which was to demolish Cartesian phenomenology and dissolve mind-body problems, — sime

What a petty aim - I would most certainly hope that wasn't his aim. No, his aim was to introduce a new way of doing philosophy. That it dismantled whatever - that's secondary, and ultimately really irrelevant. Also, he very likely undertook all this to clear the way for what truly matters, which were matters of value - which he almost never spoke of. Everything else is formed of petty matters that aren't of great relevance or importance - except in the minds of some academics who came after him and inherited his philosophy.

I'm not sure why this is the case? I'm not sure what our language is doing other than, at least in some sense, accurately depicting the world around us. It might be the case that there are certain expressions in language that are not just mere ostensive definitions, but the fact that language has meaning, seems to indicate to me its meaningful in virute of something about our experiences -- and these experiences are given content by the world (considering they are not in a vacuum). — Marty

Wittgenstein would say that this is the fundamental metaphysical illusion - the bewitchment of our intelligence by language.

Language isn't meant just to depict (or represent) the world around you, but rather to allow you to act in the world around you in certain ways. "Give me the brick", "pass me the apple", "it costs $5", "I'll be at your place after 5:00" etc. Those aren't descriptions or depictions of anything, they are ways of interacting with the world. You learn these concepts by using them to get things done in the world. It is the common practice that gives them meaning.

Sure, language can also be used to describe something for a certain purpose to someone. But that's just one of its purposes, and not the only one, contrary to the metaphysical representationalist account.

So it's wrong to go from the usefulness of language, to the idea that it therefore reflects some other underlying reality.

I'm perplexed by an idea that takes there to be anything outside of the "empirical, conceptual"
(which I take to be taken together: experience.) — Marty

Refer to this post and further replies.

And Nietzsche was right. It was Christianity that first brought the scientific attitude into the world and justified it as understanding God's laws. It was Christianity that extolled reason and its supremacy over the passions - man the rational animal, most like God, who is rational. Christianity was responsible for the eradication of superstition, sacrifices, violence, and the whole plethora of means of keeping the world enchanted. Violence played a foundational role in human societies, and Christianity rendered this foundational mechanism impossible or worse - ineffective. Nihilism is now the unavoidable conclusion for those who reject the Kingdom of God that Jesus offered. — Agustino

You'll make Nietzsche write another book from beyond the grave.

For Nietzsche, nihilism is denial of the relevance of the world, the denial of metaphysic and value of the world in favour of a transcendent force which does the work. In this respect, Christianity is just a bad as the traditions which replaced it. While Christianity might have removed a plethora of traditions which held the scapegoating of the world, it still posits a similar denial of the world as found in various traditions with where a force in some other world is seen as the definition of the world.

Nihilism is not a conclusion drawn from the rise of Christianity, it's the feature of transcendent metaphysics which has locked man out of understanding the world as responsible and meaningful in itself. Rather than an unavoidable conclusion, it is a grave mistake made many, many years ago, in the definition of a metaphysics which held meaning and value have to enter he world by a transcendent force. Nihilism wasn't a new world made by the abandonment of old traditions, whether it be in the shift from older traditions to Christianity or in the shift from Christianity to secularism, but rather those transcendent metaphysics traditions is themselves (the secular version being consumerism), which hold that meaning and value is defined by some other than with world.

His picture-theory is a 'correspondence' and while he doesn't really offer a solution, I like this: — TimeLine

I think Wittgenstein proved quite definitely that the idea of an isomorphism between language and reality, or that language can act as a picture for reality is nonsensical.....

Pierce... the fly trapped in the bottle — Agustino

You folk must be thinking of the dyadic semiosis of Saussure and not the triadic relation of Peirce. Big difference.

Value would be instantiated in the Peircean sign relation as the very purpose embodied by a relation. It would be the reason for the relation to even be. Hence ... pragmatism.

For example, seeing red - the ability to make a sharp discrimination of hue in this particular part of the visible light spectrum - is of ecological value to a primate. Clearly so, as colour vision was first lost (in a nocturnal ancestor) and then re-evolved (as later primates became diurnal foragers again).

For linguistic humans, red can come to be a higher level cultural symbol of something. It can come to stand for blood, or danger, or arousal. So the sight of redness then mediates for a cultural value. We see something further in the presence of a daub of red lipstick or a red warning light.

The dichotomy of factual vs conceptual, or empirical vs grammatical, is about "cold rationality". So it is about the learnt human habit of excluding subjective feeling so as to maximise the advantage of objective, disembodied, reasoning.

There is pragmatic value in going up another level in terms of semiosis, leaving biology and individual psychology behind and becoming more purely the creatures of a rationalising or scientific culture.

So value is still embodied in the relation. It is the whole point of the deal. It is the taking of a view which yields some advantage. But the rational ideal is one that is "dispassionate" in leaving behind the subjectiveness of our biological selves, and even our traditional social selves, so as to rise to become this "totally objective" self who now values some new set of ideal things .... like beauty, good and truth. :)

Value never disappeared from the equation. It was just culturally reimagined in a way that feels pretty damn elusive to us biological creatures.

It was Christianity that first brought the scientific attitude into the world and justified it as understanding God's laws. It was Christianity that extolled reason and its supremacy over the passions - man the rational animal, most like God, who is rational. — Agustino

I would have said these occurred prior to Christianity, with the ancient Greeks. The gospels (which I count as the essence of Christianity) say nothing about the scientific attitude or the supremacy of reason.

Christianity was responsible for the eradication of superstition, sacrifices, violence, and the whole plethora of means of keeping the world enchanted. — Agustino

In the West, maybe. The progressive disenchantment of the world has been an ongoing project within Western civilization. This civilization has been predominately Christian, it is true, but it does not follow from that that the eradications you mention were brought about solely by Christianity. It surely played a part, but it has its own superstitions, sacrifices, violences and enchantments.

Questions of value cannot be tackled by analyzing our experience and looking for causes. Neither can they be tackled by analyzing our concepts. Everything that concerns life and the living is neither empirical nor conceptual. — Agustino

That's right and Michel Henry gives a phenomenological account of this primal dimension as the affective, It is also, according to Henry, the invisible.

Interesting idea. Where does the value stem from, then? Internal experience? Social interaction? — Marchesk

The value stems from feeling.

I think Wittgenstein proved quite definitely that the idea of an isomorphism between language and reality, or that language can act as a picture for reality is nonsensical, — Agustino

As I understand it Wittgenstein's 'picture theory' of meaning posits that the conceptual grammar (I use this term you used earlier, I think correctly, to distinguish from the merely formal grammar of linguistics) inherent in language is isomorphic with the conceptual grammar of experience, that is, reality.

Regardless, this is precisely the kind of Scholastic quibbles that are actually irrelevant to value. All you see is empirical and conceptual things, and you call that truth. You even try to subjugate value to empirical concerns :s

The value stems from feeling. — Janus

I think many don't understand how value cashes out in relation to the other sides of life. This "blindness" to the centrality of value to life, such as what your work is, how you live, what you pursue etc. is often obscured. People don't understand that this attitude towards the world comes before experience and not after. Changing this attitude, that's the job of spiritual experience, meditation, prayer, poetry, art, etc. Without this, there seems to me to be no energy available for doing other things. You may want to paint, but if you lack the motivation, you can't do it, regardless of how much you want to and how necessary it is seen to be. Life without value is dead - it's a machine, a mere mechanism. And yet it puzzles me to no end that some people just cannot become aware of this.

I would comment on more things and in more detail, but I'm going to sleep first.

They are descriptions of the content of our experience which is fundamentally conceptual. That content is just a part of the world. So phrases like the ones you mentioned do have a use-value, of course, and language is learned and normative, but unless it has some correspodence with the worldly content then it'd be interpretation all the way down w.r.t what utterances mean. Which is to say, going to lead to an infinite regress. As well, if there was content which was nonconceptual, then we'd just fall for the myth of the given.

Representionalism in the sense of having a word which means something and an object it refers to is just a primitive form of both conceptualism and representionalism. That's isn't a sufficent characterization of that type of concept.

Life without value is dead - it's a machine, a mere mechanism. — Agustino

I agree, life without value is not life at all. And no one who is alive lives a life without value, whether positive or negative. Even a negative value, a disdain for life on account of its purported lack of meaning, is still a value (although it is not a valuable one ;) ).

Hume said you cannot get an "ought" from an "is". but this is pure bullshit; all our ises are replete with, and sometimes fraught with, oughts.

Regardless, this is precisely the kind of Scholastic quibbles that are actually irrelevant to value. All you see is empirical and conceptual things, and you call that truth. You even try to subjugate value to empirical concerns — Agustino

I realise you need to make this come out right for transcendent Christian metaphysics. But that's your loss. Wake me up when you are tired of being a historical curiosity.

I was only correcting your poor understanding of Peirce anyway.

Pierce... the fly trapped in the bottle — Agustino

Nice.

Wittgenstein made the factual (or empirical) - conceptual (or grammatical) distinction in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He doubled down on this distinction with his later philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, where he cemented the difference between philosophy and science, where the former was solely grammatical, and the latter was empirical. — Agustino

I'm not convinced that this is presented as a dichotomy by Wittgenstein. Science is surely not solely empirical, but rather has the form of a grammar for dealing with empirical language.

This touches on my own concerns regarding the incommensurability of conceptual schemes (paradigms, world views, language games... what have you). This has been an ongoing, unproductive discussion with @StreetlightX

I agree with what you said to @Marchesk about the difference between acquiring a new language and acquiring a language for the first time. Anthropologists immerse themselves in novel cultures in order to learn how the language is used to get mundane things done.

Language has meaning insofar as it is used to do things. Science is not only descriptive, but predictive; as an engineer Wittgenstein was well aware of how one takes talk of how things are and makes use of it. Hence his repeated mechanical metaphors: disengaged gears spinning, knobs that are not part of the mechanism and so on.

Hence Wittgenstein had nothing against what "private linguists" i.e. philosophers, express when they colloquially speak of inventing and using language in reference to their own sensations, rather Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot speak of inferring anything from or conveying anything with verbal expressions precipitated by immediate sensations, unless that is to say, a correlation of verbal behaviour to external matters of fact can be established and confirmed independently of the immediate mental contents in the minds of the speakers. — sime

So philosophy is language with the clutch disengaged.

While what cannot be said ought be passed over in silence, it remains that one can show what can not be said. Perhaps that is what Beethoven and Goethe could do.

Nice. — Banno

Haven't you read Cheryl Misak yet? Peirce (via Ramsey) was the one who showed Witti the way out of the bottle of logical atomism.

Really, you guys just keep cracking me up! :)

Thanks for the reference.

What? This time you plan to read it?

Questions of value cannot be tackled by analyzing our experience and looking for causes. Neither can they be tackled by analyzing our concepts. Everything that concerns life and the living is neither empirical nor conceptual. — Agustino

I can see the temptation in this.

Yet aren't we obligated to introduce analysis and conceptualisation and empiricism in order to value? Otherwise wouldn't our values "drop out of consideration as irrelevant"?

Perhaps.

Who said you were old and set in your ways? :)

I've poor eyes, I agree; might need new glasses.

I'm concerned to hear about your eyesight, but you seem to be able to read your screen somehow, so as a reminder....

Ramsey’s criticisms of Wittgenstein, I shall suggest, had an impact, as did his alternative. That alternative was a kind of pragmatism. By 1926 Ramsey was a full-on Peircean pragmatist. In the crucial time 1929–30, the last year of Ramsey’s life, when he and Wittgenstein were together in Cambridge and before Wittgenstein turned his back with finality on the Circle, Ramsey transmitted that Peircean pragmatism to Wittgenstein.

Moreover, I shall argue that Wittgenstein adopted, circa 1929, Ramsey’s pragmatist position on generalizations and hypotheticals, and then went on to extend Ramsey’s pragmatism to everyday
beliefs. But while Ramsey also extended pragmatism to all beliefs, he would have objected to the particular direction Wittgenstein took pragmatism, had he lived to see it.

My final suggestion will be that Wittgenstein in turn planted the seeds of pragmatism in the Vienna Circle, preparing at least some of them to explicitly turn to pragmatism.

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2946/2607

This review Consciousness: Where are Words? seems relevant.

I'm not convinced that this is presented as a dichotomy by Wittgenstein. Science is surely not solely empirical, but rather has the form of a grammar for dealing with empirical language. — Banno

Is the word "dichotomy" present in the part that you quoted from me? :P In the bit you quoted I referred to it as a distinction. That's how Wittgenstein treated it. I've referred to it as a dichotomy only when I meant to say that empirical & conceptual do not cover everything there is.

Science is surely not solely empirical, but rather has the form of a grammar for dealing with empirical language. — Banno

Of course, since science relies on language and conceptual grammar for its theories. But it is empirical in the sense that science deals with causes of real things or events in the world. Philosophy doesn't.

Yet aren't we obligated to introduce analysis and conceptualisation and empiricism in order to value? Otherwise wouldn't our values "drop out of consideration as irrelevant"? — Banno

I don't think so - I think values show themselves in the attitude we have towards the world, which comes prior to conceptualisation and empiricism. First I find myself having certain values, and those values determine what I want to do in the world, which determines how I engage with it and what is of significance to me. I cannot find what is of significance by analysing concepts or by studying physics.

