Methods of Projection

Alterman Reviews Rosenthal's "Consciousness and Mind"

2008-05-11T22:15:00.002-05:00

I was reading reviews on Amazon and came across this one of David Rosenthal's Consciousness and Mind by Anton Alterman of Brain Scam. Hopefully, this is an omen of Anton's return to the blogosphere.

Quote of the Week

2008-05-08T10:14:00.004-05:00

"Primary colour" and "colour" are pseudo-concepts. It is nonsense to say "Red is a colour," and to say "There are four primary colours" is the same as to say "There are red, blue, green, and yellow." The pseudo-concept (colour) draws a boundary of language, the concept proper (red) draws a boundary in language.

To all this it may be objected "But you are talking about colour (and similar terms) all the time." To this objection the answer is that what we are doing is giving the grammatical rules and conventions applying to colour, etc. To which it may be further objected, "Are you then talking of 'mere convention', of mere convention in the sense that the rules of chess or any other game are 'mere convention'?" Grammar is certainly not merely the conventions of a game in this sense, the game of language. What distinguishes language from a game in this sense is its application to reality. This application is not shown in grammar; the application of the signs is outside the signs, the picture does not contain its own application. Language is connected with reality by picturing it, but that connection cannot be made in language, explained by language. (Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1932: From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, p. 12; these notes are from Wittgenstein's class on March 3, 1930)

My New Blog

2008-05-07T22:15:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm just going to assume that it's O.K. to quote and translate MS 105 until someone tells me otherwise. Instead of adding to the clutter here, I've decided to make a new blog, Philosophische Bemerkungen. I've put a link to it in the "Wittgenstein(ish) Blogs" section.

Fair Use

2008-05-07T14:18:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking about posting translations of MS 105 (the first notebook that Wittgenstein wrote after returning to Cambridge in 1929) both to work on my German and to get a better idea of what Wittgenstein's concerns were at that time. I thought I might translate a notebook entry every other day, and then post them (so as to receive corrections on the translation and comments on the philosophy). However, I don't know whether I'm permitted to do this. First, the German I'd be posting would be copied from the Bergen Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Second, I'd be 'publishing' a translation of MS 105. I think that any publication of a translation of part of Wittgenstein's Nachlass has to be approved by the 'descendents' of Wittgenstein's literary executors (I don't know what they're called, but the group consists of Hacker, Schulte, McGuinness, and someone else who I can't remember).

Question: if I were to comment on the translations that I post, would that remove these obstacles?

Wittgenstein Conference in Italy

2008-05-07T08:37:00.003-05:00

Found out about this one late. The conference is titled "Wittgensteinian Uncertainties," and is being held at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and the University of Bologna this Friday and Saturday, respectively. Here's the program:

Friday the 9th

10.15-11.45 – Hans-Johan Glock (Zurich)
"Meaning and concepts in On Certainty"

12-00-13.30 – Paolo Leonardi (Bologna)
"Knowledge and Justification"

15.00-16.30 – Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh)
"The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. What Wittgenstein Saw and Austin Missed"

17.00-18.30 – Annalisa Coliva (Modena)
"Was Wittgenstein an Epistemic Relativist?"

Saturday the 10th

10.15-11.45 – Alberto Voltolini (Reggio Emilia)
"Wittgenstein's Naturalism?"

12.00-13.30 – Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (Hertfordshire)
"Wittgenstein's Hinges"

Not including the sessions at the Pacific APA and the postgraduate conference at UEA, that brings the total of Wittgenstein conferences in 2008 to twelve.

Two New Blogs

2008-05-05T07:52:00.004-05:00

Well, it's really one new blog and one kind of new blog.

The latter is David Price's Language Games. It's moved back to its previous address, so update your readers.

The former is Making Sense of Wittgenstein. It's run by Neil Clarke, a graduate student at the University of Leeds who's writing on Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein's Influence

2008-05-01T17:11:00.018-05:00

A few days ago I read an article criticizing someone I'd never heard of because he had criticized Andrew Sullivan, someone I had heard of but don't care much about. After a couple of relevant comments on the article, the conversation suddenly and inexplicably turned to the question of Wittgenstein's influence on past and present analytic philosophy. A commentor claimed that Wittgenstein, through his "baleful" influence on analytic philosophy, had replaced "real philosophy" with "wallowing" in "arid" language-games. The article's author responded

To the extent that Wittgenstein ever exerted a significant influence over the direction of analytic philosophy, it was the Tractatus, not the Philosophical Investigations that exerted that influence. But not even TLP was all that influential in the development of analytic philosophy. For the most part Wittgenstein was and is regarded as a brilliant anomaly whose work has not guided other philosophers' research. (The one notable exception is itself a very odd case.)"

