Download Was Wittgenstein Right?

THE STONE
Was Wittgenstein Right?
By Paul Horwich
March 3, 2013 8:00 pm
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both
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The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy
— what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and
should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling
with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are
what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning
language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a
power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.
Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many
professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core
supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure
and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this
dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s
unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing
rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that
it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.
Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the
special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise
profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no
startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet
accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and
conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results
is based on confusion and wishful thinking.
This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to
prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide
fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the
universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s
taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of
consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our
decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that
philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so
fascinated by it?
If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For
these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion
and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy”
aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of
decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any
of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to
a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an
understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case,
he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems
only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it
were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and
answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are
clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”
Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps
tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly surprising that
“Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For
who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even
Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led
to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious
thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”
But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might boil it
down to four related claims.
— The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary goals, which
are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to
correct naïve opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the
case.
—The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical
investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension with those goals.
That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and
variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in
order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our
environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes. As a consequence
the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate,
and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not possible
(as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by
means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.
— The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate
consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is necessarily
pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions
to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.
— Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must avoid
theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the
irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the
irrational conclusions to which they lead.
Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question: “What is
truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer
of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of
years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve
tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,”
and as “stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or another
— either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have
included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to
deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting
on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features
that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may sometimes be
impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is intrinsically paradoxical
and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the attempt to devise a
definition that will fit all the intuitive data.
But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies
rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is
highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as
mentioned above) that our various concepts play very different roles in our
cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of
very different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact
that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with
specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must
stand for some such property as well.
Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that notion’s
idiosyncratic function, and to infer that truth itself will not be reducible to anything
more basic. More specifically, we can see that the concept’s function in our
cognitive economy is merely to serve as a device of generalization. It enables us to
say such things as “Einstein’s last words were true,” and not be stuck with “If
Einstein’s last words were that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and if his last words were that
nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons should be banned; …
and so on,” which has the disadvantage of being infinitely long! Similarly we can
use it to say: “We should want our beliefs to be true” (instead of struggling with
“We should want that if we believe that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and that if we believe
… etc.”). We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon nothing more than
the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is obviously equivalent to the
statement itself — for example, “It’s true that E=mc2” is equivalent to “E=mc2”.
Thus possession of the concept of truth appears to consist in an appreciation of that
triviality, rather than a mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional search for
such an account (or for some other form of reductive analysis) was a wild-goose
chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and as
exceptionally unmysterious.
This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s
metaphilosophy, and suggests how to flesh them out a little further. Philosophical
problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic
features of special-purpose concepts —true, good, object, person, now, necessary
— and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various
kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism,
revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only
irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be
resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse
overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this
irrationality is scientism.
As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation
with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation
of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural
laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by
using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science
before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way
science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the
philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be
our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy
really is “purely descriptive.
These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny turn
out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny — to be taken much more
seriously than they are. Yes, most of us have been interested in philosophy only
because of its promise to deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that
Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But such hopes are no defense against his critique.
Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what
we still can get — clarity, demystification and truth.
NOTE: A response to this post by Michael P. Lynch will be published in The Stone
later this week.
Paul Horwich is a professor of philosophy at New York University. He is the
author of several books, including “Reflections on Meaning,” “Truth-MeaningReality,” and most recently, “Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy.”
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