Henry Staten - Nietzsche's Voice
Noson Yanofsky - The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us

Mostly finished my little 'math phase' for now, so hopefully I can pick up the pace a bit on reading. That said I picked up the Yanofsky book after reading this lovely article on the math and the multiverse that anyone interested in one or both ought to read: http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-multiverse-unnecessary

§88

OK, last one before things start to ease-up and we get to the 'Wittgenstein rants about philosophy for 40 paragraphs' section. Anyway, §88 is a reflection of the way in which terms like 'exact' and 'inexact' are used when it comes to issues of explanations. Witty's basic question is something like: exact or inexact with respect to what, exactly? As with his rejection of what I called the explanatory pyramid before, here too he rejects the idea that 'exactness' must be exact 'all the way down', as if one must have an specification of 'exactness' at each 'level' - again, explanation ad infinitum and regress are rejected:

§88: "Perhaps like drawing a boundary-line around a region with chalk? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn’t it running idle? Moreover, we haven’t yet laid down what is to count as overstepping this sharp boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be ascertained. And so on."

So if this idealized notion of exactness (transcendental exactness, we might even call it), isn't appropriate, what notion of exactness is? Well, Witty says, it depends on what you're trying to do with the 'exactness' in question: §88: "what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than does what is more exact. So it all depends on what we call “the goal”. So if I just want to be able to find you after i get back from my toilet break, 'stay roughly here' will more or less suffice for that goal. There's no need to get any 'deeper' (just as it's not inexact "when I don’t give our distance from the sun to the nearest metre, or tell a joiner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of a millimetre").

At one point Witty veers even into making 'exact' and 'inexact' nothing more than dispositions: “inexact” is really a reproach, and “exact” is praise."; To put this all otherwise: there are no 'absolute' explanations, explanations 'in-themselves': there are only explanations relative to whatever it is you're trying to do with that explanation. This is all of a piece with his skepticism regarding 'ideal' languages (§81), and how language-use must be treated on its own terms, and not with respect to some ideal of it (compare: §88: "No single ideal of exactness has been envisaged; we do not know what we are to make of this idea"; and §81: "the word “ideal” is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language").

---

Anyway, this might be my last post here for some time, as I'm overseas for about a month. I'll still post but not at this frequency. It's a good place in the book to slow down anyway, as the next few sections really mark a change in pace and tone from what has come so far.

Henry Staten - Wittgenstein and Derrida
Giovanni Maddalena - The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution

§87

§87 now carries over the discussion of doubt into the discussion of proper names (which we left off in §79, and in which, to roughly recall, it was argued that names are not exhausted by any particular description). §87 then tries to draw out the implications of this ‘inexhaustiveness’ with respect to doubt: If the explanation of the use of a name cannot, or rather, is not exhausted by the ‘elements’ of that name (I think of set: Moses: {man, led Israelites out of Egypt,, etc}), does that mean doubt about the use of the name is always possible? Does explanation here need to ‘go all the way down’, as it were? And if it doesn’t, does this automatically induce doubt?

(Another image, one similar to the one Witty uses: the name ‘Moses’, atop an infinite pyramid of explanatory terms, each one explained in more detail by the level below. Cf: §87: "As though an explanation, as it were, hung in the air unless supported by another one”.)

But just as Witty has rejected the infinite cascade of rules that explain other rules ad infinitum (§84, §86), so too is this infinite pyramid of explanations rejected - §87: "an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another”; Explanations are adequate to the degree that they simply remove a ‘local’ misunderstanding: “an explanation serves to remove or to prevent a misunderstanding … The signpost is in order - if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose.”

One way I like to think about all this is to draw a distinction between what might be called transcendental doubt and empirical doubt: transcendental doubt being a kind of a priori doubt, a doubt which, by default, serves to infest gaps in the ‘foundations’ of the explanatory pyramid, wherever they may be (§87: "It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed a gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is possible only if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts”).

