I appreciate your careful reply and need to think about it in detail.

For now, I will only point out that Wittgenstein is claiming more for his method than:

I take it that ‘language games’ is just a way of referring to the imagined examples that he creates, but I don’t think they are just “rhetorical” though (there is a point). And, as I say above, ‘forms of life’ is just a way of pointing to our practices — Antony Nickles

The language of the Blue Book pits his view of how "meaning' happens against how others do it. I read that as him seeing himself in an actual conflict over how to understand the world as we experience it.

I am sorry to hear you put it that way.

I figured you were prompting a conversation that is usually covered up by other themes.

I don't want to stand against such analyses trying to map out the problems of the modern world. And I am troubled by the speed of many current changes.

Despite all that, I have to weigh all that against the release from the ties of my immediate ancestors. And my son who acts upon the same idea.

The democratic rub.

It's not 'modernity sucks, the ancient world was terrific!' The thread is about something quite specific. — Wayfarer

I was contesting:

cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. — Wayfarer

That being a different standard of measure from a golden age idea.

The funny thing about Descartes is that most of his actual science really sucked. The algebra stuff was good.

I recognize that a lot of modern things suck. But a lot of the received ideas and practices in the past also sucked.

This newfound autonomy freed individuals from dogmatic authority but also cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. — Wayfarer

Totally adrift? That freedom is what you are enjoying now if you are relatively free. There are many kinds of shared purpose in this modern world.

True, there is more going on than just looking at how the interlocutor (the skeptic) imagines their claims, and thus why they are making them, but I would argue that it is the primary thrust of the investigation, starting here in the Blue Book, but of course we all have different things that catch our eye/interests. — Antony Nickles

So far, you have not made that argument but taken for granted that it is true. You have provided a description of the text as meaning to say X but the singular purpose you assign it is not an argument for it over against any countervailing view.

If your thesis is correct, it would mean that all the apparent concern with other topics are rhetorical ploys put in place to distract the reader. The introduction of "language games" is not the challenge it seems to be given to his contemporaries but is really just a diagnosis of a particular set of personal problems.

Just that Socrates doesn’t hear anything as important unless it meets his criteria. Obviously a poor joke. — Antony Nickles

Are you saying that Wittgenstein was not bringing in that reference as an important background to think about generality?

A big topic.

As it is Plato presenting the options in his dialogues, there is a large gap between Parmenides grudgingly admitting Forms might explain continuity and the Sophist (the Eleatic Stranger, a student from the Parmenides school) where the separation of Being and Becoming is called into question.

I don't know what the gap means or if it is only an accident of missing text.

Plato has Socrates not joining the put downs on Parmenides that he did not resist in Theaetetus when discussing Heraclitus. If we are to accept the text we have to consider, Plato was of more than one mind on the issue.

How do you distinguish between generally received opinions from what has been justified by reason?

Efforts to make that distinction are a big part of why we talk about reason.

That is and will be a lot of work for all or any who attempt it.

I am trying to understand how Wittgenstein thought of his work as outside of the other projects. Not so much a solving of a puzzle but looking at how the pieces of it are laid out.

From that point of view, Bateson wants to establish a generality that Wittgenstein wants to interrogate.

[4] Insisting on an idea’s truth beyond the limits of its epistemic warrant is irrational. — Millard J Melnyk

I don't believe we have a clear enough understanding of the limits of "epistemic warrant" to use the idea as a given. Saying that is not a rejection of reason but a particular use of it.

The proposition that saying as much is itself a belief only leads to comparing beliefs.

And then you are back where you started.

To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do.

First instance of man-listening. — Antony Nickles

Are you referring to Socrates or Wittgenstein? I am familiar with the phrase "man-splaining" but don't know how to hear "man-listening."

I don’t think philosophy is relegated to just responding to radical skepticism. — Antony Nickles

Neither do I. But I am not the one claiming that such is the primary goal of this or any other writing from Wittgenstein. Your map has no place for the arguments against Russel and Frege. They seem more like the adversaries to Wittgenstein's language game model than frightened skeptics asking for what will never be given.

Your reading is clearly a response to reading Cavell and Austin. Translating everything that is said by Wittgenstein into those terms is a reduction of the original text into another. For me on the outside, it sounds like a private language.

