The Egocentric Predicament
Thomas Nagel
- The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Vol. II by David Pears
Oxford, 355 pp, £29.50, November 1988, ISBN 0 19 824487 8
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell in the Fifties, it was the only American university where Wittgenstein’s later work was the object of intensive study. He had died in 1951 and Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953. I remember in those pre-xerox days sharing with some fellow students the typing of The Blue Book and The Brown Book in multiple carbons, from a set available in Ithaca – pre-Investigations texts dating from the mid-Thirties which circulated in samizdat until they were finally published in 1960 as part of the still continuing stream of volumes from the Nachlass.
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[1] Even other people’s lecture notes are being published, most recently Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47: notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah and A.C. Jackson, edited by P.T. Geach (Harvester, 348 pp., £35, November 1988, 0 85527 526 X). These are three sets of notes from the same lectures, together with discussion, and give some sense of what Wittgenstein was like in action. They remind one also that while the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a genuine treatise, Wittgenstein’s later writings are more like a distilled version of the bizarre, disconnected activity of philosophical thought and discussion itself – which in most writers results in a highly-structured product unrecognisably different from the process that produced it.
[2] Philosophical Review, July 1968. Pears rightly stresses the importance of these notes, written by Wittgenstein in English between 1934 and 1936, which appear to contain the first appearance of the Private Language Argument.
[3] Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921) – unsympathetically reviewed in these pages by George Steiner (23 June 1988), who reveals that he has not read the book through (‘One looks in vain for any mention of Fritz Mauthner’), and seems particularly annoyed not to have learned anything about Wittgenstein’s sex life.
Letters
Vol. 11 No. 12 · 22 June 1989
From A.J. Ayer
There is a fatal objection to the social interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language which seems to have escaped the notice of some of his expositors. If A cannot use a sign S to refer to an object O unless he is already aware that B and C are so using it, and if B cannot so use it without already being aware that A and C are doing so, and if C cannot use it without already being aware that A and B are doing so, reference is made impossible. Obviously this use of language cannot get started. If A draws a picture of a bison on the walls of his cave he will be encouraged if his fellow tribesmen immediately reach for their spears, but if we deny him the possibility of expressing his previous private intention to start a hunt, we leave them with nothing to encourage.
A.J. Ayer
London W1
Vol. 11 No. 14 · 27 July 1989
From Barry Smith
While I agree in principle with A.J. Ayer (Letters, 22 June) that there are many problems which beset our attempts to make sense of Wittgenstein’s views on the social character of language, I very much doubt whether the one he mentions can be among them, since the collaborative picture of meaning that Ayer makes trouble for rests upon the notion of a private language which was anathema to Wittgenstein.
The problem is supposed to be that A can’t know what he means by a word unless he knows what B and C mean by it, and B can’t know what he means unless he knows what A and C mean, and so on. How exactly does this affect Wittgenstein’s doctrines? Wittgenstein believed that there was a way of meaning something by a word which neither was a matter of interpretation nor depended on consultation with one’s fellows. ‘Meaning is the last interpretation.’ The novice who observes the practice of others will, after some time, be inclined to join in, and only then can we suppose he attaches a meaning (or tries to attach a meaning) to the words the others use. If he ‘goes on in the right way’, he will mean what they do; if he does not, then he may be subject to correction by them. Now, however notoriously difficult it is to say what ‘going on in the right way’ amounts to, it cannot simply be a matter of consulting one’s own ideolectic understanding and attempting to tailor it to the meaning others have attached to that word (as exemplified in the use they make of it). For this invokes the forbidden picture of the incipient speaker privately consulting a rule or image so as to measure it against the public standard. This is just the conception that Wittgenstein warned us to resist in his arguments against the idea of a private language. Many recent expositors in the analytic traditon have pointed out that there is no temptation to regard linguistic meaning as consultative in this way, save against the background of the forbidden conception.
It is far from clear that A.J. Ayer is making this mistake, but it is best to remind ourselves of the revisions to our thinking that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language recommends. Meaning is not a matter of contrasting a personal interpretation with that of others; it is a matter of joining in. There were many reactions the tribesmen could have taken to the drawing of a picture of a bison by one of their number: many ways, that is, of joining in. The Wittgensteinian insight is this: in the case where they did not reach for the spears, we should not automatically suppose that the one who drew the picture could console himself with the private thought, that that was what they were meant to do.
Barry Smith
Birkbeck College, London WC1
Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989
From Graham Martin
The late Professor A.J. Ayer asked – to simplify a little – how A addressed B by means of signs S with reference to object O can understand S if there were no previous agreement between A and B that S did so refer, and he offered this as a ‘fatal objection to the social interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language’ (Letters, 22 June). If a non-philosopher can join the argument, this one would like to know how human infants learn the crucial distinction between a noise and a verbal sign. Like animals, infants learn to use noises (crying, gurgling) as signs because their mothers, in responding to the noise, teach them its significations. How, though, do they learn that ‘dada’ is not such a sign-noise, but a rudimentary verbal sign with specific reference? And then, how do they learn the conceptual difference between nouns (for objects) and verbs, whose range of reference is more complex? As to sentences, it is usually said that they learn to construct their own by imitating parental use. But that glosses over the way infants differ from, say, parrots, which learn a sentence (‘there’s a pretty boy’) as a string of noises. Whereas an infant manages to work out that the noise ‘is’ operates as a verbal sign in a variety of sentences radically different from what I suppose might be an initial learning model (‘that-mine’ developing into ‘that is mine’). Can philosophers explain this very mysterious achievement? That would make it easier to decide on the merits of the argument for/against the Wittgensteinian theory of language.
Graham Martin
Open University, Milton Keynes
Vol. 12 No. 1 · 11 January 1990
From Oswald Hanfling
In your issue of 23 November 1989, my colleague Graham Martin, asking to be informed about Wittgenstein’s ‘theory of language’, begins by quoting a criticism by A.J. Ayer of this ‘theory’ of Wittgenstein’s. But Wittgenstein stated, repeatedly and emphatically, that he was not in the business of offering a theory of language, or of anything else. The philosopher’s job, he maintained, was to describe and not to explain. It follows that, unless Witgenstein was grossly mistaken about what he was doing – and there is no reason to think that he was – any objection against his ‘theory’ is fundamentally misconceived. It also follows that if Wittgenstein was right about the nature and role of philosophy (as I think he was), then Martin’s request to philosophers to explain how infants learn the differences between nouns and verbs, and so on, must go unanswered. What, after all, could such an explanation look like? Martin supposes that ‘an infant manages to work out that the noise “is” operates as a verbal sign’ from an ‘initial learning model’. But Wittgenstein rejects all theorising of this kind on the ground that it will always leave us with an unexplained datum of just the same kind as that with which we began. Thus if we say that an infant learns the use of ‘is’ from a ‘learning model’, of whatever kind, we shall still be left with the question: how does he know how that model is to be applied? The mere existence of the model would leave this question unanswered; and similarly if we postulated some further entity containing rules for the use of the model. ‘Explanations come to an end’ was one of Wittgenstein’s slogans. The difficulty is not one of lacking an explanation, but of pushing the quest for explanation to a point where it no longer makes sense.
Oswald Hanfling
Open University, Milton Keynes