The notable exception was later said to be Kripke's discussion of rule-following. This sweeping dismissal of Wittgenstein's influence received some minor qualification a few comments down:

I don't deny for a moment that Wittgenstein has stimulated a fair amount of fruitful philosophical work (TLP much more than PI), but if you were to examine the development of analytic philosophy over the 20th century to the present, Wittgensteinian thought, either Tractarian or Investigative, would look like a narrow branch off the main road.

This qualification was prompted by a comment pointing out that the TLP had been influential on the logical positivists, and the PI had been influential on figures such as Anscombe and Malcolm (both Wittgenstein's students). It's not clear how logical positivism could have been a "narrow branch off the main road" given that Quine's highly influential philosophy emerged as a response to logical positivism (in particular, Carnap's). Apparently, the author thinks that logical positivism is a "narrow branch off the main road" because it is a "dead project."

At this point, a couple of philosophy professors get involved. Bryan Frances (Fordham) responded to the author:

I can't agree with some of what you said about analytic philosophy and W's influence on it. [...] W's PI was, in my opinion, quite influential in analytic philosophy of language, although the influence is indirect. Colin McGinn's Wittgenstein book is helpful on this matter. The emphasis on context is enormous now, and nearly everyone is vigilant in checking to see if they are being hoodwinked by various grammatical constructions and patterns. As I understand it, these developments owe much to the PI.
I say these things as a Fordham professor specializing in core analytic philosophy!

Fortunately for the author, Jason Stanley (Rutgers) came to his defense:

Except for debates about rule-following, which occupy a rather small corner of the philosophy of language, PI has had a much smaller impact on analytic philosophy than non-philosophers think. For example, I'm a contemporary analytic philosopher at a pretty good department, and almost none of the work of my colleagues has been influenced by PI (perhaps none). And a lot of the influence of PI has [...] been due to Kripke's book.

This was getting interesting, so I decided to throw my two cents in. I pointed out that the TLP was in fact highly influential on two significant movements in analytic philosophy — Cambridge analysis (e.g., Ramsey, Braithwaite, Wisdom, and Russell himself) and logical positivism (e.g., Schlick, Waismann, Carnap) — and that the PI was highly influential on another significant movement in analytic philosophy, so-called 'ordinary language' philosophy (e.g., Ryle, Strawson). In light of these influences, I claimed that Wittgenstein's influence on analytic philosophy was "second to none." I also pointed out that Wittgenstein's present influence extends beyond discussions of rule-following (e.g., McDowell, Brandom).

The author was incredulous. Could I really be claiming that Wittgenstein's influence on analytic philosophy has been at least equal to that of Frege, Russell, Quine, Kripke, and Lewis? Even if my answer was 'yes,' I was clearly mistaken. After all, Jason Stanley had just said that Wittgenstein wasn't that influential. Surely I wouldn't disagree with a professor who works in analytic philosophy.

Shortly thereafter, Jason Stanley returned to explain that, aside from Kripke and those influenced by Kripke on rule-following, current analytic philosophers who have been influenced by Wittgenstein are all scholarly types who are "devoted to explaining his project" (e.g., Diamond, Conant, Hacker). Apparently, McDowell and Brandom don't count because they were also influenced by Kant and Hegel. Stanley finished up his comment with

I think it's fair to say that on current debates [Wittgenstein] has figured less prominently than metaphysicians such as David Lewis or Saul Kripke, not to mention Frege and Russell.

To which I responded,

I don't diasagree with this. I've been making two points: (1) Wittgenstein's influence on the last century of analytic philosophy is "second to none": two major movements in analytic philosophy — logical positivism, and "ordinary language" philosophy — are direct offshoots of Wittgenstein's thought; and (2) the current influence of Wittgensteinian ideas is not confined to debates about rule-following. There are prominent philosophers (Putnum, McDowell, Brandom) in current analytic philosophy who are not primarily interested in commenting on Wittgenstein but nonetheless rely (in some instances, heavily) on Wittgensteinian ideas. I take it you wouldn't disagree with either point.

