The Blue Book pp. 41,2:
I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there ‘must be’ what is caled a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc. And I want to give you the following rule of thumb: if you are puzzled about the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the like, substitute for the thought the expression of the thought, etc. The difficulty which lies in this substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it, is this: the expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence; – and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus.
It seems to me that this encapsulates so much of what Wittgenstein is after in the later philosophy. He denies that there “must be” these mental processes going on all the time (freedom from a dogma). He contends that an expression of thought can be every bit as “alive” as the thought itself is supposed to be. And that if it has any life at all, that will come from its particular surroundings (its membership in a ”system”, its being ”one expression within a calculus”) — not from its being associated with some special (immaterial) process (of understanding) or entity (a meaning).
“The difficulty which lies in this substitution” — I found that substitution very difficult at first…anyone else? Obviously if you bring the processes out from the immaterial they won’t on their own carry any life with them — but it’s their mentality that brings them to life. Or so it seemed to me. Did (does) anyone else have difficulty with this substitution?
May 29, 2008 at 10:55 am |
I read the section again, and it appears that W. is putting forward a two-step process for removing the nececssity for “peculiar acts of consciousness.” First, the substitution discussed in the post. Second, resist the temptation “to imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the sentence is written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated, in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there – all in a lump.”
The need for this second step suggests the stubbornness of the idea that it is the mental act which gives meaning. As if, extricated from our sentences by the first step (substitution), the peculiar mental act attaches to the entire calculus. Later, W. helps us accomplish this second step by asking whether, when want to play chess, do we have in mind every single rule of the game.
By the way – I seem to remember some rather charming remarks in this post that appear to have gone missing. Maybe you will remember them someday and repost them.
May 29, 2008 at 9:27 pm |
I’m interested in the emphasis put on “must be”. Is the point that some reasons for thinking there are such states as he mentions are bad, leaving open whether others might be good? In other words, is it the upshot of this that there might be such states but that we are in no privileged position to say that there must?
May 29, 2008 at 10:03 pm |
Not sure what you mean by “such states”. Do you mean such states as would endow a lifeless sign with the life of intentionality? In that case, there are none — that’s a fantasy. (Just like there aren’t any special states of Ja’weh endowing certain actions with goodness or badness — again, fantasy.) Do you mean such states as mental acts of interpretation, understanding, meaning, etc.? In that case, it’s not just that there might be these: there certainly are such states. But even these have (intentional) life only in their particular surroundings.
As I see it, the “must” W is battling is the must of a dogma, a prejudice (a picture holding us captive). And as long as we think of the mental state as being intrinsically (magically) intentional, and as long as we think of the linguistic token as intrinsically ‘dead’, it will seem to us that (contrary to any non-prejudiced introspection) there “must be” these special mental processes enlivening our dead signs.
May 31, 2008 at 1:10 pm |
Is the point that some reasons for thinking there are such states as he mentions are bad, leaving open whether others might be good?
I don’t think that it breaks down into “good and bad” but rather “necessary and unnecessary.” Just like there are particular sensations that may accompany reading, but no one single sensation can be taken as the criterion for reading:
PI sec. 160.
I believe that W – more than he is making argument – is teaching a discipline. For example, it takes practice to rid oneself of the notion that there must be a single criterion to define “reading” (the usual assumption, by the way, is that the single criterion for “reading” is located somewhere in the mental). Analogously, it takes discipline (notice how he talks in terms of temptation) to abandon the construct of an accompanying mental process needed to animate expressions such as “I believe…” These expressions – I read, I believe, I think – are verified by a different set of criteria depending on where and how they appear in the language game, not by one single mental (internal) referent.
May 31, 2008 at 4:34 pm |
That would be a bad way to begin according to bb41/2 quoted above. Right? Is this the dogmatism to be resisted, mms?
I think trd’s suggestion about “reading” is good. There isn’t some one phenomenal character of believing, wanting, valuing, etc. any more than of reading. Moreover, our beliefs, wants, values, etc. may be entirely unknown to us. We may be wrong about what they are. One’s dispositions may not be transparent to one, for example. Also, the physical states of one’s brain may not be transparent.
Is Wittgenstein’s anti-dogmatism so extreme as to rule out the following sort of reasoning (Scott Sturgeon recently argued something like this)?
Another view of belief.
Emphasis on this part: “beliefs in such a framework are… a shorthand way of expressing a behavioral regularity rather than the source of the regularity.” If the must be is the must be of the metaphysical-source-positing philosopher, then Gintis has dodged that pitfall, no?
June 1, 2008 at 2:42 am |
I don’t doubt for a moment that the gas about intentional states is the sort of dogmatism W’s resisting.
I suppose Gintis dodges the particular pitfall in question, sure. Except that, it seems to me, W isn’t trying to say that beliefs are behavior or something along those lines, just that there aren’t these belief processes or states accompanying expressions of belief – though there can be in certain cases (conscious) mental phenomena accompanying belief expressions that are important — they just aren’t necessary.
Also, you talk about unconscious beliefs a little unconscientiously, if you ask me. Imagine someone saying “Well, we know there can be piano pieces that don’t involve any notes played on the piano, so…” and then just going on from there. Or perhaps, “I’m working on a new composition, but so far it only consists of rests.” I can imagine some hippy-dippies wanting to make sense of such prattle (see the wikipedia entry on John Cage’s piece 4′33”), but they ought to at least be a little apologetic about introducing it. Unconscious beliefs raise similar suspicions in me.