Wittgenstein and language

As someone who's fascinated by language and languages, I've really enjoyed studying Wittgenstein this semester because of his focus on language.

When I first read in the Tractatus his comment that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," I thought about how learning new languages can open up new ways of thinking and new ways of expressing thins, indeed, opening up the limits of our world. I know Wittgenstein didn't really talk about difference between languages, or what it may mean to speak multiple languages; he rather focused on language in general and what it structure and use mean for our concepts.

But all his talk of language made me appreciate language even more, the fact that it's a tool we use to be able to communicate with others. I feel some people may not even think about the fact that we create the language we use as we use it, and sometimes people tell me they're just not good at languages when learning foreign languages. I'd love to be able to learn all the languages of the world, but unfortunately that just isn't possible. I think it's amazing to learn all the different ways in which you can express yourself and in which you can communicate with others. Learning another language is also a way of learning a different way of seeing the world.

Maybe it took learning another language than his native German, English, for Wittgenstein to have really developed his use theory of meaning and his notion of language games. For it's often not until you have to learn another language that you really think about language at all. And it's in learning languages that you realize meaning's not all about reference. So many expressions and words you can't understand the meaning of until you've heard how they're used and used them yourself. This is something you realize when you go into a foreign country and, with your textbook knowledge of the language, can't understand much of what people say.

Wittgenstein and religion

In reading Kenny's chapter on Wittgenstein's "Ethics, Life, and Faith", it seems that Wittgenstein describes religion as a sort of language game, as is anything else we do. The language of religion has to be understood differently than the language used in science, say, because it's part of a different language game. Wittgenstein says, regarding religious narratives:

Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it (261).

...historical proof (the historical-proof game) us irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else (261).

What's more, Wittgenstein equates religious belief to a commitment to a system of reference, like all our beliefs. And this belief is more of a "way of living" (263), not necessarily something you believe or don't believe by choice. It's as though you have to grow up in the right environment to believe a certain religion (or not to believe). This seems an accurate description, for most people 'believe' in whatever religion they grew up in. For example, most people from mainly Christian countries are Christian, most people from mainly Muslim countries are Muslim, most people from Buddhist countries are Buddhist, and so on. Even those who profess to have really chosen their beliefs, to have come to see that such-and-such religion was the 'answer' to life, subscribe to the religion that is the religion of their community, their family, or their society. And for those who may have grown up in a certain religion and begin to believe in another (or not to believe), it seems there have to have been certain conditions in the way they grew up that made it acceptable and even desirable to critically question religion.

So religion's just another language game, one whose rules and beliefs are determined by a certain system of reference. What, then, of ethics? Wittgenstein remains rather silent on the topic, saying it's one that can only be talked about in nonsense. He doesn't equate ethics to a language game. Maybe this is because Wittgenstein doesn't want to make ethics relative. Throughout his discussion of language games he's insisted that there's no essence that determines the nature of concepts, it's all in the way they're used. If he were to extend this theory to ethics, one might be able to read him as a moral relativist, as someone who thinks that our considerations of 'right' and 'wrong' depend on the way in which the concepts are used in the particular language game of whatever community we're in.

So though Wittgenstein wants desperately to get rid of the idea that one can get at essences (by saying they don't exist), he seems stuck at ethics, and doesn't know what he can do with it. He says that ethics , "if anything, is supernatural" (253). You can't make ethical propositions. It's hard to explain what it really means to say that something is right or wrong, and ethical issues aren't clear-cut.

Wittgenstein the film

Our class just finished watching director Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein a little over an hour ago.

Wittgenstein seems very much an other in this film. At the beginning we see him as a child introducing the rest of his adult family. The child Wittgenstein stays with us throughout the film, as a very different person than the older Wittgenstein, one unplagued by anxiety and with a seeming clearness about the world.

Maybe that's the message we're supposed to get. The younger Wittgenstein, the one who thought he had all the answers, is carefree. It's when he gets older that he realizes the answers he had don't really work. We still seem him throughout the film, carrying his flag emblazoned with the Tractatus phrase: "The world is all that is the case". It's the younger Wittgenstein who thinks he can explain things to the Martian; at the end, it's the unmasked 'Martian' who explains things to Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein doesn't feel at home in Cambridge, so he goes to Norway to sequester himself away and do philosophy. He wants to be like a 'real' person, so he volunteers and enlists to fight in the first world war. He leaves his post at Cambridge to get away from that life and just go teach at a school in rural Austria. He attempts to find work as a manual laborer in the Soviet Union, but is disappointed as he finds they only would want him as a philosopher. At Cambridge the others clearly make fun of him, though he does find love--though it's a love that society condemns, and he feels shameful about this.

Can we integrate this biography into his philosophical work? The words of the Martian at the end seem to suggest that Wittgenstein's life struggles and philosophical struggles were intimately related. As a young philosopher, Wittgenstein thought he had solved everything, had solved all the problems of philosophy. He had created a logical world which made sense, in which everything had its place. As he got older, however, Wittgenstein realized that this ideal world was just that--an ideal, one in which nothing could be done. And Wittgenstein wanted to be able to be part of the world. So he decided to go about investigating the real world, the rough one, the one in which one could act. But he still clung to that vision of the logical world, the one in which everything had its place. Just like the older Wittgenstein in life: he wanted to belong, to feel part of the world, so he tried to be ordinary and do ordinary things but still felt out of place. His youthful dreams of a perfect world were shattered, and the rest of his life he had to spend trying to make sense of what this shattered, confusing world is.