I also do not deny that the vast majority of current philosophy of language either rejects or ignores Wittgensteinian ideas. Personally, I think this is a failing of current philosophy of language, but that's a different discussion.

Stanley didn't reply to my comment, but he did have more to say about Wittgenstein:

Those who are now attracted to Wittgenstein are people who never saw the sense or interest in traditional philosophical questions. Since those are the questions that professional philosophers have always pursued, in the United States and elsewhere, many people attracted to Wittgenstein do not see the interest in the discipline of philosophy. But none of this has anything to do with America, or some supposed pretend distinction between analytic philosophy some other kind of philosophy. It just has to do with philosophy. Many people find it too boring or too hard, and see a vindication of their attitude in Wittgenstein.

Another commentor took issue with this:

Now this, like the preceding nonsense about "nonsense," is simply a perverse equivocation on "traditional" (would you say the same of Kant's rejection of "traditional" philosophy?!), and ends up very close to a slur. If you're not interested in Wittgenstein or the issues he raises about philosophy, fine. No one's forcing you to think about such things. But this characterization of the issue isn't any better than the Anonymous rant that started us off. As our indulgent hosts might say: feh.

There was a bit more exchange between the author and some others who had joined in, but then, sadly, the discussion drew to a close.

I've been reflecting on all of this the last few days. How is this view of the history of analytic philosophy possible? I'm reminded of something Michael Kremer wrote about Soames's history of analytic philosophy:

The books are uneven in many ways, reflecting Soames's varying level of expertise. This comes out in the lists of suggested additional readings appended to the twelve major parts of the two volumes. For example, the suggestions for Volume 1, Part Three, "Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus," consist of one book and three articles. While the one book, by Robert Fogelin, is a standard secondary source, the other pieces all discuss a fine point concerning the expressive capacity of Wittgenstein's logic — an issue first raised in Fogelin's book. In contrast, the list of additional readings for Volume 2, Part Seven, "Saul Kripke on Naming and Necessity," includes 9 books and 36 articles. The difference between these lists does not reflect the relative sizes of the two literatures, or the quality of the work. One is left to suppose that it reflects the state of Soames's own expertise.

Conference Update "Wittgenstein After His Nachlass"

2008-04-28T11:23:00.008-05:00

Here's the program for "Wittgenstein After His Nachlass," being held in Lisbon, May 2-3:

Friday the 2nd

9:30-10:30 – P.M.S. Hacker (University of Oxford)
"Robinson Crusoe Sails Again: The Interpretative Relevance of Wittgenstein's Nachlass"

10:45-11:45 – David G. Stern (University of Iowa)
"Tracing the Development of Wittgenstein’s Writing on Private Language"

12:00-13:00 – Joachim Schulte (University of Zurich)
"Concepts and Concept-Formation in Wittgenstein’s Manuscripts of the Late 1940s"

14:30-15:30 – Brian McGuinness (University of Siena)
"Denis Paul and the Total Wittgenstein Data-Base"

15:45-16:45 – Nuno Venturinha (New University of Lisbon)
"Towards a Re-Evaluation of the Philosophical Investigations"

17:00-18:00 – Josef G.F. Rothhaupt (University of Munich)
"Wittgenstein at Work: Creation, Selection and Composition of Remarks"

Saturday the 3rd

9:30-10:30 – James Conant (University of Chicago)
TBA

10:45-11:45 – Volker A. Munz (University of Graz)
"Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Whewell's Court Lectures"

12:00-13:00 – Ilse Somavilla (University of Innsbruck)
"Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks in the Context of His Philosophising"

14:30-15:30 – Luciano Bazzocchi (University of Pisa)
"A Data-Base Aided Analysis on Tractatus Writing and on Its Rubber-and-Pencil Amendments"

15:45-16:45 – Kerstin Mayr (University of Innsbruck)
"Culture and Value Revisited"

17:00-18:00 – Alois Pichler (University of Bergen)
"The New Bergen Electronic Edition and Web-Based Collaborative Wittgenstein Research"

Conference Update – "Understanding Wittgenstein"

2008-04-28T10:44:00.008-05:00

Here's the provisional program for "Understanding Wittgenstein," a postgraduate conference being held at the University of East Anglia in September:

Friday the 12th September

13.00-14.15 – Phil Hutchinson (MMU)
TBA

14.15-15.30 – Christian Erbacher (University of Bergen, Norway)
"From Analysis to Interpretation"

15.45-17.00 – Daniele Mezzadri (University of Stirling)
"Types, Forms and Unity: Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s theory of judgement."