I agree that the different directions in academia do not seem to be gravitating towards a center.

I don't think Wittgenstein would have objected to Linguistics as Chomsky pursues it. I wonder if Wittgenstein talked about that somewhere.


Mention of Thompson reminds me of the interest in "forms of life" amongst "cybernetic" epistemologists.
Here is a passage from G Bateson that touches upon the Blue Book:

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle—for these, too, are images created in their respective modes—that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise "I make it all up." But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external "reality." (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events. — Gregory Bateson, afterword to John Brockman

I did not mean to bring up that element as a rebuttal to your thesis. But if the introduction of history is not germane to the argument, why not just stick with Kant where all of this is just the way it is?

Which does not require any material scaffolding, but does not contradict any material evidence. The culmination of the Cartesian ego cogito. — Pantagruel

That does not depict the role of history Hegel insisted upon.

How ever that is framed in the many interpretations, History is the criteria absent from the mythological as various attempts at representation.

I would not like to see people skate by a problem which Hegel intended to bust up the party.

How many philosophers have set out to deal with those annoying questions "once and for all"? None have succeeded. — Ludwig V

That is a fair question. The odd thing about Wittgenstein is that his "skeptical method" does not lead to a "once and for all" claim prominent in other theses. W's restrictions upon generalization do not permit saying things such as "causes are only a narrative provided by the imagination" or "I think therefore I am." He frequently describes what philosophy is like as an image of its limitation, but he keeps on doing his version of it anyway. Descartes takes one bath and surpasses the quandaries of past generations.

Whatever is the best way to read this work, what sticks out for me is when Wittgenstein complained that Socrates was being too complacent in his job of midwifery in the Theaetetus. Let's make finding out if an idea is alive harder....

You keep putting your situation in the context of your choices alone. Actual life involves the collision of your choices with others. You are not in a bunker weighing the outcome of choices. What you imagine as possible for yourself is what everyone else is doing at the same time.

When you describe how other people are dealing with trust and betrayal, it could be accurate or not by a selected criterion but you and I can never be the witness of that. The limits of our judgement should follow the limits of our perception.

Consider when people rely upon you. Sometimes that works out for them. Other times it does not.

Illusion, in that scenario, has to do with capability, but also bad faith versus sincere effort. It is something to sort out while weighing your intentions as much as those of others.

The second is their role in language-learning, working up from simple games to more complicated ones. How far the idea has taken off in empirical psychology, I could not say. But it seems a not implausible idea to me. — Ludwig V

I think Josh has been trying to talk about that. There are psychological models that develop some of those ideas about learning language. But the sharp put down of the scientific method as a part of what W is doing is an unconformity with adjacent layers, to borrow a phrase from geology.

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.

Is the writing, Must We Mean What We Say, where Cavell introduces the central role of the skeptic in his reading of Wittgenstein? Or is that asserted somewhere else? I am getting curious about the man behind the curtain here.

If there must be a further explanation that all of us can give examples of what anyone would say when X, and the logic of that, then I’ll leave it to someone else: — Antony Nickles

Is that to say it is a sort of last word for you even if it does not satisfy others?

I heard Penner to be saying that Kierkegaard was not imagining that his rivals were outside the Christian community. So, if he did understand that they were outside, he would have responded differently. I will avoid such a bank shot and just look for what Kierkegaard has said about worldliness.

I don't think rights are a function of the Enlightenment. For example, Aristotelian approaches to justice involve rights (which are the correlative of duties), and they surely precede the Enlightenment. — Leontiskos

What one does see in the writings of the Enlightenment is an attempt to separate the "Natural" from what has been imposed upon it, whether through human or divine authority. I am not sure that would have even been an idea for Aristotle.

Kierkegaard claims that views of "nature" have been changed because of "Christianity." Such a view both affirms and questions the separations drawn in the City of God by Augustine.

I read that a long time ago. I remember an emphasis upon distinguishing creed, what a person believes, and generations of a community struggling with itself. That does suggest a classification of types applicable to other religions but won't capture the bitterness felt by Buber reading the Letter to the Hebrews.

