imagine. Right now, I’m picturing how secure I felt when my daughter went off to college—I knew I could trust her. “I believe in my daughter; she’s a good kid,” is what I would say. If she broke rules, they would only be the little ones. The grammar here is not exactly induction and nor is it exactly impressionistic. It is the grammar of trust. What you are doing is transferring something to another person. You take something of value and give it away. When my daughter went off to college, she was given control of my judgment of her. This is not unlike giving the keys to the car. She now has control over this bailment. She alone can damage it. The task-function is: PLEDGE(value). What is the intellect doing when a person proclaims romantic love for another? Like any statement, we can imagine different task-functions. But let’s focus upon the paradigm case. Imagine a person whose heart truly belongs to another, and who says to her, “I love you.” What is the grammar? The intellectual task is to report a condition or a state of the mind. And so the grammar is affect-laden (affectuous). The task-function is something like: CONFESS(affect). But what is the grammar of the God proposition in Problem 15.1 (“I believe in God.”)? Again, we can imagine different task-functions, but let’s not pick a cynical one. Our age sees religion as some sort of deception or as a caricature (Bill Maher). But it is too dismissive to say that all beliefs in God are per se impressionistic. We can imagine a devout person not using that task-function. But what would the grammar be? The diffculty with PLEDGE(value) is that there is no one to actually receive the bailment. It would be a pretend bailment, and that isn’t what the trust task-function does. Pretending to do a bailment would be a different intellectual task: PRETEND(scenario). Of course, you could trust your priest, but this would only be showing faith in him, which is not what I am investigating. So the grammar cannot actually be one of trust, even for one who says, “I trust God.” Here is the answer. The grammar seems to be exactly the same as being in love. It is not the same kind of love, of course—one assumes it does not

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involve the same brain chemicals. But the grammar is nonetheless the same because of what the intellectual task is. The proposition is affect-laden. “But what if the person doesn’t agree”—since when has that mattered? The issue is what the statement is doing (what the intellectual behavior is). For example, when people say they believe in a resurrection, many times they are not stating that they believe in a set of facts—even if they say they are. As Wittgenstein once noted, “Only love can believe in the Resurrection.”2 This is because of the task-function being used in the speech act. Asking some Christians whether they believe in the Resurrection is like asking some in this country whether they believe in America. Although you can imagine a mental state where both answers involve the grammar of induction— MARSHAL(facts)—you can more easily imagine an intellectual behavior which uses CONFESS(affect). And the issue is never what the answer is; it is merely what intellectual task you are receiving in the reply. And this is why it would do no good to either confront the matter with “facts” or to criticize the belief at all.3 If one simply took God propositions as affectuous, legions of debates in theology and philosophy of religion could be thankfully quieted. Indeed, it is the very failure to see the grammar of God propositions that prolongs these discussions on both sides. And it is for this reason that there is absolutely no contradiction between the God stories and that of science—put simply, the grammar does not allow it.4 Ray Monk characterizes Wittgenstein’s views this way: “Both the atheist, who scorns religion because he has found no evidence for its tenets, and the believer, who attempts to prove the existence of God, have fallen victim to the ‘other’—to the idol-worship of the scientifc style of thinking.”5 If you ask someone whether they believe in God, and they say yes, it is not all that far removed from asking whether one is “married.” Because, it is like saying, “Yes I fell in love with x and still keep my affliation in this spot.” And if you ask, “But are you still in love?”—this merely asks whether you still feel the affect that so moved you to the affliation in the frst place. And like marriage, religion, too, has its longevity challenges. Wittgenstein compared it to walking a tightrope.6 A man who believes in God is simply a man who is in a marriage of sorts. And it simply does no good to tell anyone either that he or she shouldn’t be married or that their spouse isn’t a good pick. One wants to say: this only works in divorce. GOD PICTURES If affrmations of God have an affectuous grammar, does that mean there is nothing to the beliefs—no content? It does not. It merely describes what the speech acts that involve affrmation consist of. The most important substance

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of religious beliefs comes from “God pictures” of some kind. No one can have any religious beliefs whatsoever without frst selecting a God picture. It is these (felt?) imaginations that are the inherited background from which religion is constructed. Problem 15.2. Suppose that science discovers immutable proof that Jesus never rose from the grave. They discover his bones. If true, does this mean that Christianity is false?