Saturday the 13th

10.00-11.15 – Marie McGinn (University of York)
"Wittgenstein and Naturalism"

11.15-12.30 – Bob Clark (University of York)
"Infinity, cuts and applicability"

13.15-14.30 – Matthew Fielding (University of Paris I)
"From natural expressions to natural history"

14.30-15.45 – Peter Dennis
"Thinking criss-cross in the Philosophical Investigations"

16.00-17.15 – Rob Deans (University Of East Anglia)
"What is Severism?"

Wittgenstein Conference in Australia

2008-04-24T14:21:00.004-05:00

Found out about this one late. There's a "One-Day Wittgenstein Conference" this Saturday (the 26th) at the University of Sydney. Here's the lineup:

9.30 – Richard Menary (Wollongong)
TBA

10.30 – David Simpson (Wollongong)
"Naturalism and Normativity: Quine and Wittgenstein"

11.30 – Dawn Phillips (Warwick)
"Wittgenstein, Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Philosophical Problems"

2.00 – David Macarthur (Sydney)
"Another Look at Wittgensteinian Criteria"

3.00 – Huw Price (Sydney)
"One Cheer for Representationalism"

4.00 – Warren Goldfarb (Harvard)
"Rule-Following Revisited"

Also, in addition to being on his website in .html here, Warren Goldfarb's lectures on the Philosophical Investigations (being given this month at the University of Sydney) are in .pdf here.

"Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies"

2008-04-22T15:44:00.004-05:00

While searching around on Google Scholar I found an article by Nicholas Griffin (on Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's theory of judgment) in Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies. I followed the link and ended up at McMaster University's Digital Commons. It appears that every article from the journal is available there for free, and there's a search engine to search "all 5059 papers" (the "papers" include the journal articles, dissertations, and theses). I've added a few articles from Russell to the "More Wittgenstein Papers Online" section.

Wittgenstein Audio & Video

2008-04-21T09:53:00.008-05:00

I've added a new page element, "Audio & Video." So far, it contains links to some general introductions to Wittgenstein's philosophy by (1) Juliet Floyd, (2) Marie McGinn, Ray Monk, and Barry Smith, (3) Barry Smith, (4) John Searle, and (5) Antony Quinton, as well as talks by James Conant, Alice Crary, Hans-Johann Glock, Anthony Kenny, and David Stern (some of these require QuickTime). A talk by Peter Hacker titled "The Relevance of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology for the Psychological Sciences" will be added as soon as the Heyhtrop Philosophy Society posts it. I will also add links to relevant talks at the Wittgenstein Workshop (which will soon be available thanks to Currence).

(There are a few more audio recordings of talks on Wittgenstein in the Wittgenstein Archives' Fragments section.)

Quote of the Week

2008-04-21T08:00:00.002-05:00

I want to explain my views on elementary propositions and first I want to say what I used to believe and what part of that seems right to me now.

I used to have two conceptions of an elementary proposition, one of which seems correct to me, while I was completely wrong in holding the other. My first assumption was this: that in analysing propositions we must eventually reach propositions that are immediate connections of objects without any help from logical constants, for 'not', 'and', 'or', and 'if' do not connect objects. And I still adhere to that. Secondly I had the idea that elementary propositions must be independent of one another. A complete description of the world would be a product of elementary propositions, as it were, these being partly positive and partly negative. In holding this I was wrong, and the following is what is wrong with it.