But for Witty, insofar as such pyramids are unnecessary - we can understand the meaning of names perfectly well without them - so too are such transcendental doubts simply illusions. The only doubts we ought to entertain here are the empirical ones, the ones that crop up in the course of explanation (cf. §85: "this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one"). In line with this one can also consider two kinds of corresponding explanations: transcendental explanations and empirical ones: transcendental ones being of the kind like the explanatory pyramid, an a priori structure which each explanation of one thing relates to every other in a globally structured, networked manner. And correlatively to his rejection of transcendental doubt, so too does Witty reject transcendental explanation: §87: ”none stands in need of another”.

--

Almost done with this section, one more to go before a whole new 'part' of the PI begins.

§86

Much like §85, §86 also serves to integrate some of the apparently disparate themes so far addressed. Indeed, it explicitly relates itself back to the language-game in §2, in which ‘block’ and ‘slab’ were called out. §86 revises the game somewhat, with written instead of spoken words. In this sense it’s actually made to look a lot like the language-game in §1, with the shopkeeper who looks up color words in a chart. If we recall, §1 opened with the problem of regress - if the shopkeeper has to look up a chart, how does he know what to do while looking up the chart? And how does he know how to do that, and so on? In response Witty affirms: ‘explanations come to an end somewhere’.

In this connection, §86 moves the discussion forward by relating all of this to rules. The chart, in §86, functions as a rule (§86: "So the chart is a rule”). And as a rule (much like an ostensive act!), it can be read in different ways:

§86: “Suppose different ways of reading a chart were not introduced; one time according to the schema … another time according to this schema … or some other one…"

With Witty again addressing the question of infinite regress with a series of rhetorical questions:

§86: "Can we not now imagine further rules to explain this one? And, on the other hand, was that first chart incomplete without the schema of arrows? And are the other charts incomplete without their schemata?”

And although Witty doesn’t come right out and say it, one can infer, given both the tone of the questioning, as well as from the answer given in §1, that these questions must, like most of Witty’s series of rhetorical questions, be answered with a big fat ‘no’.

§85

§85 brings together a number of important themes covered in the course of the book so far, although if you blink, you might miss it. For, by linking rules to ‘signposts’, Witty brings to bear upon rules the entire discussion of ostension undertaken in the earlier sections in the PI. The following line in particular makes it clear:

§85: "But where does it [the signpost, the rule - SX] say which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (for example) in the opposite one?”

It’s worth recalling that one of the imports of Witty's discussion of of ostension was that ostension is thoroughly differential: the same pointing gesture may point out any number of different things, and that

§30: "An ostensive definition explains the use a the meaning a of a word if the role the word is supposed to play in the language is already clear.”

Similarly, rules too must be understood in a differential manner: what rules ‘do’ depends on the role that rules themselves play in a particular language-game. This differential nature of rules is captured in §85 itself:

"And if there were not a single signpost, but a sequence of signposts or chalk marks on the ground - is there only one way of interpreting them?” (this rhetorical question obviously being meant to be answered in the negative - SX).

Yet for all this, the most important part of §85 is contained in the last section, which ties all this once again back to the question of doubt. Does the differential nature of the rule, the fact that it can be interpreted in more than one way, lead automatically - ‘philosophically’, as Witty says - to doubt (one thinks here again of Descartes)? In line with his downplaying of doubt in §84, Witty here 'relegates' doubt from a ‘philosophical’ register to an ‘empirical’ one:

§85: "[The signpost, the rule] sometimes leaves room for doubt, and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one.”

This too ties in to Witty’s appeal to look at things ‘up close’, and to avoid any attempts at a ‘general form of the proposition’. Such attempts wrongly transform doubt from an properly empirical matter, into a ‘philosophical’ - I’d prefer to say transcendental - one.

§84

§84 introduces the question of doubt into the mix. Lots has been written on Witty's take on doubt - especially in the later sections on pain, and his more focused remarks in On Certainty - so it's worth noting its appearance here for the first time in an explicit manner in the PI.

In any case, importantly for this section, doubt is introduced in its relation to rules, the question being: if the application of a word is 'not everywhere bounded by rules', does this mean that cases not covered by such rules always necessarily in doubt as to their use? I imagine this somewhat pictorially: as though one carves out a little bounded space of certainty among a larger, ambient space of doubt (light surrounded by darkness, as it were).

