Interesting. The text does not follow you to your conclusion.

I will ponder upon it.

What does the opposite of an obsession with language look like?

It's important to point out that Wittgenstein considered himself chiefly as a logician. If his arguments aren't deep and insightful about the nature of philosophy, and people quibble about what he meant all the time, then maybe it is all about misunderstanding something about him, which I doubt is true.

It simply took that long to discover what he meant.

My previous comment doesn't detract from the obscurity of Wittgenstein's writing style; but, only means that he wasn't a philosopher; but, rather a logician doing philosophy.

I disagree. I need time to frame my rebuttal.

Seems a bit of an irrelevant question. What are you getting at ?

Wittgenstein's significance is at least in part a sign of the times. In the olden days, there was a relatively unified worldview or set of shared beliefs against which controversies and disputes were conducted. But now there is no consensus at all about every fundamental aspect of existence, apart from various implications of what science seems to be telling us - which as Wittgenstein said, have no bearing on 'the problems of life'. Set against that confusion, Wittgenstein is presented as a beacon of clarity.

'Yes, but...' will come the reply.

Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.

Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.

We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.

Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.

Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.

There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic. — Kenneth Taylor, Why I am Not a Wittgensteinian

As for the 'intractable confusion' that this post refers to, I'm not sure that this accurately describes every advocate for the various schools of philosophy being referred to. They might believe that their school of thought is crystal clear.

'Yes, but....'

BTW, aside from finding a lot in PI to like myself, I don't think we should undersell Wittgenstein's value as someone within the analytical camp who could criticize that camp (not unlike Quine in this way). It might be easy today to shrug at the idea that language is a social practice, or that use helps to define meaning, seeing it as obvious. But the context in which Wittgenstein wrote managed to somehow forget these basic facts. Language had become the way in which we "grasp propositions," i.e. abstract objects reducible to logical formalisms. Or sentences' meaning just was the condition that would verify or falsify it, or a statement should be defined in terms of the "possible words" it was consistent with. Huge swaths of language were being deemed "incoherent" or "meaningless." Wittgenstein helped a lot of people walk back from this sort (IMO, quite bad) theory.

But, since the topic of being divorced from the history of philosophy has already come up, I figured I'd share this short article on the similarities between Augustine and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein kicks off PI with a quote from Augustine's Confessions, but in turn he seems to attribute a quite misleading, simplistic theory of language to Augustine. As the article points out, Augustine's understanding of language actually shares a lot with PI, including the focus on "use." Unfortunately, the article only looks at Augustine's early works. His theory of signs develops quite a bit (IMO in a good way), but the revisions are buried in theological texts so they tend to get ignored. Stoyanoff sees Augustine as "centuries ahead of his time," for this. Fair enough, he also does Descartes' cogito and arguably part of Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectical centuries earlier. But this is maybe a bit off. Augustine was one of the very most widely read philosophers for a long period and people did not fail to pick up on his ideas on language and make use of them. Rather, it's only how philosophy changed later in the modern period, a sort of "forgetting," that seems to make the ideas "new" again.

There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. How the nature of the knowing subject affects knowledge is an area of considerable focus in medieval thought. So, IDK, Wittgenstein's version of Augustine might be one of the contributors to this misconception. Ironically, Pierce's semiotic triad, which is quite popular in continental philosophy, is pretty much the same as Augustine's in De Dialecta, and signs are a major focus in scholasticism, yet this view of past thought shows up in plenty of continental philosophy.

Accordingly, it's not well suited for metaphysical and epistemological problems, and it's confusing when applied in this way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is there another way to study and critique metaphysical and epistemological issues, or is language indispensable for the task?

There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:100: :clap:

There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. How the nature of the knowing subject affects knowledge is an area of considerable focus in medieval thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood.

I'd be interested if you could cite some references for earlier philosophers works which treat of "how the knowing subject affects knowledge". I'm not contesting your statement or claiming there are no such philosophical works or passages of work; I just can't think of any, and it seems like it should be interesting to see what such philosophers had to say about it.

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus

So it seems that no one in the forum is retaining anything at all. Have no one discussed the presocratics? They were the first to point out the "stuff" which makes up reality. Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff".