While what cannot be said ought be passed over in silence, it remains that one can show what can not be said. Perhaps that is what Beethoven and Goethe could do. — Banno

The other interesting issue is why is it that value cannot be said? Is it because value is subjective, and cannot be intersubjectively (or objectively) verified - and there is no private language that can hold meaning?

I realise you need to make this come out right for transcendent Christian metaphysics. But that's your loss. Wake me up when you are tired of being a historical curiosity. — apokrisis

No, this actually has nothing to do in particular with Christian metaphysics, anymore than it does with Buddhist metaphysics, or pretty much any other religion or spiritual practice out there. Here's a fragment from Osho that treats many of the same points as me:

You cannot think about truth; either you know it or you don’t know it. How can you think about love? Either you love and know, or you don’t love and you don’t know. There is no third alternative. Nietzsche lived just in thoughts. Otherwise he had the potential of being a Gautam Buddha for the West. He had the capacity, the caliber, but the West has missed the very dimension of meditation. Their philosophers have remained only thinkers. The East has not produced great philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche - there is no parallel in the East. The East has never bothered about polishing, sharpening, thinking, knowing that by thinking you cannot arrive at your being, to your truth, to your godliness, to self-realization. Nietzsche lived a miserable life, full of worry, anxiety, anguish, angst. This is strange. Such a great thinker, but his life is nothing but anguish. Gautam Buddha may not have been such a great thinker. He was not, but his life was so calm, so quiet, so peaceful. And the strangest phenomenon is that the Western philosopher has been thinking, “What is truth?” and has never been able to find it. And the Eastern mystic, non-philosopher, has never been thinking about truth. He has been on the contrary, dissolving thoughts, getting out of the mind, finding a space in himself where no thought has ever entered. And in that space he has encountered God Himself. The Western philosopher creates great edifices of thought, but his whole life is so poor. — Osho

So it is useless that you blabber on about more and more technical refinements of some Pierceian theory or whatever, since theories do not change life - they do not make life more beautiful, they do not remove anxiety, etc. In other words, theories are irrelevant to value - we do not find value by means of theories.

The Western philosopher creates great edifices of thought, but his whole life is so poor. — Osho

One might add here, just like Peirce's life was poor, despite his great intellect. So of what use that intellect, if all his theories couldn't bring him peace?

If you are going to blather on about folk, you ought to at least spell their names right.

And this Osho ... have you been a fan of him long? Doesn’t really seem to be your usual sort. You think his life was some kind of shining example, eh? Tell us more. :D

:-d

If you are going to blather on about folk, you ought to at least spell their names right. — apokrisis

Done X-)

And this Osho ... have you been a fan of him long? — apokrisis

I first read Osho when I was 12-14, so yes. Not a "fan" as such, I disagree with him on a lot of things too. But not on the bit that I've quoted.

Doesn’t really seem to be your usual sort. — apokrisis

Yeah, of course it doesn't seem like it to you cause you never understood my position to begin with.

You think his life was some kind of shining example, eh? Tell us more. :D — apokrisis

Well his life certainly does seem to have been better than that of a lot of Western philosophers for that matter. But that's an aesthetic judgement. For example, Peirce was frequently depressed, easily irritated, angry, drank a lot, etc. doesn't sound like a great life to me.

I get it - there is well researched, academic evidence of a link between Peirce and Wittgenstein.

But I am not obligated to read such stuff, nor have I been motivated to do so by what I have read from you - things like that odd approach to mountain sizes and to modern logic leave me doubting its usefulness.

Nor is it central to this thread; Peirce was mentioned in a post attributing some particularly fly-ish ideas to him. The quip I quoted was an amusing response. End of story. Back to the thread.

I've referred to it as a dichotomy only when I meant to say that empirical & conceptual do not cover everything there is. — Agustino

Hmm. I don't really see even the distinction as of central importance to Wittgenstein's approach. At the least I would like to see it argued for, rather than assumed.

think values show themselves in the attitude we have towards the world, which comes prior to conceptualisation and empiricism. — Agustino

Here perhaps we have some real fat to chew on - good reply.

If our attitudes are only prior to our conceptualisation, how is it that our conceptualisations can change our values?

I cannot find what is of significance by analysing concepts or by studying physics. — Agustino

Well, I do. What I value has changed over time as a result of both changes in my conceptualisation of things and what I have experienced.

I find it difficult to suppose that others find their values somehow fixed; I would feel quite sad for them.