But this is a picture Witty rejects, or at least, ascribes instead to the imagination, rather than reality: just because we can 'imagine' doubts, 'is not to say that we are in doubt'. At stake here is again the question of regress: must there be rules that 'regulate the application of rules' ad infinitum? Witty's closing remark: "but for all that, I do not doubt in such a case", suggests not. §86 will make this point particularly clear.

In this connection, it's worth harking all the way back to §1, where, in relation to looking up words in the color chart, and asking all sorts of further questions (§1: “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?”), Witty simply says: "Explanations come to an end somewhere." This theme of stopping infinite regress (questions of doubt and justification) will become increasingly important later down the road.

-

In a larger context, it ought to be noted that this is effectively a thoroughly anti-Cartesian stance: generalized doubt, belonging as it does to the imagination and not reality, entirely reverses the Cartesian operation in which doubt is primary. This is a pretty obvious point, so I simply mention it without further comment.

§82, §83

Not much to say about these as they are fairly straightforward: just as Witty questions the exhaustion of meaning by definitions, here he questions the exhaustion of langauge-use by rules - much as he did in §80. §82 is basically a series of rhetorical questions all meant to prise open an gap between language and rules, and §83 offering something like a parable also meant to put into question the idea that all language-use is exhaustively delineated by rules.

In any case the gist is this: just as complexes cannot be analyzed-out into simples, neither can language-use be analyzed-out into rules.

The next few sections mark what I take to be another change in theme, giving explicit attention to the nature of rules, which have periodically cropped up in the discussion so far, but not quite in so explicit a fashion as the next few parts. Zooming out again, so far, a breakdown of what's been covered might look like this:

§1-§27: Imperatives (block! slab!)
§28-§36: Demonstratives (this, that)
§37-§45: Names (Nothung, Mr. N.N.)
§46-§64: Linguistic Roles (Simples, Composites, and Iterations thereof)
§65-§80: Definitions and Boundaries
§81-88(?): Rules, Logic, and Idealization

---

Anyway, lets tackle §81:

It's worth recalling some of what motivates the current discussion before digging into it, specifically, Witty's comment back in §65 that there is no 'general form of the proposition', and that one must look 'close up' in order to understand language. In this light, §81 and onwards is something like a critique of what happens when you do the opposite of this: a look at what happens when language is not looked at from 'close up', and instead treated in an 'ideal' sense.

Witty begins by comparing the use of language to games and "calculi with fixed rules", and notes that there is nothing necessary about any such comparison: language use can be compared to games, but this doesn't mean that it really 'is' or 'must be' such a game. Language-use has an autonomy from any such 'fixed calculi' at the end of the day, and cannot be reduced to them. Or, to put it sharply, there is an irreducible wedge between language and logic.

In saying this however, Witty also wants to stave off another misunderstanding that may follow from this: the idea that language is somehow then a degraded or less-perfect thing than logic. The basic idea is that logic if not an 'ideal language' of which specific instances of human language are lesser forms of. In saying this, Witty interestingly sheds light not only on language, but on logic as well: following (his understanding of) Ramsey, Witty understands logic to be a matter of construction, something 'made' and not 'found'.

Hence, in turn, the sharp distinction between the way in which 'natural science treats of a natural phenomenon', and logic, which deals with ideal constructions. This sharp distinction helps explain the reference to Ramsey at the beginning, in which logic is referred to as a 'normative science'. The idea being that something constructed must at every point be governed by some kind of imperative or rule which enables transitivity between propositions (this follows from that if...; think of axiomatic systems where every move must be justified according to the axioms which ground it). Note that 'normative' here must be understood in its formal and logic sense, and not its ethical and juridicial sense.

By contrast, natural phenomena do not participate in any such economies of inference, but instead economies of causes. I'm admittedly banking on a distinction treated in detail by Sellars on this (causes vs. reasons), but I think putting it in these terms - although not explicitly employed by Wittgenstein - is very useful in helping to understand the sharp distinctions at work in §81 (and I know I keep dragging it in, but in the remarks and lectures on Math, Witty continuously makes reference to the distinction between natural phenomena and ideal language and insists constantly just how important it is to keep the two apart).

