From PI sec. 193
We might say that a machine, or the picture of it, is the first of a series of pictures which we have learnt to derive from this one.
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really – in a mysterious sense – already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined.
And then later, in PI sec. 194:
We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.
I think that the mistake that W is identifying here is to think of “machine” and “machine-as-symbol” as having a geography on which one can locate different characters: “Here is the actual machine and ‘possibility’ here is a transient hobo, but in the machine-as-symbol, “possibility” is the president of the chamber of commerce.” More than it is wrong, this type of thinking is clumsy and mystical.
Your thoughts?
May 31, 2008 at 9:24 pm |
I think you’re going with an especially savage construal of the remark: “[T]he action of a machine–I might say at first–seems to be there in it from the start.” (PI §193) I don’t think the typical philosophical mysticism that goes along with one’s impulse to express oneself this way is as obviously bad as the mistake of taking a (posisble) movement to be found among the parts of a machine.
See W’s immediately following remark: “What does that mean?–If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.”
I don’t think that people doing rigid body dynamics think they’re to locate the possible movements of a rigid body in the machine in quite the way you’re thinking. And, while someone taking rigid body dynamics as a kind of an a priori discipline might indeed think that “it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really–in a mysterious sense–already present” (ibid. W’s italics) I don’t think the mysterious sense is quite as grotesque as the way you’re portraying it. The mistake you’re talking about would be about as bad as the White King’s: