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Title: Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition) by Ludwig Wittgenstein ISBN: 0-02-428810-1 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.33 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (23 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant: The Linguistic Philosophy of Everyday Life
Comment: This is obviously one of the most important books of 20th cent. philosophy, so no point in restating its fine points of linguistic theory etc.
More important (to me) is how it makes you feel, particularly since its enduring value will be defined, not by how professional philosophers think of it, but by how its received by ordinary people (who work in drab offices, let's say).
Wittgenstein unfolds a strange dialogue with himself and with hypothetical interlocutors. There are various problems presented. But just when your head is hurting from all the possibilities, like a Zen master, LW just disolves the problems with a subtle aphorism. It's a strange feeling, I tell you! Similar to reading eastern philosophy.
His aphorisms such as "philosophy shows the fly out of the bottle" or "understanding language is like understanding a way of life" or (the best) "if a lion had language, we would not understand him" have a way of getting under your skin and forcing you to really observe the world in a new way. The other day I was speaking with a female attorney about hostile workplace law and how language can be a tool for keeping women out of certain jobs, and I kept thinking, "This is straight Wittgenstein." In fact a lot of "postmodern" ideas about language can be traced to this book.
Whether Wittgenstein's ideas are technically right seems of more concern to linguists and psychologists. For me, good philosophers give the world fresh insights and new models. And P.I. certainly does that. If you aren't familiar with his work, I would check out Derek Jarman's elegant film "Wittgenstein" (screenplay by Terry Eagleton), then flip through this book and see if your perspective doesn't change and if you don't suddenly break up the next office meeting shouting: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world!"
Rating: 5
Summary: Study guide to the mind, language
Comment: Could this have been a better book? Philosophical Investigations and Darwin's "Origin of Species" were both the "precipitate" of 20 years of personal exploration of intellectual problems. Darwin had reasons for publishing his work that Wittgenstein did not have. Alfred Wallace independently discovered some of Darwin's ideas, forcing Darwin to rush his work to print. In contrast, Wittgenstein lamented the poverty and darkness of his time and had to hope that his ideas might be appreciated in the future. Given the difficult conditions of its construction, it is hard to fault the form of this book.
Is there anyone who could have been the equivalent for Wittgenstein of what Wallace was for Darwin? Darwin and Wallace could both get out in the world and make the types of observations needed to discover the same ideas. Wittgenstein had to create the Tractatus, an experience that eventually led him to reject the conventional approach for trying to explain language. However, other philosophers seemed to be immunized against coming to interpret the Tractatus in the way that Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was dealing with ideas that were also starting to be incorporated into other intellectual disciplines, so could Wittgenstein's Wallace have come from another discipline such as computer science?
Maybe Alan Turing could have tried to program computers to use human language and in so doing taken another path to the conclusion that formal logical systems cannot account for human language behavior. Unfortunately, when Wittgenstein was done working on the material that was later published in Philosophical Investigations, the first computer programs were just being run. Turing was interested in the idea of artificial intelligence, but the computer hardware was not there in time. That only one man was able to make the intellectual journey described in Philosophical Investigations is the great story behind the story.
The problems Wittgenstein confronted "from inside", by way of introspection, are the problems that neurobiologists are now confronting "from the outside". For example, Wittgenstein used the "duckrabbit" as an example of "aspect seeing". The drawing of the "duckrabbit" can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made explicit the analogy between the meaning problem for human language and our mental power of aspect seeing. Sure, we can write a definition for a word to put into a dictionary, but does that mean that we have "captured" THE meaning of the word? No more than seeing one aspect of the duckrabbit means that we know its meaning.
Wittgenstein was horrified by the way Freudians had abused the term "unconscious", so he mostly avoided using it. "We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike." This one sentence indicates the main point of the entire work and gives a short answer to the question of what went wrong in the Tractatus. Philosophical Investigations is a workbook in which Wittgenstein attempts to march across this central idea in so many ways that eventually the disease of our former way of thinking about language is cured.
In the last section of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein condemns psychology for its conceptual confusion and barrenness, noting that psychologists get bewitched by their experimental methods. Psychology, as a black-box study of the mind, must fail as surely as do the attempts by philosophers to describe mind and language as formal systems.