You're right on the second count, at least.

I deleted it. If you want to make a point about truth or whathaveyou, go ahead. No need to use a very raw, very contentious event to make that point. Especially with a badly written thread largely composed of copy-pasted block quotes.

Non-sequitur? Red herring works fine too through.

§80

§80 continues with yet another variation on the theme of definitions not exhausting meaning, this time treating common nouns ('chair'), instead of proper nouns (names, §79), and imperatives ('stay roughly here', §71). One further advance in the discussion is the re-invocation of 'rules' as similarly not exhausting the employment of common nouns like 'chair'. Interestingly then, there's an equivalence being set up, in some respect, between rules, simples, and definitions, and the respective roles they play (or rather don't play) in defining the boundaries of their respective concepts or words (common nouns, proper nouns, and imperatives, at the very least).

Good luck to them.

Unlikely, but that's my point. At the point at which you're wrangling over fallacies, you haven't even made it out of the gate of interesting.

:love:

Also, how great of a word is enthymeme?

Gonna try and work my way back into some momentum for this...

§78

§78 works to cast the whole of the preceding discussion about definitions into a distinction between knowing and saying. At stake here seems to be a twofold attempt to show, concretely, both the point(s) of overlap and point(s) of divergence between the two terms. Correspondingly, this serves two purposes that I see: first, by highlighting the similarities, Witty shows quite nicely how the a confusion between the grammar of the two might arise - how it is that we might take a definition of something (‘saying’ something) to be exhaustive of our knowledge of it [cases (1) and (2)].

Second, by highlighting how the terms diverge [case (3)], he aims to clearly show that a distinction exists; that one can drive a clear and obvious wedge between the grammar of saying and knowing.

§79

§79 works to iterate or project the discussion of definitions once again into yet another avenue: that of names. Those familiar with Kripke will recognise it as containing the seeds of Kripke’s anti-descriptivism, which, admittedly, I can’t help but read this section through the lens of. Anyway, the basic idea is that just as an imperative to “stay roughly here” is not exhausted by any particular boundary (§71), so too are names not exhausted by any particular descriptive determination:

§79: “So is my use of the name “Moses” fixed and determined for all possible cases? … But where are the boundaries []? … I use the name “N” without a fixed meaning”.

As a general comment, one way I’ve been framing a lot of this discussion in my head - and Witty’s approach in general - is as an attempt to discern what I’d call the immanence of meaning to use: the fact that the meaning of something attains it’s ‘adequacy’ always in relation to the circumstances of its invocation (‘use’): if one says ‘stay roughly here’, or if one uses a name, meaning here is not ‘built out of’ smaller pieces (simples) which, when put together the right way, would ‘give’ meaning to these things. Names are always adequate to what use we make of them: attempts to resolve names down to finer grained descriptions are always bound to fail.

In my head, I almost think of this visually: if a meaning is this: — — , one can’t ‘take it apart’ so as to attain pieces like this: ‘- - - - - -‘; meaning does not derive from a synthesis of smaller, more foundational things, and therefore cannot be analyzed out into any such pieces. The adequacy of meaning is immanent to use, and does not lie beyond it. This stuff really comes out in Witty's discussion of math, but alas that's beyond this thread.

:vomit:

Truth.

They're foundational for philosophical arguments. I've seen way too many examples on this forum where arguments go nowhere since people just bash opinions and doesn't listen to the other side. — Christoffer

Yes, there's alot here beneath engagement. It's the gems one must look out for. It's simple self-respect to know when to ignore someone and their argument when it leads to no interesting discussion. The problem here is not fallacies. It's misplaced pride and an inability to ruthlessly discriminate. No pinned post can fix that.

Those who think philosophy turns on fallacies have yet to leave the play-pen.

--

That said, a link tacked on to the rules as a resource is not a bad idea at all.