I laid down rules for the syntactical use of logical constants, for example 'p.q', and did not think that these rules might have something to do with the inner structure of propositions. What was wrong about my conception was that I believed that the syntax of logical constants could be laid down without paying attention to the inner connection of propositions. That is not how things actually are. I cannot, for example, say that red and blue are at one point simultaneously. Here no logical product can be constructed. Rather, the rules for the logical constants form only a part of a more comprehensive syntax about which I did not yet know anything at that time. (Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, pp. 73-4; conversation with Schlick and Waismann on January 2, 1930)

Early Gordon Baker

2008-04-11T10:19:00.004-05:00

Commenting (in 1979) on the importance of assessing Wittgenstein's collaboration with Friedrich Waismann in the early 1930s, Baker writes,

Wittgenstein's collaboration over a period of years on a project to give a systematic presentation of his thinking puts it beyond doubt that his polemics against philosophical theorizing cannot be interpreted as opposition to systematic philosophizing. If his view had been (as it is often claimed) that philosophy consists of a miscellany of conceptual therapies with no internal connections with each other, he could not have taken any part in an attempt to mold his philosophical remarks into a systematic framework. Yet he did take part in this project at the very same time that he was writing some of his notorious attacks on philosophical theorizing ("BT," §§86-93). This is conclusive proof that it cannot be mistaken in principle to try to fit Wittgenstein's remarks together into a philosophical system even though it is something that he never succeeding in doing to his own satisfaction. ("Verehrung und Verkehrung: Waismann and Wittgenstein," in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt, pp. 245-6)

Wittgenstein Conference in Brazil

2008-04-10T22:11:00.006-05:00

"Wittgenstein: How to Read the Album?", September 17-19 at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP).

The Wittgenstein Colloquium arrives at its fifth national and second international version proposing as a general theme the question: "How to Read the Album?". This title evokes the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein comments the intimate relationship between the compositional form of the book and the very form of his thought. He invites the reader, by this way, to take that into account.

Wednesday the 17th

2:00 – Arley Ramos Moreno (State University of Campinas)
"Reading the text as an album: structure and style."

4:00 – Antonia Soulez (University of Paris VIII)
"From an autonomy (of signification) to the other (of grammar): effects of the grammatical turn on the manner of reading Wittgenstein."

Thursday the 18th

2:00 – Alois Pichler (Wittgenstein Archives, University of Bergen)
"Was Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein's only album?"

4:00 – Bento Prado Neto (Federal University of São Carlos)
"The space-temporal nature of our language."

Friday the 19th

2:00 – Antoine Ruscio (Collège International de Philosophie)
"Wittgenstein: clarifying the conditions of language, and its sortileges."

Quote of the Week

2008-04-09T13:51:00.003-05:00

The logical form of the proposition must already by given by the forms of its component parts. In the form of the subject and the predicate there already lies the possibility of the subject-predicate proposition, etc. (Notebooks, p. 23; entry on November 1, 1914)

Goldfarb - "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations"

2008-04-09T12:33:00.005-05:00

Warren Goldfarb (Harvard) is presently giving a month-long seminar on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations at the University of Sydney. Here is Goldfarb's description of the seminar:

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein claims to be giving a radical critique of philosophy. The nature of this critique, and the nature of the activity that Wittgenstein would like to see replace philosophy as previously done, are not well understood, particularly because they are not based on any general view that underwrites the criticism ('verificationism', 'behaviorism', etc.). In this series of seminars I want to provide a unified reading of the work that focuses on five major topics: reference to objects (ontology), linguistic meaning, understanding and other cognitive notions, rule-following, and the private mental realm. A major aim is to exhibit an idea of 'Wittgensteinian scrutiny' and to point a way to apply it to contemporary questions in philosophy.

Goldfarb is posting the text of the lectures on his website here.

More Wittgenstein Papers Online

2008-04-07T09:27:00.001-05:00

I've added another page element, "More Wittgenstein Papers Online." Most of the online papers on Wittgenstein that I've found have been on the webpages of Wittgenstein scholars (links to those webpages are in the "Wittgenstein Scholars with Papers Online" section), but I occasionally come across lone papers floating in cyberspace. Links to the latter are in the "More Wittgenstein Papers Online" section (about half of the links are to papers posted on the Wittgenstein Workshop site; see the Archives).

On a related note, the January 2008 Issue of Philosophical Investigations is available online for free. I havn't added the papers in that issue to the "More Wittgenstein Papers Online" section because the 'free issue' changes periodically.

[Update: James Conant and Michael Kremer have quite a few newly posted articles on their websites.]

Using Google for Research

2008-04-04T12:59:00.000-05:00

Suppose, for example, that you are trying to make sense of Tractatus 3.11:

We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs. The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.