Only after the death of Wittgenstein did the black-box of the mind begin to be opened and understood well enough to start the process of explaining mind in terms of brain physiology. We now know that the human ability to think of something and form a mental image of it (which gets extensive investigation in Philosophical Investigations) is mediated by the spread of activity down into the lowest domains of the visual cortex in a way that reverses the flow of information that makes perception possible. We can now begin to understand aspect seeing in terms of the existence of mutually competitive semantic networks in brains, only one of which can stabilize within consciousness at one time. Our experience of word meaning is just a special example of how our brains deal with fluid concepts and can shrink associative networks around individual words or relax them to encompass phrases or entire sentences.
Just as no living organism makes sense outside of the network of life within which it is embedded, nothing within human language has meaning outside of the semantic networks that form inside the brains of human children. Of course, most of the activity of these networks takes place within what George Lakoff calls the "cognitive unconscious", the ocean of unseen brain activity upon which our introspectively accessible and behaviorally expressible brain activity floats. It will be a fitting tribute to Wittgenstein's courage and vision if the neuroscientists who are working from the outside of the brain to reveal the workings of the cognitive unconscious will be able to join with those philosophers who are working on Wittgenstein's research project and building towards the same goal from the inside. Towards this end, Philosophical Investigations deals with issues that are still very much on our "to do" list.
Is it useful to read some of Frege's work or Wittgenstein's Tractatus before reading Philosophical Investigations? An alternative is to make use of the secondary literature, for example Garth Hallett's thick Companion to Philosophical Investigations. I suggest opening up Philosophical Investigations and pretending that you are sitting right in front of Wittgenstein in a classroom. When he says, "now think about this," put the book down and think about it! When he asks a question, write it out in your own words and then write out your answer. If you see a word or phrase that confuses you, write it down in your personal glossary along with the location in the text where you find it. Check in Hallett or online for help with these confusing words. Think in the direction that Wittgenstein pointed.
Rating: 5
Summary: Recursive Dialogue
Comment: A useful way of understanding the later Wittgenstein is to take him as a rhetorician. That is, by taking him as saying that understanding in general is analogous to going up to someone and having a conversation, one may grasp that understanding involves a triangulation between the speaker, the audience, and the world, which last is comprised of these conversations or language games.
As the meaning of the speaker's utterance is inseparable from how the audience takes this utterance, so the world is inseparable from utterances in general, for utterances are the very effects the world has caused.
So,I hear you speak in the way that I do because I have expectations about what you're going to say. Indeed, because I can test my expectations of what I think you're going to say against the actual outcome of what you did say, the concept of "mistake" thereby becomes meaningful. Whenever the concept of "mistake" is meaningful in this manner, I escape a would-be private world wherein other minds are merely the projection of my own ego.
I'm adjusting my expectations of what's coming next even as you speak. Moreover, you have expectations about how I'm going to take what you say. However, if you hear me respond in a way that surprises you, you may want to make an adjustment in the way that you're speaking to me so that you modify my expectations. Perhaps then I'll better know what to expect next. You, after all, expect me to hear you in the way you intend, and when my response indicates otherwise (by surprising you),you'll want to make sure that I understand how you wish me to proceed. In this way, we create,a posteriori, a means of understanding rather than depend on some reservoir of meaning that exists beforehand, in a priori relation to our utterances.
The better I understand either you or the world, the further I should be able to proceed without great surprises. A surprise on my part,however, indicates that perhaps I should reconsider something that I thought I had grasped earlier. In light of the unexpected, my earlier response may prove less useful now--on its basis, I did not anticipate this.
No response is ever truly wrong, though, for each was at least useful at some point along the way, and, taken together, each makes up the object of our ongoing discourse. However, those reponses that prove most useful are those that, by minimizing surprises, let me know how to go on.
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Title: Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Routledge Classics) by Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Francis Pears, Brian McGuinness, Bertrand Russell ISBN: 0415254086 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein ISBN: 0061316865 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 06 October, 1972 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Language, Truth and Logic by Alfred J. Ayer ISBN: 0486200108 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1952 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Blue & Brown Books by Ludwig Wittgenstein ISBN: 0061312118 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 July, 1942 List Price(USD): $14.50 |
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Title: Wittgenstein Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cyril Barrett ISBN: 0520013549 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: June, 1967 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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