I happen to agree with Willow. Fallacies are so basic as to be entirely philosophically uninteresting. If one is arguing over fallacies, one has ceased to engage in anything worthy of sustained discussion.

I've actually read a paper on beserker rage in a philosophical context! It's by John Protevi, and might be of interest to you. It's available from his site free, here.

I originally read the paper in his book Life, War, Earth, in which it has somewhat more philosophical meat to it, and which I'd recommended unreservedly if the paper piques your interest at all.

I believe the idea is that the less pinned, the better. There's only so much real estate, and we want to save it for discussion. Fallacies and biases would be nice and all, but a bit of a luxury that we don't really need.

Weekend reading spot :D

Just as a side comment - I've been reading Witty's Remarks and Lectures on math, and doing this excercise in this thread has been super useful in getting on handle on them. It's also made me solidify, in a way I wasn't doing before, my conceptualization of the link between use and roles. To use is to use-as, in an intensional manner. That intensional aspect of use is a point of emphasis I've never quite grasped so concretely before.

Monkeys who like unripe fruit which is more difficult to open the less ripe it is so only the strongest monkeys can open the really hard ones. Only to die from poison. — Benkei

But the only selection criteria at work here is death: the strength of the monkey isn't relevant. Natural selection is 'indifferent' to how you die; only that you die is relevant.

In the coming apocalypse, our cockroach brethren are far more likely to be far better suited to the wasteland than we are, for all our apparent gifts.

You quoted someone calling sexual selection the handmaiden to natural selection — Benkei

To be fair, I didn't quote anyone! That said, I was implicitly responding to this:

I'm certain sexual selection is a mode of natural selection. — Benkei

- the wording of which I mirrored in my first post here ("sexual selection is not a mode of natural selection"). Perhaps the issue can be put like this: if one wants to conceive sexual selection as a mode of natural selection, this can be done, but only at the price of broadening the the concept of natural selection so that it loses its specificity. To put the problem crudely, if you conflate sex and death as sources of selective pressure (so as to lump them both under the label 'natural selection'), you lose the ability to properly conceptualise the evolutionary dynamics specific to each.

And that's the key point: sexual selection and natural selection can lead to divergent evolutionary outcomes. Specifically, sexual selection can make a species less than optimized to its environment, making it evolutionarily worse-off than it otherwise would be. This is why runway selection is such a big deal: once selection starts to occur due to aesthetic criteria (rather than criteria of pure survivability), you get a divergence in selective parameters, as it were. You get two dimensions along which to measure evolutionary success, each of which can, depending on the situation, complement or conflict with each other.

Now of course one can just ignore all of this and say 'its all natural selection', but then this would be like trying to parse a fine-grained phenomenon with a knife too large to do the job. You would not capture the specificity of the dynamics at a resolution appropriate to it. If you don't make the distinction, and make it well, you deprive yourself of the ability to properly understand certain evolutionary phenomena.

--

As for the OP, we probably agree. The whole thing hinges on a very silly understanding of what is implied by 'natural' in 'natural selection'.

From the naive point of view such antagonistic evolution is counterproductive: wouldn't it be better if we could all get along instead of wasting resources on pointless competitions? Make love not war! But of course nature doesn't care about such "commonsense" sentiments: it just does what it does for no reason at all. — SophistiCat

Heh, I wouldn't say 'no reason at all', but rather, for more interesting and varied reasons than we are usually prepared to countenance. For sexual selection in particular, the generally agreed upon mechanism is that of 'runaway selection', where, while (aesthetic) features might have initially begun to be selected for as signs of better fitness, as those features become more prominent over evolutionary time, they become more and more desirable for their aesthetic qualities alone. In other words, runaway selection creates positive feed-back loops which become autonomous and independent of the dynamics of natural selection (within certain threshold boundaries of course).

Such runaway processes have also been invoked to explain the emergence of cooperation and altruism among certain species (us!) where one would expect a more dog-eat-dog world. It's not all sunshine through - as Prum notes, in the case of ducks, such runaway processes have led to an intra-sexual 'arms race' where male and female ducks have evolved some terrifying genitalia because male ducks are, well, very rapey, and female ducks have literally evolved different genitalia in order to stop being impregnated by male ducks they don't want to be impregnated by. Nature is scary and wildly facinating.

