I could provide a dictionary definition if you like, to show how people typically use these terms [morality and ethics]:

"Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". — Luke

Witt is looking at how our practices work and break down, including why we abandon our ordinary criteria. The approach above is caught in the trap Witt is diagnosing: thinking we can have a defendable system of how to pre-judge behavior.

"[Axiology] concerns matters of value" — Luke

As opposed to matters of fact, or logic. Welcome to the Tractatus. Once again, Wikipedia fails.[/quote] I would think with your adamant denial you would have your own thoughts on this issue.

Where does he call [loss of direction] "morality" in the text? I think you are seeing something that isn't there. — Luke

Again, Witt is not spelling it out for you. He is pointing in a direction and requires you to pick up the thread, the examples, the questions. Most times our actions don't require philosophy. When they do, our conceptual investigation shows us what our interests are in others pain, following rules, justification, etc. Just as Plato would think we knew what virtue was, but then tear it apart to learn more about it.

When he comes to the end of his justifications, then his "spade is turned" and he has stopped digging. There is nothing more he can do in terms of explaining or justifying why he follows the rule as he does; — Luke

We are inclined to say this to the student. We do not have to; it does not show that our action is our explanation. What it demonstrates is that the relationship between the student and teacher is more important than justifying the explaination. We can simply judge the student as wrong and stop the conversation, or start again, ask more questions, move to other examples, etc. The skeptic assails us with questions and doubts; Witt is trying to give them reasons in order to understand how to continue with them, with that part of them in us.

I don't believe that we want to have something private, hidden - that is simply the misconception of meaning and understanding that philosophers had inherited. — Luke

You've called the skeptic (the interlocutor) unreasonable and say they have simply misconceived how language is used. But the book is an investigation of why we want to flee from our ordinary criteria, why regular humans would rather know the other rather than be bound to their claim on us. He takes skepticism seriously as an ongoing threat to our ability to remain responsible (morally) to what we have said and done.

You seem hell-bent on maintaining your position, with little interest in understanding what I am saying about the matter at hand (explanation vs description, the hidden). I don't believe I have anything I could say that would satisfy your vague objection that grammar is literally about how to use words, rather than showing us something about the world, and thus, ourselves.

I have tended to read Antony’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as consonant with that of the ‘new school’. — Joshs

Categorizing each other, rather than responding to our claims and readings, diminishes our effort to personally respond to a text or discussion and learn something new or change. That said, the deepest layer of this reading (the fallout from the skeptic's desire for knowledge) comes from studying Stanley Cavell, who I would say, more than anyone, carries the flag for modern OLP and yet still marches to the beat of his own drum (his interests in philososphy).

You're assuming what ethics and moral philosophy looks like.
— Antony Nickles

Of course. So are you. We each have an understanding of the (linguistic) terms "ethics" and/or "moral philosophy". — Luke

I am not assuming it, I am making a claim that Witt is thinking of the moral realm as something particular, yet different. You just denied he is, without any explanation of what it's supposed to look like or include. This is not just words to me.

And what Witt would call "morality" is when we enter an unknown situation-..." Nickles

Do you have any textual support for this? — Joshs

Justifications coming to an end, rule-following and its limits, continuing a series (able to go on) or being inclined to give up on the other (student), aspect-blindness, whether we can know the other (pain, thoughts). He discusses how our ordinary criteria work, but also how they break. Instead of a moral theory or rules I can tell you, Witt is showing us that it is a moment, a crisis.

The subject is language because it is the means by which we struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding--it is the "resource", not the cause. — Nickles

I don't follow. Language is the means by which we struggle, but language is not the cause of our struggle? — Joshs

Yes. We struggle against our bewitchment (by certainty) through the method (OLP) of looking at our expressions (“language”) surrounding an example (and context) to see the variety of other workable criteria there are and to recognize our desires (for projecting criteria of certainty) and our real need (what is essential to us as evidenced by our criteria for a thing).

Grammar is found in language use, and relates to our linguistic practices. If you are saying that these practices themselves have grammar, then I disagree. — Joshs

Most of the time there is no space between our words and our lives (as with knowledge and pain)--we have not come to a point of loss. Here, the desire for certainty forces the skeptic to remove words from their ordinary contexts and expressions, which creates the problem that they then project onto the world, as intellectual (there is something mysterious, hidden, unknowable). For example, they might say: "because agreement on ethics is not ensured, it is irrational".