As promised before, I will leave off from challenging the role you have assigned the skeptic. But I will point out that Wittgenstein is unambiguously "stepping into the ring" when advancing a method that does not accept many of the premises Kant was working with:

If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?” – Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs”. Let us look at a simple example of operating with words. I give someone the order: “fetch me six apples from the grocer”, and I will describe a way of making use of such an order: The words “six apples” are written on a bit of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the grocer compares the word “apple” with labels on different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the labels, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of paper, and for every number counted takes a fruit off the shelf and puts it in a bag. – And here you have one use of words. I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are processes of using signs simpler than those which usually occur in the use of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language-games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality. — BB, page 27

This has Wittgenstein looking like the skeptic, dissolving the verities of his opponents. That he separates his method from the scientific at page 29 demonstrates that he intends to maintain the distance from the "psychological" he established in the Tractatus. To go forward with his method, he has chosen to walk on a narrow tightrope.

I hadn't thought of it like that. On the other hand, once scepticism has become a dogma, it smothers everything in its path. It's a balance. — Ludwig V

As the Professor says:

This method of watching or even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the object of the dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resistance - this procedure, I say, can be called the skeptical method. It is entirely different from skepticism, a principle of artful and scientific ignorance that undermines the foundations of all cognition, in order, if possible, to leave no reliability or certainty anywhere. For the skeptical method aims at certainty, seeking to discover the point of misunderstanding in disputes that are honestly intended and conducted with intelligence by both sides, in order to do as wise legislators do when from the embarrassment of judges in cases of litigation they draw instruction concerning that which is defective and imprecisely determined in their laws. — CPR, B451

I guess I agree with Kant that the "skeptic" is not opinion but an energy that keeps us alive.
Otherwise, thinking merely mirrors a reflecting of thinking.

That difference is interesting to me as well. Will ponder.

I think there are other ways to look at the table of possibilities being presented here. I will be more cautious about talking about it in the future.

Your description does capture a number of ways the solipsist may be operating. The solipsist could be me, after all, and my M.O. could be one of those listed.

The peculiar way that W lays out the options does support a reading that an "imposition of logic" can make sense of what is happening. But W does not say it is the only sense possible. That recurrent theme is the soundtrack of this book if it were a movie.

I read Wayfarer to be saying that emergence of new life came from someplace rather than nothing. That demands a different response than the constant refresh of the world required for the opposing view counting upon an unknown agency.

Since we are poorly positioned as a species to sort this out as a matter of fact, the difference in question becomes a collapse into a tautology where the opposite ends fail to be a contrary for the other.

There are plenty of examples where Kierkegaard expresses dissatisfaction with fellow Christians. It is fair to say that his opposition to Hegel, for instance, is an objection to an expression of modernity. But a fair amount of that objection is based upon "rational" grounds as much as upon religious ones.

When discussing the psychological, Kierkegaard uses "modern" ideas of development. He argues that they become inadequate after a certain level of explanation.

Penner is basing his interpretation on this differential:

Some of Kierkegaard’s favorite targets, such as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, attempt to rescue Christian theology rather than deny or destroy it, and Kierkegaard regularly assumes that the edifice he refers to as “modern speculation” understands itself to be explicitly “Christian.” — Penner, 380-1

That makes it sound like Kierkegaard was fooled by various apologetic speech. It seems fair to me to ask for evidence of that in Kierkegaard's actual writings rather than rely upon Penner's inference.

If we are going to speak of the Enlightenment, should that not also include the issue of rights as discussed by Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, etcetera? The more "Christian" life Kierkegaard is calling for does not cancel the "individual" depicted in those places.

Of course signs co-exist with their objects. — Ludwig V

That works for highway signs but does not explain why Wittgenstein calls it a mistake (without qualification) when reflecting upon learning language and the experience of meaning.

By pointing out when W speaks of "us" versus "them" in the above quotes, I did not mean to say he is always doing that. On the contrary, he explicitly draws such a line in the sand only in specific places over specific practices. The constant appeal to common sense and ordinary language gives the background of how perplexity appears. When W draws the line in the sand, it is over the method of philosophy. The scrum is happening on a shared field of discourse.

I read through the OP from the beginning last night and see that I have challenged your view of "the skeptic" many times. I will stop arguing in that vein. I will only point out that the opposition regarding the use of signs in this book's discussion of the real versus the empirical is applied to Augustine just as heartily in the Philosophical Investigations.

