“It seems so simple when I explain it, but people are too educated in inferior logic to see this clearly.”
did jakob just say that? rubs eyes and looks again yeah, i think he did.
wittgenstein, russell, carnap, ayer, or schlick… any of you guys wanna handle this?
[ crickets ]
shit. i don’t wanna do this, man. it’s very complicated and i’m too lazy to go the distance. why did you have to say that, jakob? why?
i reckon there are worse things i could be doing now. okay, a few preliminary questions. if it does, why, and how, can/does language make sense? what makes a statement meaningful, and what makes a statement true or false. now remember, a statement can still be meaningful while being true, false, or neither. what i’m asking here is what distinguishes a sensible statement from a nonsensical statement.
don’t go looking for positivist or linguist quotes to answer this. i need you to explain in your own words so i can be sure you think you understand what you are saying. there are several ways to answer this but no matter how you do it, you can only end up at wittgenstein’s conclusion after he revised his tractatus theory.
the short story is, once upon a time philosophers thought that language mirrored the atomic facts of the world, meaning, the world consists of facts (which are things, events, processes) and language can accurately represent these facts. they thought that the logical form of the world was mirrored by the logical form of language… that basically anything that can happen in the world could be described and explained with language.
but then they arrived at a problem. they tried to create a perfectly logical language… one that would function according to rules which could be accounted for by a complete set of axioms. then they found out that such a system couldn’t exist, since every set of axioms must rely on more axioms, ad infinitum. in plain terms, this meant that what a statement ‘means’ cannot be clarified only by the definitions of the words themselves, as this process of defining would never end; jakob is dutch. what does ‘jakob’, ‘is’ and ‘dutch’ mean. ‘jakob’ means (a) ‘a dude that makes mad beats on the beat-box’, (b) ‘is’ is a copula that connects a subject to a predicate, and (c) ‘dutch’ is ‘a nationality’. well what is an (a), (b), and (c), then?
see where this is going yet? without using a tautology, one would never finish defining the meaning of the original statement, because the atomic parts of the statement must also be defined… and the parts of those parts, and so on.
now, you can’t possibly know what a statement means unless you know what all the atomic parts mean… and since that’s impossible, we cannot use purely logical criteria to evaluate our language. we have to use some other method too to determine whether or not a language is meaningful.
how do we get around this. good question. i’m glad you asked. well actually i asked for you but that’s no problem. i’m happy to help.
we have to completely revise our understanding of language and how it works. being the case that we can no longer make language an EXACT logic, we must abandon the notion that ‘meaning’ is a perfectly logical thing… which also means we must abandon the notion that a perfectly logical thing can be expressed with language. it works both ways.
wittgenstein realized this in the post-tractatus period. he then claimed that meaning is not found ‘behind’ language, rather in its ‘use’. this consideration is similar to his picture theory but that’s not important right now.
what’s important is that… and this is a splendid irony… you are okay with VO and you haven’t broken any rules. relax. but you didn’t know there were rules which existed and which could be broken, so you didn’t arrive at your VO for the right reasons. you assumed what you are saying is meaningful in some logical way- what you want to call a ‘higher’ logic or some such nonsense- while in fact, you accidentally violated the original rules that were believed to exist for language… and pretended like you did so on purpose after the fact. don’t sweat it. philosophers do this all the time.
what you have to realize and accept is that much of your VO language simply cannot be meaningful for others because others understand its words and statements in different ways than you. this is an unavoidable prolem with philosophical language games, and the primary reason why positivists claim that what can be said clearly is part of the language of the natural sciences, NOT philosophy. philosophy isn’t about making statements of facts because if it was, it wouldn’t be philosophy… it’d be inductive and deductive like science. but this doesn’t detract from philosophy. it only changes its role.
philosophy is meaningful but not in the way that statements of fact are meaningful. philosophy is meaningful like poetry is meaningful; it is emotive and pictorial more so than indicative.
you are a talented and intelligent poet, jakob, full of a love and enthusiasm for life… no doubt about it. you’re a philosopher too, of course, but i’ve filed you away as a pre-positivism era philosopher who isn’t yet aware of the inherent problems of philosophical language. or i should say, philosophical use of language.
summary:
- first we thought language could represent everything in and about the world and express this stuff clearly.
- then we realized things don’t necessarily have to be logically clear in order to be meaningful.
- next we realized that this changed the role of philosophy.
- then we continued philosophy as if nothing we just realized makes any difference.
- finally, we got on philosophhy forums and began doing philosophy, and everybody nodded their way through what everyone else said- ‘yeah, i totally agree. i know what you mean. that’s absolutely right. very well said.’ etc., etc.- without knowing all of this apparant agreement was bullshit.
but we didn’t know that we didn’t know what everyone else meant… and that’s the wonder of it, jakob. that’s the poetry. that’s the beautiful aspect of what makes us human. we don’t need to know wtf is going on to still love doing philosophy together.
“i am sitting with jakob in the garden; he says again and again ‘i know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. ilp arrives and hears this, and i tell ilp: ‘this fellow isn’t insane. we are only doing philosophy’.”- wittgenstein