The term “use” is for the options (“senses” he will also call them) that a practice has, it’s different “possibilities”; for example: knowing your way about, knowing your phone number, knowing as acceptance, being aware—he will also umbrella it under the term “concept” (which is not in the sense of idea or “linguistic”). "Use" is not a connection between, or manipulation of, us, words, and the world. You express yourself (even if you choose the words)--as in: “I know they are in pain”--and that can then be judged (by our ordinary criteria) as: I am aware of it, rather than I am certain about their sensation. We can look and see how it is here between the two senses of the expression, its uses.

Crystalline purity does not refer to there being only one criterion of language (as if there are many more besides this one); crystalline purity refers to the mistaken presupposition that there is a non-empirical "essence of language" that it is the philosopher's task to discover. — Joshs

I was using the term that Witt does to cover the category of criteria, as if requirements, which we are susceptible to desire (not mistake): universality, certainty, repeatability, predetermination, prediction, grounds for judgment as to right and wrong, reasons outside of our character and responsibility, only knowledge, true/false, correspondence to reality, etc. This manifests in different ways, but is basically getting our (human) messy selves out of the picture, which puts us in limbo with no ordinary criteria or context.

...but also that [ordinary criteria are] not an alternative or rejection [of logic or essence or ...], but the opportunity to ask: why do we do that? Is it right, good?
— Antony Nickles

Do you have any textual support for this? — Joshs

From the beginning of this post I have been arguing this. He is trying to figure out how he got into the mindset he did in the Tractatus, the motivation of the interlocutor's questions, his discussion of temptation, obsession, need, etc. Why do we want to have something private, hidden? The question is everywhere. There is not an answer "...if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it." #201 All the examples are to get you to see yourself in him, his journey, his failings, his revelations--that philosophy has a way and its own satisfactions.

I don't see that he is recommending that we should change, except for the way that we do philosophy and think about philosophical problems. Again, if this makes it about ethics, then every philosophical work is about ethics. — Joshs

Yes, I think Witt's work is an example that every work of philosophy is about us and the human condition--philosophy is the betterment of the self. Nietzsche and Emerson court controversy to implore us to perfect ourselves. This is the moral urgency of Socrates stopping people on the street or Marx calling for a revolution because he wanted the things that produce us to be our own. Witt is showing us that epistemology must include us (is ethical), even to see when knowledge is no longer the issue.

What does our ordinary means of judgment mean? — Fooloso4

I think it will help to show the differentiation I'm trying to make about "the ordinary" to point out that we are not talking about the obvious, surface, or, i.e., "common sense" of our words, like there is a different, regular "point of view" or approach to them that is just not based on (is a rejection or refutation of) our desire for certainty, explanation--e.g., something hidden (metaphysically, personally)--and that this is self-evident, grasped fully and immediately, as if it does not need any "explanation" which, in this sense (not in Witt's use), turns out to be: further thought, investigation, going by "side roads" (#426).

This difference in the sense of "the ordinary" (its place as a term of Witt's) is evidenced by the fact that Witt creates his own fantasy worlds/situations in order to place an expression in a context that attempts to give the interlocutor/skeptic what they want (say, knowledge of the other). Thinking of our ordinary language as straightforward misses the point that making up these crazy situations is done to highlight that there are contexts in which these expressions normally live, and this varied, endless context is the ordinariness of our expressions, which Witt's method attempts to have you see for yourself, accept--in each situation, each time (when the need arises). Realizing this, we can move to simply describing the parameters (criteria) for our practices through our associated expressions in various contexts: for example, what breaks the practice of promising so that it is no longer even a promise? what makes it (say, "I promise to love you")? my knowing it? maybe only feeling it? "meaning" it? what does this tell us about identity, character, duty, moral responsibility?

The discussion of the availability of Witt's text is well-put by @Fooloso4 above in linking it to our being blind to an aspect of something. If you open any page of PI, it is clear that Witt is opening a question, posturing/hypothesizing, maybe something in contrast, and then leaving it at our feet to complete or see for ourselves. Yet those open-ended claims are taken as statements rather than seeing them as posed for our acceptance. Instead of proving them to ourselves, we cheat and take the followthrough to be given already, in those words, simply, without our participation, as if this investigation has nothing to do with the reader, our journey (the interlocutor in us--the skeptic), to change us, as the writer of the Tractatus is changing before us. I am only trying to point out that the work is to see why we blind ourselves to the sufficiency of the ordinary? Why we step over describing the contextual criteria of our expressions to look for something hidden that meets our necessity for it to be certain, universal, predetermined, etc., in other words, explainable by knowledge; how and why?

