The ways in which we picture the world is a prominent feature of both the Tractatus and PI. In the later work, however, he rejects the notion that logic is the a priori transcendental condition that makes representation possible. — Fooloso4
Culture and history are not the whole of what he is getting at. Again, the importance of the "possibility of phenomena" and new ways of seeing things. "Logic as grammar" means that it is an activity. Language changes as a form of life changes. — Fooloso4
He does not reject a condition, he rejects pictures — Antony Nickles
(PI 122)A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)
Seeing things in a "new way" is not changing to another set of glasses (#103), it is remembering our ordinary ways — Antony Nickles
It never occurs to us to take them [the glasses] off.
What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view. (CV 18) — Fooloso4
a representative overview is said to be of fundamental importance. — Fooloso4
He is no longer concerned with the Tractarian question of the conditions for the possibility of representation, but rather with the ways in which representation, how we picture things, is how we look at them, and can both stand in the way of and lead to new ways of seeing connections. — Fooloso4
to see connections between things, how they relate to each other — Fooloso4
...but this is different than a picture, which I would equate with a theory. — Antony Nickles
However, there is a sense of "picture" which is what I am trying to make clear--what hides the ordinary from us (what is in plain view). — Antony Nickles
As I understand it, what is at issue is the status of a mental picture — Fooloso4
It is not pictures but the picture of something hidden that he rejects. — Fooloso4
I did not mean a "mental picture", which would just be us picturing something to ourselves, which, as he says, is analogous to a picture like a painting. All those quotes are about a picture in the sense of a theoretical framework — Antony Nickles
A "point of view" in the PI is not a cohesive theory; it is an attitude, in the sense of an inclination, a disposition. — Antony Nickles
(I once read somewhere that a geometrical figure, with the words "Look at this", serves as a proof for certain Indian mathematicians. This looking too effects an alteration in one's way of seeing.) (Zettel, 461)
The question is what is it about us that creates the picture of something hidden? And the answer is our desire for crystalline purity, of knowledge that is certain enough that we will know right from wrong (abdicating responsibility for choosing), that we will not be surprised or accused by others, that we will have justification sufficient to satisfy our disappointment with the world and ourselves. — Antony Nickles
In the beginning was the deed. (402)
Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (OC 475)
A language game is an extension of primitive behavior (Z 545)
Instinct first reason second (RPP 689)
The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing. (OC 166)
The presupposition is that the world is intelligible. But the world of our ordinary experience is messy and does yield to our understanding. One response to this is that the truth of things is hidden and must be uncovered. — Fooloso4
I'm not sure where you are finding that Wittgenstein assumes that the world is intelligible, or whether that is your prerequisite. — Antony Nickles
If the world does not yield to our intellect then it must be because there is something hidden from us. — Fooloso4
This is the very fixation that I have been discussing this whole time — Antony Nickles
I have as well. — Fooloso4
If the world does not yield to our intellect then it must be because there is something hidden from us. — Fooloso4
I’m taking the following as a statement or claim that you are making, rather than a diagnosis of the skeptic’s manifestation. — Antony Nickles
The belief that there are hidden things only disclosed to or by the few who are wise is as old as the desire for wisdom. It manifests in different ways.
Wittgenstein's own search led him to believe he had cracked the code. — Fooloso4
129. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. — Philosophical Investigations
131. I suddenly see the solution of a puzzle-picture. Where there were previously branches, now there is a human figure. My visual impression has changed, and now I recognize that it has not only shape and colour, but also a quite particular ‘organization’. —– My visual impression has changed — what was it like before; what is it like now? —– If I represent it by means of an exact copy a and isn’t that a good representation of it? — no change shows up.
132. And above all do not say “Surely, my visual impression isn’t the drawing; it is this —– which I can’t show to anyone.” Of course it is not the drawing; but neither is it something of the same category, which I carry within myself.
133. The concept of an ‘inner picture’ is misleading, since the model for this concept is the ‘outer picture’; and yet the uses of these concept-words are no more like one another than the uses of “numeral” and “number”. (Indeed, someone who was inclined to call numbers ‘ideal numerals’ could generate a similar confusion by doing so.) — Philosophical Investigations, Part II
126. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. — Jackson
But Wittgenstein did not "crack the code" in the sense of solve the problem. — Antony Nickles
126. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.
129. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
His investigation finds that it is because we have fixed our gaze past them to something certain, universal, logical, etc., even if we have to imagine it to be hidden. — Antony Nickles
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.(Culture and Value)
One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.
we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.
Compare what he says in the preface to the Tractatus:
I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems.
with PI 133:
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
His desire for complete clarity is not something Wittgenstein rejected after the Tractatus.
He continues:
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. — Fooloso4
I think that the "picture" you have both been trying to articulate is more of a way of seeing things, or a Weltanschauung, which he mentions at 122 when discussing surveyable representations. — Luke
That is the point of the duck/rabbit and, one might say, the point of philosophy. — Luke
One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.
in 129: "we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful."
Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. — Fooloso4
Instead of wanting some specific criteria, we come to see our ordinary means of judgment and identity and felicity as good enough. — Antony Nickles
PI 90. ... our investigation is directed not towards phenomena, but rather, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.
PI 126. One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.
And, yes, I would categorize seeing the ordinary as extraordinary as a course of action, an ethic Luke. — Antony Nickles
A ‘non-bourgeois’ thinker whose profound influence on Wittgenstein’s development dates from this first year back at Cambridge was Piero Sraffa. Sraffa was a brilliant Italian economist (of a broadly Marxist persuasion), and a close friend of Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Communist leader. After jeopardizing his career in his home country by publishing an attack on Mussolini’s policies, Sraffa was invited by Keynes to come to King’s to pursue his work, and a lectureship in economics at Cambridge was created specially for him. Upon being introduced by Keynes, he and Wittgenstein became close friends, and Wittgenstein would arrange to meet him at least once a week for discussions. These meetings he came to value even more than those with Ramsey. In the preface to the Investigations he says of Sraffa’s criticism: ‘I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.’
This is a large claim, and – considering their widely differing intellectual preoccupations – a puzzling one. But it is precisely because Sraffa’s criticisms did not concern details (because, one might say, he was not a philosopher or a mathematician) that they could be so consequential. Unlike Ramsey, Sraffa had the power to force Wittgenstein to revise, not this or that point, but his whole perspective. One anecdote that illustrates this was told by Wittgenstein to both Malcolm and von Wright, and has since been retold many times. It concerns a conversation in which Wittgenstein insisted that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’ (or ‘grammar’, depending on the version of the story). To this idea. Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ This, according to the story, broke the hold on Wittgenstein of the Tractarian idea that a proposition must be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.
The importance of this anecdote is not that it explains why Wittgenstein abandoned the Picture Theory of meaning (for it does not), but that it is a good example of the way in which Sraffa could make Wittgenstein see things anew, from a fresh perpective. Wittgenstein told many of his friends that his discussions with Sraffa made him feel like a tree from which all branches had been cut. The metaphor is carefully chosen: cutting dead branches away allows new, more vigorous ones to grow (whereas Ramsey’s objections left the dead wood in place, forcing the tree to distort itself around it).
Wittgenstein once remarked to Rush Rhees that the most important thing he gained from talking to Sraffa was an ‘anthropological’ way of looking at philosophical problems. This remark goes some way to explain why Sraffa is credited as having had such an important influence. One of the most striking ways in which Wittgenstein’s later work differs from the Tractatus is in its ‘anthropological’ approach. That is, whereas the Tractatus deals with language in isolation from the circumstances in which it is used, the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning: a ‘language-game’ cannot be described without mentioning their activities and the way of life of the ‘tribe’ that plays it. If this change of perspective derives from Sraffa, then his influence on the later work is indeed of the most fundamental importance. But in this case, it must have taken a few years for that influence to bear fruit, for this ‘anthropological’ feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method does not begin to emerge until about 1932. — Ray Monk, The Duty of Genius
What does our ordinary means of judgment mean? — Fooloso4
Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary is not for most of us our ordinary way of seeing things — Fooloso4
Is it our ordinary means of judgment and identity that leads to new inventions and discoveries? — Fooloso4
Are we ordinarily awake to wonder? — Fooloso4
If "an ethic" can be used to apply to any course of action, then I would agree. — Luke
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