You want to know what the secondary literature says about this proposition, but (outside of a few obvious places) you're not sure where to look. Following footnotes, thumbing through indices, and waiting on interlibrary loan are time consuming, to say the least. I've recently found a better way: Google Book Search and Google Scholar. Of course, these have been around for a while, and I've known about them for a while, but I had only ever used them to search for a specific book or article (i.e., when I already knew what I was looking for). However, it turns out (much to my surprise and delight) that they are fantastic tools for performing topical searches of the secondary literature.

Returning to the example, if you enter 'Wittgenstein, 3.11' in Google Book Search, 323 results come back! What's even better, you can click on any of them and read the relevant pages (with Google Scholar, many of the results are journal articles that can't be read without a subscription; nevertheless, the search tells you where to look). So you don't have to go to the library or wait for interlibrary loan. You can research from the comfort of your own home.

Wittgenstein Texts Online

2008-04-02T11:57:00.000-05:00

I've added a new page element, "Wittgenstein Texts Online." It presently contains links to Wittgenstein's review of Coffey's The Science of Logic, part of Notebooks: 1914-1916 (in German), the Tractatus (in German, as well as the Ogden and Pears-McGuinness translations), "Some Remarks on Logical Form," "Lecture on Ethics," "Lectures, 1932-3" (Part I of Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-1935, From the Notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald), the Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations (in German). If you know of any others, please post the link in the comments.

Miscellaneous Links

2008-04-02T09:20:00.000-05:00

Here are some links I've been meaning to post (some of these have made the rounds before):

(1) Hist-Analytic, scans of a lot of primary and secondary texts in analytic philosophy, updated pretty regularly.

(2) Philosophy Dissertations.

(3) Philosophy Podcasts, courtesy of the philosophy department of Saint Anselm College.

(4) "Davidson's Sentences and Wittgenstein's Builders," John Perry's Presidential Address to the Pacific Division APA (April, 1994).

(5) Jonathan Cohen's (UC, San Diego) webpage, lots of online papers, many of which concern the philosophy of color.

(6) Podcasts of Hubert Dreyfus's (UC, Berkeley) courses on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Fall, 2007) and Division II (Spring, 2008).

Quote of the Week

2008-04-01T22:19:00.000-05:00

Dear Ogden,

I am very sorry indeed I cannot send you the supplements. There can be no thought of printing them. What they contain is this: When I had finished the book roughly there remained certain propositions — about a hundred — about which I was doubtful whether I should take them in or not. These propositions were — partly — different versions of those now contained in the book; for it had often happened that I had written down a proposition in many different forms, when the same thought had occurred to me in different ways during the long time I worked at that business. Another part of the supplements are merely sketches of propositions which I thought I might some day take up again if their thoughts should ever revive in me. That means: the supplements are exactly what must not be printed. Besides THEY REALLY CONTAIN NO ELUCIDATIONS AT ALL, but are still less clear than the rest of my propositions. As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do?! If you were to squeeze me out like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me. To let you print the Ergänzungen would be no remedy. It would be just as if you had gone to a joiner and ordered a table and he had made the table too short and now would sell you the shavings and sawdust and other rubbish along with the table to make up for its shortness. (Rather than print the Ergänzungen to make the book fatter leave a dozen white sheets for the reader to swear into when he has purchased the book and can't understand it.) (May 5, 1922; Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein to C. K. Ogden, p. 46)

I can't resist a little commentary: (1) When I first read this, the last sentence made me laugh out loud.

(2) I first read this in Conant's "Method of the Tractatus." After quoting from the letter, Conant writes,

These supplementary passages [Ergänzungen] "are exactly what must not be printed," for they contain no elucidations. What is wrong with adding passages that contain no elucidations? Here is a preview of the answer to this question, which this essay will defend: to add passages to the work that do not subserve its elucidatory aim would be to compromise its fundamental conception. (p. 379)

I think it's pretty obvious that Conant bends the letter to fit his interpretation. First, Wittgenstein does not say that the supplements must not be printed because they contain no elucidations. He says they must not be printed because they're either redundant or incomplete. He then says, "Besides, they really contain no elucidations at all." Second, even if Conant is right about Erläuterung (elucidation) in the Tractatus (see the last section of MT), Wittgenstein doesn't mean that here. Ogden had requested that the supplements be added to the book to make it clearer. Wittgenstein responds that the supplements are even less clear than the rest, so there's no point in adding them. (Of course, even if Conant's interpretation of the letter is wrong, his interpretation of the Tractatus is unaffected. "The Method of the Tractatus" is a very long and very complicated article to which the letter is mere window dressing.)