There is one picture of Jesus that is very popular in the minds of Christians. They believe it is necessary for him to be divine. As such, they picture Jesus as having a share of the God power by belonging to its corporeal structure, sort of like the depiction in fgure 15.1(A). But there are other imaginations that could ft Christian theology. Imagine for the moment that Jesus was a normal human being who was being used by God for important purposes. In this account, he is not unlike Frodo Baggins— a man whose task was to confront evil by making a limitless sacrifce that was handed to him. This picture sees Jesus, like Frodo, as a man of deep character who accepts his task. And so, he gives the new teachings, shows how to live, and even dies to save others, spiritually. The miracles simply become invented after the fact—like stories of George Washington and the cherry tree. This account has Jesus as being the last and most important surrogate of God—the fnal, and most important, prophet.7

Figure 15.1  Concepts in Religious Belief. Source: Author.

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This new picture of Jesus organizes the God power as being one of employment, not of corporation. Each prophet is in the employ of God, the last being the central fgure, as depicted in fgure 15.1(B). So, if we had found the dead bones of Jesus, would we say now that Christianity is false? The answer is only that one of the pictures no longer fts. For in the second picture, the essential business can still go on. The narrative still works: he came and gave the central teachings that should be followed. You can still celebrate his words and deeds. You can even pray to him (what stops you?). And you can still see him as the penultimate fesh who was destined to bequeath the silver secrets of God. He would be, in essence, God’s adopted son. And why should we have any prejudice here against adopted versus natural children? All that we do is adjust our picture somewhat. And we can do this because this account bears enough family resemblance to the other. So what have we just done? We now have different ways to construct Christianity using alternate Jesus pictures.8 Each organizes the God power differently. And so, if a Christian took the view that his faith was specifcally predicated upon a resurrection—that this was a litmus test—we should say to him that he has faith not in a “religion,” but only to one of its pictures. That’s what people don’t understand—the faith always runs just to the picture. And so it is with all religious beliefs. If only people could see that their actual faiths run merely to pictures, the whole nature of religion would radically change. No longer would disagreement seem to have such dire stakes. Insecurity would not be premier. For if science had found evidence against one picture, we would merely investigate what the alternates might entail.9 ASPECT SIGHT Is there any way that people can see God in real life—and what does it mean to say this? We don’t mean the way one sees a UFO, because this process of seeing doesn’t need explaining—you simply look at it. What we mean is that, if God doesn’t appear before me in life like any other object would, is there any way nonetheless that I could see him without my affrmation involving a psychological affect (love)? Below I present two scenarios where this is possible. To begin, let us ask this question: what is a miracle? We have two impoverished pictures of this idea. One says that miracles are like a Disney movie— they have a Santa Clause quality. Another says they are simply a fction or a deception of some kind. So either the waters really do get parted or the matter is a social fable that deceives “the believers.”

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But there is a third picture that is much more insightful. Miracles don’t ever violate nature; they simply show themselves from within it. Wittgenstein describes the idea like this: It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence.—Now, do I believe this happens? I don’t. . . . The only way for me to believe in a miracle in this sense would be to be impressed by an occurrence in this particular way[:] . . . “It was impossible to see these trees and not to feel that they were responding to the words.” Just as I might say “It is impossible to see the face of this dog and not to see that he is alert and full of attention to what his master is doing.”10

You don’t believe the trees bowed when the saint talked, but you could believe that the wind blew the trees in a synchronous fashion so that a certain effect was perceived. And the interpretation of the effect would be precisely the issue. For in this one iteration of nature, the claim is that you have seen an aspect in something that is otherwise a natural occurrence. And so the concept of a miracle becomes that of a felt, but yet derived, aspect. Consider this scenario: There is a middle-school teen whose arm was recently amputated. She cannot play her favorite sports. This experience is just starting to set in: her whole life seems different now. Sitting on the porch, she begins thinking of walking to the woods to commit suicide in the river. Tumult frst engulfs these thoughts. But then, she resolves to do it. As she begins her walk, a natural summer breeze gusts in a certain way and the tree leaves hiss in the blustery collage. The steps of forward motion become slightly more diffcult against the feel of the breeze in the chest cavity—and she then feels completely halted for an instant. It feels as though a push of some kind has stopped her. As she looks at the hissing trees she comes to believe that God had told her to go no further.