Wittgenstein and changing one's frame of reference

In response to Megan's blog about Wittgenstein and Tillich:

I wonder if Wittgenstein could argue that having rational criteria for belief is just a frame of reference we have because we were brought up in a certain way. Of course, you can't argue this if one holds that humans are, by nature, rational. In this case rationality would be some kind of genetic, unchangeable frame of reference.

But I still think that one could have a rational frame of reference and change some frames of reference, at least ones that didn't completely contradict one another, as a result of some experience. Yes, though, it seems that a religious conversion would be just this sort of contradiction. And I'm not arguing that an argument such as Tillich's should convince anyone. It just may be that for certain people, like you, and like me, for instance, such religious 'experiences' couldn't convince us. So those who are convinced, even if they live within a rational framework, may be living in a larger system of reference that allows such contradictions to rationality. There may be certain conditions on what it will take to allow a contradiction, i.e., it has to be a certain type of experience that causes such and such an effect on them.

You could look at it from another perspective, say, of a believer in god such as Tillich. Maybe it's the case that his frame of reference doesn't allow him to see the world, even to see rationality, without a belief in, or a feeling of, the divine. Maybe he sees it as irrational to not hold a belief in god in spite of an overwhelming feeling of fear at knowing one will one day die. It may be that he can't see it your way because he doesn't have the same frames of reference as you: you are both, as it were, living in two different worlds. You can't even imagine holding something that's outside your frame of reference.

Can we trust language?

Language sets the same traps for everybody: the terrible network of well-worn wrong tracks. So we see one person after another going the same way, and we know where they will turn aside, where they will go straight ahead, without noticing a fork, etc., etc. So what I should do is to put up signs in all the places wherever wrong turnings branch off, to help people over the dangerous places (Kenny 55).

If we're supposed to get the meaning of words from the way in which we use them, what are we to make of this passage? Is Wittgenstein saying that we can't trust our language to tell us what things mean?

It seems to me that what he's trying to say is that the structure of language makes it seem that things are different than they are. It's the way in which we use words similarly within language, that is, as verbs or nouns or whatever it may be, but that this leads us into false assumptions.

How is Wittgenstein to show us the way, then? The answer seems to be that Wittgenstein just wants to warn us of what kinds of mistakes we may make. But is Wittgenstein holding two contradictory positions, one that says language confuses us, and one that says we need to just look at how language is ordinarily used to free us from this confusion?

We run into problems when we make inferences from the structure of language about the nature of concepts.

But it does seems hard to be able to truly just look at the so-called 'ordinary' use of language, especially if one has studied philosophy. Where's the limit that separates 'ordinary' language from philosophical language? And how are we supposed to recognize this so we know when we're getting into meaningless confusions?

Certainty

Is it that Wittgenstein wants to eliminate talk of certainty as being focused on some metaphysical fact or object? In Kenny's chapter Scepticism and Certainty Wittgenstein seems to dismiss the idea that our being certain about something is based on anything other than our unflinching, undoubting belief in such a thing or state of affairs.

For Wittgenstein, our certainty comes about through experience:

This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say 'learns:' After he has seen this and this and heard that and that; he is not in a position to doubt whether...(244).

With his final comment in this section we see that Wittgenstein indeed does want to eliminate talk of certainty as some complex concept. Wittgenstein insists, as he does with other concepts such as the inner/outer and necessity, that certainty is nothing more than part of a language game. Our certainty is nothing more than what we've learned from experience, and what our experience has taught us couldn't possibly be any other way:

They [people] have always learnt from experience; and we can see from their actions that they believe certain things definitely, whether they express this belief or not. By this I naturally do not want to say that men should behave like this, but only that they do behave like this.

And here we also see Wittgenstein's insistence on philosophy's task to be one of describing rather than explaining. Philosophers have been asking too many questions about what certainty is, how anyone can actually have certainty, when all it is, according to Wittgenstein, is the way we use it: certainty is just what we have no reason to doubt, and can think of no reason to doubt. To solve philosophical problems, we need to stop looking for the complex sorts of solutions philosophers have been worrying about and just look around us at the real world.

Language and the mind

I was reading over the Kenny chapter on the Inner and Outer, and came across this paragraph:

I saw this man years ago: now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored up there in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high time they were upset (210).

He continues this same idea a bit farther on:

The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system? (211)

I've had issues with what this seems to imply. Is Wittgenstein saying that there's nothing our brains store, it's all just a linguistic fact, the fact of our remembering? This seems incredibly hard to maintain. How can he explain what is it to remember, to know something? I just can't see how there could be a "psychological regularity," as he calls it, without any correspondent "physiological regularity." It seems there has to be something in our mind, in the physical makeup of our brain, that allows for what we call "remembering."

I'm not trying to say that there has to be some mental object in the mind. And maybe that's what Wittgenstein is really arguing against when he denies this "physiological regularity." But his way of saying it makes it seem that he wants to deny any physical cause of psychological states. Ok, so Wittgenstein says that this should upset our ideas of causality, but I'm just wondering what good his account does. Would it really matter that there's some sort of physical activity going on in the nervous system that constitutes our psychological states? What harm does this do to his theory? It's not like there's some separate physical activity going on in the brain that we think about, and this is what we call thinking. No, it is this very physical activity that is thinking.