Time and again it is established that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has everything to do with survivability. — Benkei

Unfortunately, this is not true. Or rather, for quite a while its been thought to be true, but has begun to crumble under large swaths of emerging evidence that it simply does not account for a great deal of evolutionary phenomena. Ascribing 'what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates to survivability alone' simply flies in the face of evidence - Prum, the Yale ornithologist who I'm relying upon here - cites case after case after case (from the wings of Manakins, to the reproductive systems of ducks, the displays of the great Argus, and so on) where attempts to account for aesthetic phenomena in terms of survivability simply does not work. The evidence itself needs to be read to be discussed, so I can only encourage that you read his work. None of this is to say that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has nothing to do with survivability. Only that survivability does not exhaust accounts of aesthetic phenomena.

And even if we couldn't link it to survivability it's not as if it wouldn't become just another selective pressure that has no intentionality whatsoever as I don't control who I'm attracted too. If we did, the religious could rejoice and start "curing" gay people. — Benkei

This, though, is a non-sequitur through and through. The whole question of intentionality is an irrelevancy - the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? Is mate choice a driver of evolutionary change in its own right, or not? Whatever the 'metaphysics' of 'choice' at work here is irrelevant. Ironically, one of the reasons sexual selection was so violently rejected as an independent evolutionary mechanism in the time after Darwin theorized it was because the very idea that animals - specifically females! - could play any causative role in driving evolution was nothing less than an offence to Victorian puritan mores. That same regressive hangover remains an infection on our understanding of evolution today.

Sexual selection is not a mode of natural selection, but an entirely different mechanism of selective pressure. Not only are they distinct, but they can in fact work against each other to the extent that sexual selection can make a species less robust to natural selective pressures. And even more, this is something Darwin himself recognized in the Descent:

"In 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin boldly addressed both the problem of human origins and the evolution of beauty. In this book he proposed a second, independent mechanism of evolution—sexual selection—to account for armaments and ornaments, battle and beauty. If the results of natural selection were determined by the differential survival of heritable variations, then the results of sexual selection were determined by their differential sexual success—that is, by those heritable features that contribute to success at obtaining mates.

... in Origin, Darwin saw sexual selection as simply the handmaiden of natural selection, another means of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the most vigorous and best-adapted mates. This view still prevails today. By the time he wrote Descent, however, Darwin had embraced a much broader concept of sexual selection that may have nothing to do with a potential mate’s being more vigorous or better adapted per se, but only with being aesthetically appealing ... Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was [the] revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices.

If evolutionary biology is to adopt an authentically Darwinian view, it must recognize, as he did, that natural selection and sexual selection are independent evolutionary mechanisms. In this framework, adaptive mate choice is a process that occurs through the interaction of sexual selection and natural selection." (Richard Prum, The Evolution of Beauty).

D'oh. I always forget about artificial selection... because its artificial lol.

'Natural' in 'natural selection' isn't redundant though. It serves to distinguish it from, say, sexual selection, which Darwin also wrote about. This doesn't mean sexual selection isn't 'natural' - it just means that 'natural' is being used in a more technical way than you're giving it credit for (i.e. it doesn't just serve as a bulwark against the 'supernatural').

Originally posted by @philosophy, merged here:

"In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that knowledge does not conform to objects but, rather, objects conform to knowledge. That is to say, the subject himself imposes the order he experiences in nature. As such, the subject is not in direct experiential contact with the world. Reason cannot extend beyond the world as we experience it.

But could it be said that the tremendous success of modern science, particularly physics, suggests that we are indeed in direct experiential contact with the world and that Kant is therefore wrong?"

This discussion was merged into Kant and Modern Physics

Of course we're a collection of atoms. We're just not only that.

When people show me real affection, I feel a confusing mix of anger and sadness.