Ironically, Pierce's semiotic triad, which is quite popular in continental philosophy, is pretty much the same as Augustine's in De Dialecta, and signs are a major focus in scholasticism, yet this view of past thought shows up in plenty of continental philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Peirce studied and benefitted from Latin thinkers like Aquinas and Scotus, and his theory of signs is especially indebted to the Latins:

And Peirce violated the cardinal commandment of modernity: Thou shalt not learn from the Latins. He read even there, and what he found, more than any single influence, revolutionized his philosophy. From Scotus in particular, but also from Fonseca and the Conimbricenses, he picked up the trail of the sign. He was never able to follow it as far as the text of Poinsot. This would have been only a question of time, no doubt; but in 1914 Peirce's time ran out.

Nonetheless, what he picked up from the later Latins was more than enough to convince him that the way of signs, however buried in the underbrush it had become since the moderns made the mistake of going the way of ideas instead, was the road to the future. . . — John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, p. 613

This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus

But the basis of traditional metaphysics was 'the identity of thinking and being' (per Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition.) And that in turn relied on Parmenides' metaphysics inherited and transformed by Plato and Aristotle. It was still apparent in Aquinas, whereby the intellect receives the forms whilst the senses perceive the material body. Thereby particulars are perceived as beings which are the expressions of an idea or form or principle. There is no way that can be equated with naive realism.

Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff". — L'éléphant

But if things are made of "stuff", that suggests materialism, and if not materialism, then realism at least. You can be a naive realist and hold that things are made of some kind of stuff.

Materialism or non-physicalism has no bearing in their view of the stuff.

There is no way that can be equated with naive realism. — Wayfarer

If the things of the world are understood to be independent of the human mind, then that would be compatible with naive realism, regardless of what kind of stuff they were thought to be composed. Can you cite any passages from Aristotle, Plato, or Parmenides or the scholastics that explicitly equate thinking with being?

I think it's arguable that material (whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be) was generally, and largely still is, understood to be the fundamental stuff that constitutes what exists. Think of Aristotle's hylomorphism.

Can you cite any passages from Aristotle, Plato, or Parmenides or the scholastics that explicitly equate thinking with being? — Janus

I provided a link to the .pdf of that book (which incidentally is out of print and was very expensive when available.) As the title of the book is Thinking Being, then one might surmise that it explores the very question you're asking, so I will refer you to it, as it is practically impossible to present a synopsis in a forum post, especially as it is tangential to the thread topic.

In Thinking Being, Eric Perl articulates central ideas and arguments regarding the nature of reality in Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. He shows that, throughout this tradition, these ideas proceed from and return to the indissoluble togetherness of thought and being, first clearly expressed by Parmenides. The emphasis throughout is on continuity rather than opposition: Aristotle appears as a follower of Plato in identifying being as intelligible form, and Aquinas as a follower of Plotinus in locating the first principle “beyond being”. Hence Neoplatonism, itself a coherent development of Platonic thought, comes to be seen as the mainstream of classical philosophy. Perl’s book thus contributes to a revisionist understanding of the fundamental outlines of the western tradition in metaphysics. — abstract

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus

The historical ignorance here is off the charts. :yikes: Maybe start with Plato, a large part of whose philosophy is concerned with the unreliability of sense knowledge:

SOCRATES: There is more than one point besides these, Theodorus, on which a conviction might be secured—at least so far as it is a matter of proving that not every man’s judgment is true. But so long as we keep within the limits of that immediate present experience of the individual which gives rise to perceptions and to perceptual judgments, it is more difficult to convict these latter of being untrue—but perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps it is not possible to convict them at all; perhaps those who profess that they are perfectly evident and are always knowledge may be saying what really is. And it may be that our Theaetetus was not far from the mark with his proposition that knowledge and perception are the same thing. We shall have to come to closer grips with the theory, as the speech on behalf of Protagoras required us to do. We shall have to consider and test this moving Being, and find whether it rings true or sounds as if it had some flaw in it. There is no small fight going on about it, anyway—and no shortage of fighting men. — Plato, Theaetetus, 179c-d, tr. Levett & Burnyeat

:ok: I'll take that as a "no".

If you take that passage to be explicitly equating thinking with being, then I would say your lack of reading comprehension skills is "off the charts".

I think it's arguable that material (whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be) was generally, and largely still is, understood to be the fundamental stuff that constitutes what exists. Think of Aristotle's hylomorphism. — Janus

And how does that fix the view of realism? Or naive realism? They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality.