And so, this iteration of nature played its role in the perception of something larger. What is claimed to be seen is itself something unsayable— unprovable—yet remains shown to the person. Wittgenstein writes, “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”11 But if she does decide to speak of the matter, she has two choices. If she declares that the trees bowed or that God’s hand appeared, this would only be an affectuous interpretation. But if she instead discloses how she came to feel such a thing in a physical iteration of nature that was otherwise unremarkable, the grammar would not be revelatory; it would become confessional (private). It would nest itself in a real event in life, not unlike the way a rape victim or a person broken in love might show her or his scar to

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you. The task-function is something like CONFESS(event). As Wittgenstein writes: Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the “existence of this being,” but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts—life can force this concept on us.12

And if you really are fortunate enough to be shown something spiritual in an experience, the ground of the belief in God no longer becomes “faith” (explicitly). It becomes a sense of peace that changes the whole plane of regard (profundity), because it feels similar to having received a secret. Wittgenstein described the effect as feeling safe from anything that could happen.13 And this is why he told his friend Drury when encountering a street preacher, “If he really meant what he was shouting, he wouldn’t be speaking in that tone of voice.”14 It should not sound like doctrine, insecurity or “preaching.” It should be something confessional, which requires privity and a showing. This is why Wittgenstein thought that Christianity, properly understood, was not a belief system but a way of living (charitable and humble). “If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different.”15 Some people think, quite wrongly, that beliefs in God are an endorsement of magic. They say belief endorses supernatural powers and so forth. But this isn’t so. Religion merely endorses the unknown, not magic. So long as there remains mysteries to existence—so long as our form of life still causes the dilemmas that it does—religion will always exist in some format or another. Problem 15.3. Suppose you are watching a movie and the ending is terrible. And your opinion isn’t superfcial—for example, wanting a happy ending. The problem is that the ending made other things in the story less believable. How is this different from a belief in an afterlife?

When you say the ending doesn’t ft, you are saying something about the movie’s assertability logics. Something in the ending made the middle problematic. The story became less credible. It feels like watching a magic trick after you have learned the secret: it feels fake. This kind of aesthetical judgment can also apply to the way you think the experience of life should end.16 There are two ways this can go. Some argue that our experiences and knowledge of life on earth show that there is no afterlife. Think about all the suffering and death throughout history—the wars, famine, plagues, genocide,