Speaking for myself (so may/may not be applicable to you), this tends to come from finding myself undeserving or unworthy of such affection. Actually more than this: it comes from a secret(?) desire to be recognized as unworthy ('can't you see who I really am??') and resentment - self and other-directed - that the (apparent) facade is working so well. It's like, you want people to see through the facade, and are saddened that they don't, and you end up hating both them (for not seeing through it) and yourself (for putting it up in the first place).

Or to put it terms of acceptance: what's being accepted by others (from 'your' POV) is the 'wrong thing': they're accepting (or so one thinks), the façade, and not 'you'. And that's hard to accept in turn. In fact breeds resentment. Sorry for all the quote marks. It's hard to speak about this stuff.

If this is it (big if) ... how to fix it? I'm no therapist, but maybe something along the lines of: recognize that the facade is doing more to hurt than help. Also, I know I keep saying facade, but I just mean something like: 'the front that's put up that's everything not to do with the broken bits inside'. It's not 'fake' or illusory (everyone has a facade), just it's disconnected from the hurting bits which is where the problem lies.I dunno if any of this applies to you. But that's my experience of that feeling, and even then it's probably far less intense scale.

@fdrake”: "Aw man, behind on this and §3 (of section I!) is really killing me, even with your exposition. I get that the overall aim here is to show how to ‘decompose’ a manifoldness, but I don’t quite understand the demonstration he sets up to explain it. Two questions to begin with:

(1) “Let us suppose a variable piece of a manifoldness of one dimension” - I’m not sure what work the word ‘variable’ does here in ‘variable piece of a manifoldness’. Can one take an invariable piece of a manifold? And what would this distinction mean?

(2) “Let us take a continuous function of position within the given manifoldness, which, moreover, is not constant throughout any part of that manifoldness.” - Here, I’m not sure what work ‘not constant’ is doing. Is it the variation of position on the manifoldness we are asked to think of is ‘not constant’?

I don’t think I can work my way through the rest of the paragraph without getting these fundamentals down.

§75

§75 continues Witty’s expression of skepticism regarding the exhaustion of a concept by its definition. So to the pair of rhetorical questions: “Is this knowledge [of a game] somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were formulated, I’d be able to recognize it as the expression of my knowledge?”, I can only imagine Witty answering both in the negative. The formulation of the next question is somewhat more interesting though:

"Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of game, showing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these, saying that I would hardly call this or that a game, and so on”. (my bolding)

The juxtaposition of ‘completely expressed” - which suggests a sense of exhaustiveness - along with “could” and ‘and so on’ - which suggest open-endedness and in-exhaustion - strikes me as notable. That the 'completely expressed’ is, qua 'complete', nonetheless open-ended suggests to me that Witty wants to gives a different sense to the very idea of ‘completion’, that ‘completion’ or ‘the completely expressed’ does not need to be ‘closed’ in the sense of having an exact intensional definition, but can itself be subject to elaboration, variety, and context.

§76

§76 riffs again on how concepts do not need to be exactly bounded, and that, even if one were to supply a boundary (read: definition), this would not make the two concepts - one unbounded, the other not - the same. There would bb affinities, with still with differences.

§77

§77 seems to want to ‘apply’ the preceding remarks to what happens when we employ concepts in the sphere of aesthetics and ethics, the implication presumably being that the concepts involved in both are inherently fuzzy, and attempts to employ definitions here are doomed to failure. There isn’t really an argument here, it ought to be noted, so much as an assertion of ‘where Witty stands on this’.

§77 also begins to address a point that will come up in detail later: that of skepticism, and how to address it. For, if Witty is right that fuzzy concepts cannot be subject to definitions (by definition?), then one implication might simply be that 'anything goes’ - “Anything - and nothing - is right”. As an antidote to this kind of ‘definitional skepticism’, as one might term it, Witty offers the following panacea: “

§77: "In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (“good”, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings”.

In other words, if one has lost one’s bearings on a concept, look to the language-game in which that concept is employed: that language-game - and not a definition - will (help) provide those lost bearings.

I do not agree with this characterization of a "de-interiorizing" at this point. There is no warrant for an exterior/interior dichotomy here. And this is the same as at 56/57, the division of internal/external is shown to be irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's my point too.