They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality. — L'éléphant

Yes, I agree they could be realists who don't believe in the ultimate tangible quality of real existents. That was pretty much implicit when I wrote "whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be".

If you take that passage to be explicitly equating thinking with being, then I would say your lack of reading comprehension skills is "off the charts". — Janus

I was addressing your "thesis" that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist. That's why I quoted your "thesis." (I am trying to be generous with the word 'thesis')

I was addressing your "thesis" that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist. — Leontiskos

Again, you show your poor reading skills. I said:

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. — Janus

That is very far from saying "that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist".

In any case realism, whether naive or not, about external objects is really the point: I was questioning the assertion that any of the ancients or the medievals explicitly equated thinking with being. I wasn't denying that there have been such but asking those who claim there have to provide textual evidence to support their contention.

That is very far from saying "that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist". — Janus

The whole premise of your argument is that those who lived prior to modern optics were naive realists. Drop that premise and the whole argument disappears. Here it is again:

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus

We haven't even gotten into how unintelligent this argument really is. One does not require modern optics to recognize the possibility of visual distortion. Eye disease, perspective, differing visual capabilities, and the fact that far-away objects are difficult to see all demonstrate such a thing. The ironic thing here is that the presuppositions of those who think the ancients were dumb, are dumb. "They didn't have modern optics therefore they couldn't understand visual distortion." That's a bad, bad argument.

Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

I recently read an article that has the following quote (translated):

Nothing seems less likely than that a scientist or mathematician reading me could be seriously influenced in his way of working. At best, I can hope to stimulate that a significant amount of crap will be written, and that this in turn might contribute to something good coming into being. — Wittgenstein, 1947

What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?… As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein… why is it SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

I do think this is a thing, for a number of reasons. One is that he can come off as arrogant (Austin even more so). His basic claims are: what the implications are when we say or do a particular thing in a particular setting, such as, that “I believe (it is raining)” works as a hypothesis. Now, he is asserting them for all of us (Kant will call this speaking in a universal voice) but we could disagree by bringing up other examples, further contexts., etc. Now some take these claims as certainty (argued), and echo the claims righteously. But he is only relying on claims he takes as obvious and uncontroversial. What I mean is that we would all have to agree on those claims in order for them to be philosophically relevant. These (grammatical) claims are not everything he states however, and so his conclusions (in the same tone) are taken to be self-evident as well, or in need of no further explanation or possibility of refutation.

But he is not talking about language, as Rorty and @Wayfarer’s Kenneth Taylor take it, he is looking at how we talk, in certain examples (calling out, rule following, pointing, continuing a series, seeing, understanding, and, even, “meaning”/language, but only as another example), because it is a window, a method, in order to see how different things do what they do differently (our criteria for judging can be seen in the ways we talk).

His goal is not to tell us the way the world works, e.g., by way of rules, or that this is how rules work. Initially he is trying to figure out why he got stuck on one solution (in the Tract), when the world works in so many different ways. What he learns first is that our desire for certainty narrows our vision (dictates the form of answer), and so, yes, it is a book about self-knowledge. It aims to show us how our interests affect our thinking.

And although he does not directly address other philosophers (as brought up by @Shawn @Leontiskos @kindred), the big issues are in there; skepticism, essence, knowledge, other minds, determinism, the human condition, ethics, etc. He does not shy from those or dissolve them, nor is he tangential to the analytic tradition. I would put it that some people have particular interests in philosophy, and so take Wittgenstein as pointless or trivial, and some use Wittgenstein to attempt to dictate others’ interests, which is not the point either.

I would put it that some people have particular interests in philosophy, and so take Wittgenstein as pointless or trivial — Antony Nickles

Maybe inadvertently, I think this helps make the point, as that is the reciprocal of how their interests are regarded by him.

Maybe inadvertently, I think this helps make the point, as that is the reciprocal of how their interests are regarded by him. — Wayfarer

I see what you did there :smirk:. Why does Nickles post seem exactly like an example of what I’m talking about (like using more Wittgenstein to prove or disprove Wittgenstein)? Or is the irony not as glaring as it seems to be showcasing? Hell even using other philosophers to prove or disprove Wittgenstein seems like it is bordering on eliciting as the said title of this thread states. I. Don’t. Get. It. It’s like Wittgenstein has almost a “brand” of unique elitism and self-referential back-patting smugness that only that brand does best.