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disease, the extinction of species. Think of the senselessness of an individual tragedy like a death in a car wreck—and now think how regularly these sorts of occurrences are. If there is one thing that has perpetually defned life on earth, it is that death is the only sure thing (the one universal). It is no wonder that a Holocaust survivor could abandon his or her faith in God. The conditions of life on earth simply show that the God stories are constructed.17 But here is the opposite view. It comes from an extremely pessimistic account not just of humanity, but of its format (existence). Wittgenstein felt “our lives are ugly and our minds in the dark—a feeling that was often close to despair.”18 Humanity is incorrigibly fawed. We are selfsh, uncomprehensive, blinded, and perpetually incomplete. Our very form of life is simply defective and even repulsive. And so, only a God story could make sense of how insufferable we are. Otherwise, humanity becomes just some sort of ugly wart in the cosmos— like a fatulence within the universe. And this picture, Wittgenstein once thought, was not only despondent, but transformative.19 All the calamities, the suffering, the tragedies, and the failures are what shews that God is real. For this is the only way that this dreadful and repulsive situation can end and make sense of everything. Thus, we have two contrasting pictures that are aesthetical judgments about life itself—about how the movie should end. They involve an aspect sight. And they make the logic of theological stances more nuanced than is commonly thought. The three standard positions—atheist, agnostic, and “believer”—now become displaced by qualifed opinions that purport to be derived from looking at the experience of life, as shown in fgure 15.1(C). And these “qualifed derivatives,” as I call them, are more important. If beliefs about God are predicated upon deriving an insightful aspect from the experiences of life, then beliefs about the ending become dependent upon two things: (a) how much of the “movie” you have seen; and (b) the depth of your eye (connoisseurship). And if asked about the movie’s ending midway through, it suddenly becomes strange to hear the answer “agnostic.” For who was ever agnostic about a movie’s ending? And here we don’t mean how it ends, but whether the ending makes sense. Being agnostic would mean you didn’t care about your aspect sight. And the conclusive answers, too, now seem problematic—they become either premature or a priori. And so, we can conceptualize the belief in God as being something not affrmatively endorsed or rejected, but rather having congruity with the way life as an experience develops. And these sorts of propositions would not be affectuous; they would simply be a form of connoisseurship (note that none of the “qualifed derivatives” found in the statements below use the taskfunction CONFESS(affect)):

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(a) I don’t know that my daughter is following my rules in college, but I don’t doubt it. (Wouldn’t surprise me). (b) I don’t know what’s behind the door, but if it were to be x, I wouldn’t be surprised. (c) I don’t know whether God is real, but it wouldn’t surprise me, given the way the experience of life works. Wittgensteinians tend to see the intelligent consideration of the God question as being one of the two qualifed derivative positions in fgure 15.1(C) (receptive or doubtful). We really don’t believe any other theological stance can exist without the person being confused or simply in love (or not). What the God question really asks you to do is develop an insightful aspect about life as an experience. Wittgensteinians always work problems from the inside out, and we never do it a priori. And so the only intelligent way to get at this question is to see how a picture fts its surroundings. And that means we need to know how well your imagination is for picturing the idea in the frst place. That’s the other thing with Wittgensteinians— we’re always looking at what you are doing with your intellect. Because, as we see it, this issue was never about “God” in the frst place; it was only about how sophisticated your picture was and how skilled you were in deriving the aspect from its surroundings. This is why Wittgenstein found Russell’s atheism so insufferable. We don’t like atheists for two reasons: (a) their imaginations of God are usually dull; and (b) they come to the matter bearing the wrong tools (argument and science). But the faithful do not like us either, for we cannot endorse a great many of things to which they are clutched. And so Wittgensteinians are unique in the world of theology. We do not know whether God exists, but it simply wouldn’t surprise us one bit. And if we do ever affrmatively declare that he does exist, we will have only said we have fallen in love in a certain respect. And absolutely nothing more about this matter could be said. For its whole point is to be shrouded exactly the way that it is. Having fnished this book, I see no need to state the ending. NOTES 1. In trial courts, lay people behave seriously toward the proposition of guilt because of the social ritual and jury indoctrination. When we say that juror attitudes are “put in check,” what we are saying is that certain undesirable intellectual behaviors are being put off to the side. But as to the lawyers, really good lawyering probably tries to make jurors use both inductive and impressionistic grammar. In other