I think that's a misunderstanding. The requirement that the solipsist's claim cannot be understood by anyone else follows from the solipsist's doctrine. The solipsist misunderstands their own doctrine if they do not understand that it is logically impossible for anyone else to understand it. IMO. — Ludwig V

The bit I quoted leaves out where the solipsist just moments before was attempting to speak meaningfully of his condition. It is the conflict of motives that seems to make W impatient rather than him judging all who explain themselves a certain way to be deliberately obscure.

The use of "occult" is pejorative. In view of the consistency with which Wittgenstein employs the term, a replacement would have to name what is thinking that "signs co-exist with their objects."

If it is true that the

brain [is] acting as a receiver for consciousness. — Gnomon

is that not another instance of "forms" activating "matter?"

In that case, not an inversion of the Wayfarer thread.

The role of "use" is underlined in the previous paragraph beginning where W is playing a role with: "Then I can still express my solipsism by saying,"

I could also express my claim by saying: “I am the vessel of life”; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I say this should be unable to understand me. It is essential that the other should not be able to understand “what I really mean”, though in practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional position in his notation. But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else — BB, page 65 (or 97 internet edition)

The intention to not be understood is an interesting charge to make against the solipsist and other philosophers. This shows that what troubles the solipsist is a condition other thinkers share. This encounter with a more general problem leads to a more general response:

The meaning of a phrase for us is characterised by the use we make of it. The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expression. Therefore the phrase “I think I mean something by it”, or “I’m sure I mean something by it”, which we so often hear in philosophical discussions to justify the use of an expression is for us no justification at all. We ask: “What do you mean?”, i.e., “How do you use this expression?” — ibid. page 65 (or 98 internet edition)

Note the "us" and "We" being used here.

If the cause were a deep-seated fear, simply showing the proper use of 'know' wouldn't eliminate the fear. It eliminates the problem, thus proving the problem was linguistic, not psychological. — Joshs

This is confusing. I understand why someone would not be satisfied by a correction of speech.

In the context of this book, however, the problems of the "linguistic" are taken to be separate and logically prior to the problems of psychology.

That seems to me to be a push against explanation. The different bits keep getting further apart.

I am talking about the interests/desires (and feelings, as reasons) of the skeptic, but that is also a possibility in every one of us (including Witt), and so the “situation” is our situation as humans (the human condition). — Antony Nickles

I understand that you are concentrating on your writing now so I will wait as long as you like to respond or not, but I am compelled to say this now:

I don't follow your framing of Wittgenstein primarily intending to quell the qualms of the skeptic. What W is putting forth is provocative and has pissed a lot of people off.

The primary reason W puts forth for the "mistakes" he has outlined is the "craving for generality." He plasters the wall with Plato as the poster child for this desire. That is not to say that he "refutes" Plato.

The 'human condition' is the only game in town but is difficult to locate. As Wittgenstein has said elsewhere, he does not want to make that easier for anyone.

That is, do you agree with W that it is a mistake to look for the use of a sign as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. Again, since the word "occult" doesn't occur in the quoted passage, I'm not clear how it establishes how W uses it. — Ludwig V

I am not sure that I agree but accept that such a judgement is critical to Wittgenstein's enterprise.

"Occult" appears in the preceding paragraph:

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.

If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? – In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.) — BB, page 9

The comment: (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a “thing corresponding to a substantive.”) is developed further at page 11, 48, and 72.

The "occult" is what Wittgenstein is militating against. Note the use of "us" in the following:

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign. — ibid. page 9

In the penultimate paragraph of the book there is the following:

Let’s not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind makes between a word and a thing, and that this connection contains the whole usage of a word as the seed might be said to contain the tree. — ibid. page 110

I will ponder how to express my comments regarding Kant more cogently.

Thank you for the link. I was not aware of it.

There is one available from archive.org, but the document is protected and cannot be OCRed, so I'm not sure where that quote would reside inside of it. Maybe you know? — Leontiskos

The passage starts on page 57 and goes to page 61.

The beginning is really the preceding paragraph saying: "Love for the neighbor has the perfections of eternity--. Kierkegaard uses this formula to begin many different topics in the book.

The beginning of the section II C at page 51 gives the context of the passage within the larger argument.