Sinnlosigkeit und Unsinn

2008-03-31T10:16:00.000-05:00

In the last "Quote of the Week," I quoted the following line from the Notebooks:

"The watch is sitting on the table" is senseless [sinnlos]! (p. 70)

In the comments to that post, I wondered whether, in the Notebooks, Wittgenstein had yet to distinguish between Sinnlosigkeit and Unsinn. After taking a look, I'm not quite sure what conclusion to draw.

In addition to the line quoted above, the word 'sinnlos' occurs only twice in the pre-Tractatus notebooks:

Vormittag bei der "Marodenvisite" wegen meines Fußes: Muskelzerrung. Nicht viel gearbeitet. Nietzsche Band 8 gekauft und darin gelesen. Bin stark berührt von seiner Feindschaft gegen das Christentum. Denn auch in seinen Schriften ist etwas Wahrheit enthalten. Gewiß, das Christentum ist der einzige sichere Weg zum Glück; aber wie wenn einer dies Glück verschmähte?! Könnte es nicht besser sein, unglücklich, im hoffnungslosen Kampf gegen die äußere Welt zugrunde zu gehen? Aber ein solches Leben ist sinnlos. Aber warum nicht ein sinnloses Leben führen? Ist es unwürdig? — Wie verträgt es sich mit dem streng solipsistischen Standpunkt? Was muß ich aber tun daß mein Leben mir nicht verloren geht? Ich muß mir seiner immer — des Geistes immer — bewußt sein. —. (December 8, 1914)

A proposition of physics is obviously senseless [sinnlos] if its application is not given. What sort of sense would it make to say: "k = m.p"? (p. 67; June 20, 1915)

The first passage does not appear in the published version of the notebooks. That use of 'sinnlos' (viz., "such a life is senseless") is not the technical use in the Tractatus (as an aside, this is the first evidence I've seen that Wittgenstein read Nietzsche; by the way, does anyone know what 'Marodenvisite' means; it's not in my dictionary). And the use of 'sinnlos' in the second passage appears to be closer to the 'unsinnig' of the Tractatus.

However, Wittgenstein's lone use of 'senseless' in the "Notes on Logic" does look like the 'sinnlos' of the Tractatus:

Signs of the form "p v ~p" are senseless, but not the proposition "(p).p v ~p". If I know that this rose is either red or not red, I know nothing. The same holds of all ab-functions. (Notebooks, p. 104)

Wittgenstein's use of 'Unsinn' (pp. 57, 84) and 'unsinnig' (pp. 2, 11, 16, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50) is much more frequent. He also uses 'nonsense' and 'nonsensical' quite a few times in the "Notes on Logic" and "Notes Dictated to Moore." Two are of particular interest:

But though a particular proposition "p or not-p" has no meaning, a general proposition "for all p's, p or not-p" has a meaning because this does not contain the nonsensical function "p or not-p" but the function "p or not-q" just as "for all x's xRx" contains the function "xRy". (Notebooks, pp. 94-5)

A tautology (not a logical proposition) is not nonsense in the same sense in which, e.g., a proposition in which words which have no meaning occur is nonsense. What happens in it is that all its simple parts have meaning, but it is such that the connexions between these paralyse or destroy one another, so that they are all connected only in some irrelevant manner. (Notebooks, p. 118)

In these, Wittgenstein is using 'nonsensical' and 'nonsense' where, on the distinction the Tractatus draws between senselessness and nonsense, 'senseless' and 'senselessness' would be appropriate.

McGinn Article Online

2008-03-30T13:12:00.000-05:00

Marie McGinn, "Saying and Showing and the Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought" (Harvard Review of Philosophy, 2001).

Quote of the Week

2008-03-26T14:03:00.000-05:00

If, e.g., I call some rod "A", and a ball "B", I can say that A is leaning against the wall, but not B. Here the internal nature of A and B comes into view.
[...]
"The watch is sitting on the table" is senseless [sinnlos]! (Notebooks, p. 70; entry on June 22, 1915)