BY SEAN WALSH
The scene.
From time to time the dialectic gets feisty and on rare occasions almost physical. A meeting of the Cambridge 1946 Moral Science Club, according to some of those present, was one such occasion. Note that recollections differ, as they say1.
What might have happened is this: the very intense Ludwig Wittgenstein threatened the visiting speaker, Karl Popper, with a fire poker, in the course of a dispute about whether there are “genuine philosophical problems” and, derivatively, if there can be objective moral principles.
When asked by an agitated Wittgenstein to give an example of the latter, Popper is said to have replied, smirk on face, “not to threaten visiting speakers with a fire poker”. Popper is already out of line at this point. Clearly this is more a hypothetical imperative than an objective moral principle.
Popper, left, was probably “harder” but Wittgenstein, right, was the more intense.
It is part of the unique eccentricity of philosophers to argue whether their subject exists. Odd on the face of it. Like professional boxers arguing over whether there is such a thing as a right hook.
Popper’s choice of topic was also a provocation, by the way. For reasons I will explain.
Wittgenstein the younger.
Wittgenstein had by this time moved some distance from the conclusions and methodology of his early work, which had been largely misinterpreted even at the time of its publication. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in 1921, concludes with the following aphorism:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”2
This stipulation, a reminder that limits are limiting, was opportunistically appropriated by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists as endorsing its ascendant ideology of metaphysical reductionism. The major premise in the positivist argument is that if a proposition is meaningful then it is empirically verifiable or tautologous (and therefore uninformative). If it is neither of these things then it is nonsense.
These very smart scientists and philosophers for some reason failed to notice that this major premise is, itself, neither of these things. This is what happens when movements of thought become ideological – structural self-refutation goes unnoticed or is indulged.
But Wittgenstein’s Proposition 7 is not a declaration of reductionism so much as a call for metaphysical humility, and is the end point of a theory of meaning easily detachable from that proposed by the Austrian movement.
Wittgenstein’s work on the foundations of mathematics led him to believe that the structure of logic is the structure of the world as we can describe it. At a foundational point, he argues, elementary propositions3 intersect with the way things are, and this generates an enabling, but also limiting, condition on what can be (meaningfully) said.
To put the point another way, logic, thought, reality have a commonality of structure which allows language (which is built from the atoms of logical expression, and which itself expresses thought) to picture the world as it is or could possibly be.
The world is the totality of this, but the world is not everything that there is. And the attitude towards what is left over must be reverential silence and not scientistic dismissiveness. Some things you can say, others are shown by the limits on what can be said.
Wittgenstein the philosopher-therapist.
But by 1946 Wittgenstein had come to think of language as being more varied, flexible and multifunctional than the propositional calculus of the Tractatus. And had developed a new theory, or perhaps conception, of meaning which did not rely on a serendipitous coincidence of world and logical form.
Wittgenstein had become a sort of semantic/syntactic anthropologist: if you want to know what words mean, he insisted to his followers, then attend to how they are used, and do not assume that there is some essence to concepts that goes beyond the functional. Ordinary language is an aesthetically jarring tapestry of constituent “language games” each with its distinctive rules or “grammar”.
And “philosophy”, whatever it is that philosophers take themselves to be doing, is also a linguistic game or collection of games. This, at least, was Wittgenstein’s conception of the subject at the time of the poker incident: philosophers trick themselves into believing that they are setting out and attempting to solve these deep mysteries because they do not understand the rules of the language games they are playing – or even that they are playing them at all.
Philosophers have a habit of talking themselves into intellectual neuroses, and he was offering himself as a sort of therapist. You can understand how Popper’s discussion topic was, well, brave?
A “serious” way of thinking?
Bertrand Russell (who was present at the meeting) said once that Wittgenstein at this point had given up on serious thought and so had manufactured a way of doing philosophy that did not require it. This is an unserious interpretation of the Austrian’s later work, the full implications of which were yet to be understood. It is not that there are no mysteries just that there are no philosophical problems if by “problem” you mean something that remains soluble once the linguistic housekeeping has been completed. There is a continuity with the earlier, Tractarian, thesis: there are some mysteries which of necessity are outside the competence of thought and speech. Language is humility’s enforcement mechanism.
Here is just one example of how Wittgenstein’s later views on language generated outstanding, and still debated, metaphysical revisions, in this case to do with the character of conscious experience.
The “privacy” of the mental.
Can thought be private? Does it make sense to say that the contents of your mental life can be known only to the person who “has” them?
Descartes, and the younger Wittgenstein, would say that of course it does. It is part of the essence of thought that it is known directly only by the thinker. The later Wittgenstein would disagree and would say that talk of essence here is misleading. If thought is essentially private then it must be possible for the thinker to come up with an internal language, known only to him, in which those thoughts are itemised and described.
But in such a language there can be no way of distinguishing between incorrect and correct application of its terms and rules. A purely “private” language is impossible, he argues, and this upends the Cartesian theory of the mind.
You might be unconvinced by what is called Wittgenstein’s “private language” argument, but pace Russell it is shaped by some “serious” thinking.
Green philosophy – back to trees and forests.
And of course there are “genuine philosophical problems”. One of them is this: if an event happened some decades ago and is described by those present in many different and often inconsistent ways then did it happen at all other than in the mind of God?
It’s not just where the tree fell that counts. It’s at what time.
1 We shall return to this.
2 Proposition (7)
3 Nobody knows what these are.