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words, if both behaviors yield the same picture—or if perhaps they don’t—lawyers no doubt make use of that. 2. Culture & Value, 1937, 33e. 3. Even if the historical accounts of the Gospels were false, Wittgenstein says that this is irrelevant, because, “This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e., lovingly).” Culture & Value, 1937, 32e. 4. See Aesthetics, 53–72 (lectures on religious belief). 5. Duty of Genius, 410. 6. After learning that one of his students, Yorick Smythies, converted to Catholicism, Wittgenstein reacted, “If someone tells me he has bought the outft of a tightrope walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it.” Duty of Genius, 463–64. And in 1948 he writes, “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” Culture & Value, 1948, 73e. 7. If we take the expression “son of God” to mean surrogate of God, then the only question is whether a man is merely a surrogate or the surrogate, as in the major one. Like all propositions, the sense is found in what the person is doing in speech act. 8. There is still an intermediate picture. One could imagine Jesus was not divine but was also not ordinary. Suppose he had only one special power that no other prophet ever had: the ability to access God’s ear (like having a telephone). And so God always had to address his requests. In this picture, God and Jesus are sort of like partners. One works his end of the problem—phoning stuff in—while the other takes care of the heavy lifting. And so the point is that we have another conception that can deny resurrection, yet still work. 9. Adjusting the God picture to ft new scientifc discoveries is routine. An example is the way Deism emerged when the Enlightenment came around. 10. Culture & Value, 1944, 45e. 11. Tractatus, 107 (#6.522). 12. Culture & Value, 1950, 86e. 13. Malcolm, 70. 14. Drury in Recollections, 111. 15. He continues, “It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end fnd your way to God. . . . There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.” Drury in Recollections, 94 and 114. See also, Culture & Value, 1946, 53e (“You have to change your life . . . or the direction of your life”). 16. Young people no doubt have a different sense of life compared to older people, because the young have experienced less of it. One wants to say it this way: their pictures of how it should all end are supplied rather than derived. 17. Christopher Hitchens argues something like this. Because mass extinction is “business as usual” on the earth—entire species regularly become extinct—Hitchens says that this is evidence that the God stories are false. 18. Malcolm writes, “It was Wittgenstein’s character to be deeply pessimistic, both about his own prospects and those of humanity in general. Anyone who was on an intimate footing with Wittgenstein must have been aware of the feeling in him

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that our lives are ugly and our minds in the dark—a feeling that was often close to despair.” Malcolm, 72. 19. He writes in 1937: What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought.—If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other, and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. Culture & Value, 1937, 33e. C.f., Drury in Recollections, 101 and Culture & Value, 1937, 32e.

Index

AAUP. See American Association of University Professors aesthetic(-s)(-al), 30, 103, 106, 124, 126, 133, 143, 145, 147, 150–52, 161–62 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 105 analytic philosoph(-y)(-ers), 15, 45, 126–27, 130 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 15 aspect(s), x, xxiii–xxv, 18, 20, 23, 26, 36–38, 41, 67, 79, 82, 106, 129, 133–34, 136–42, 144–46, 148–53, 160, 162–63 assertability (conditions), 60, 127, 130, 161 Augustine, Saint, 97 Austin, John L., 60, 65 autis(-m)(-tic), 18, 26–27, 32, 37 Ayer, A. J., 5, 11 Bishop Butler, 53, 125, 130 Bobbitt, Philip, 8, 14 Bouwsma, O. K., xiv, 10, 31, 38–40, 57 Carnap, Rudolf, 4, 5, 11 Child, William, 66–67 Chomsky, Noam, 90, 95

Christ(-ian)(-ianity), 5, 11, 33, 157–59, 161, 164–65 cognitive linguistics, 113, 119 “connection, the,” xxiii, 20, 23, 36, 38, 62, 80, 139, 141 connoisseur(-ship), xxv, 39, 82, 102, 111, 126, 137, 141–43, 145–47, 151–53, 162 Coyle, Dennis, xiv–xv critical reasoning (thinking), x, xxi–xxii, xxiv, 9, 17, 36, 39, 73, 77 defnition(s), xxiv, 45, 55, 62, 77, 79, 87, 97, 100–102, 106–7, 111, 118, 121 Diamond, Cora, xiii, 149–51, 153 Drury, Maurice, 25, 37, 66, 129, 141, 161 Dworkin, Ronald, 153 ethics, xiii, xxiv–xxv, 39, 79, 81, 87, 121, 133, 141, 145, 147–48, 150–53 etymology, 115, 117 family resemblance, xxiv, 47, 49, 99, 100, 102–3, 105–7, 109, 112, 125–26, 140, 159 Fish, Stanley, 94

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Index

The Flexible Constitution, xv, 56, 58, 78, 167 formalism, 55, 67, 93, 124–25, 127, 131 form(s) of life, 89, 98, 130, 139, 150, 161, 162 framing, xxiv, 79, 133, 135–36, 139, 142

math(-ematic), 10, 13, 17, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 59, 64, 70, 74, 103, 111, 117, 125, 151 Monk, Ray, x, 8, 13–14, 17, 19, 21, 33, 48, 64, 67, 82, 147, 157 Moore, G. E., 7, 13, 35, 49, 64, 127–28 Nash, John, 74

Geach, Peter, 6, 24 grammar, xxiii, xxv, 55, 57, 59, 60–66, 72, 79, 84, 92, 96, 100, 102–3, 110–11, 113–14, 117–18, 128–29, 147–48, 155–57, 160, 163 Graying, A. C., 8 green ideas, 90, 95 Grice, Paul, 93, 96 Hacker, Peter, 15 Hertzberg, Lars, xiii, 83, 89 Hetherington, Stephen, xiii, 123–24, 129, 130–31 Horwich, Paul, 3 Humpty Dumpty, 87–88, 94 ideology, xxiv–xxv, 48, 67, 87, 133–35, 137, 150 imponderable evidence, 146 Jesus, 23, 153, 158–59, 164 Jocelyn (or “my daughter”), xiii, 101–2, 112, 114, 155–56, 163 Kanterian, Edward, 11 Lakoff, George, 36, 69, 71, 79, 134, 136, 137, 142 language game, 47, 51, 53–57, 62–64, 78–79, 91–92, 97, 104, 109–10, 112–13, 118, 121–22, 126–27, 131, 136, 147 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 12, 24 Malcolm, Norman, x, 6, 8, 22, 24, 25–26, 28, 33, 35, 40, 83, 88, 131

ordinary language philosophy (OLP), 78, 80, 83–84, 100, 107, 129, 131 Orwell, George, 137 Parker-Ryan, Sally, xiii, xv, 83–84, 96, 100 picture(s), x, xv, xxi–xxiv, 3, 8, 10, 18, 20, 23, 26–29, 36–37, 69–75, 77, 79–83, 88–96, 104, 111, 115, 119, 128–30, 134–42, 146–52, 155, 158–60, 162–64 picturing, xiv, xxiv–xxv, 27, 69, 70–71, 156 Pinker, Steven, 49, 73, 97, 103, 107, 115, 118 the Pope, 55 post-analytic, 9, 15, 39, 87 pragmatics, 93–94, 96 proper names, xxiv, 49, 109, 114–15, 118 quiet(-ude)(-ists), 81, 157 Ramsey, Frank, 10, 24, 29 Redpath, Theodore, 21 Rhees, Rush, 143 Richter, Duncan, xiii, 15, 84 Russell, Bertrand, 6, 7, 9–14, 24–25, 31–33, 49, 62, 64, 66, 89, 91–93, 95, 163 sharp boundary, 103–5, 107, 125, 126, 131, 143 social cluster (or cluster), xxiv, 57, 97–100, 101–6, 113, 143 social reconstruction, 78, 121, 126

Index

Star Trek, 45, 69 Stroll, Avrum, 64 suicide, 19, 28, 32, 160 task-function, xv, xxi–xxiv, 59–63, 66–67, 69, 71–73, 79, 81, 88, 91–93, 96, 98, 100–103, 105, 107, 110–11, 113–18, 123, 128, 130–31, 143, 147–48, 155–57, 161 Trump, 10

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therapy, 39, 77–82, 100, 104, 107, 136, 156 vegetarian, xiii, 148–49, 152 Vienna Circle, 4, 5, 11, 12 Von Wright, Georg Henrik, 12, 24, 35 Waismann, Friedrich, 5–6, 10, 12 Washington Redskins, 116–17 Woods, Tiger, 53–55 World War I, 19, 32

About the Author

Sean Wilson is a tenured college professor in the United States and is author of The Flexible Constitution. He holds a PhD and a JD, and is currently associate professor at Wright State University. His expertise is in Ludwig Wittgenstein, American politics, and law and courts. This is Dr. Wilson’s second book.

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