Understood, but much of what I have been doing is trying to draw some of the connections in his work. — Fooloso4

I get that and it’s appreciated, but I’m only left to speculate where you’re going without a claim to a certain interpretation of the quotations and the reasoning to tie them to this discussion. None of what Witt is doing is self-evident.

Where does the PI "morally implore us" to do anything at all; any of this? Do you want to say that any advocation/teaching of the right way to do something, such as change a car tyre, is a moral imploration? That seems like a tenuous association with morality. Even if there is a sense of morality in Wittgenstein's telling us the "right" way, or a better way, to do philosophy, morality is still not the subject of his philosophy in PI, nor his focus in the text. — Luke

You're assuming what ethics and moral philosophy looks like. Aren't the subjects of thoughtfulness, understanding, teaching, treating people as more than objects of knowledge, etc. what ethics is about? And what Witt would call "morality" is when we enter an unknown situation--not the everyday stuff like changing a tire, but when we come to the end of our justifications, we're at a loss as to what to say to each other (say, a student), our regular courses of action amount to contradiction (stunning us he and Plato say), etc.

The main focus of the Philosophical Investigations is language... "Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language." - PI — Luke

Th subject is language because it is the means by which we struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding--it is the "resource", not the cause. The interlocutor is given to say things, but they are things which we could agree could be said in such a situation. They are our expressions. Examining those expressions ("our 'ordinary' language") shows us the grammar (criteria) of the practices like chess, rule-following, thinking to ourselves, being in pain, see a thing as a thing (or in another way), etc. And these examples of practices show that we have a multitude of criteria rather than just crystalline purity, but also that this is not an alternative or rejection, but the opportunity to ask: why do we do that? Is it right, good?

There is no mention of ethics or morality here. — Luke

Maybe we've gotten so used to science telling us things that we read everything as a statement, every philosopher has a philosophy. But if I tell you something, do you learn better than if I ask a question and force you to come to it yourself? Witt comes in second after Nietschze for cryptic, half-finished thoughts and just flat-out question marks. If it were easy to change, he could just tell you how. Knowledge would equal wisdom. It is not explicit because it is imbedded in going through it (with him), but I would say it comes down to the simple lesson that our need for some tidy and certain knowledge makes us flee from ourselves and others. See, it's already wrong, dead, misstated, arguable...

"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. ...In both cases [of changes to our theoretical paradigm] we are freed from a picture that held us captive. A point of view given to us and protected by Christianity. A point of view that was regarded as not only ordinary but true. — Fooloso4

So science can change our picture of the world, even our vision of ourselves. It finds the anomalous, the contradictory, and we are certain it is not a mistake because it is repeatable, so the theory must bend, expand to include it (it is not so much true as reconcilable). So, yes, the shift in our story of facts allows for the fertile growth of more knowledge, the discovery and verification of new information. But science's success is not philosophy's (much as we would like it to be)--we do not have its power, its certainty--but neither can science do the work that is philosophy's. The place of peace (the understanding of our desires) that philosophy provides, is not one of knowledge. It is not a story of mystery and discovery, but of awakening what is already there, expanding ourselves; learning about our real need, as our desires are embodied in the criteria found in our ordinary expressions, say, for example, the fear that makes us want to skip over our flawed criteria (for, say, knowing, thinking, intending, etc.). Behind the idea of theories that are true to a reality (that theory/picture, which is the subject of the investigation) is our obsession with science's certainty. Witt's "ordinary" is not popular opinion, established or imposed. We may be ignorant of how the world works (empirically, scientifically, factually) but everyone can provide the kinds of examples of expressions that Witt does.

P.S. -

"That philosophy claims that everything is before us does not mean it is already understood." — Antony Nickles

But this is not what philosophy claims. — Fooloso4

What I should have said was "Even though Witt claims that everything is before us..."

"I've tried to piece it together myself but I'm at a loss."
— Antony Nickles — Fooloso4

What I was referring to was not Wittgenstein's work, but that I could not figure out what you are getting at.

The point of view of Copernicus or Darwin is that the method and tools of philosophy are in plain sight? — Fooloso4

No, I was revisiting Witt's claim we are discussing in the PI. I would think science's shifts in paradigms (to reconcile new facts, etc.) offer it the means to continue more productively, but it is not doing philosophy in getting there nor benefitting from philosophy's clarity. Ultimately, I think that is off topic unless you can explain.

It is not that ordinary language has to be understood against the expressions of traditional philosophy, but that traditional philosophy fails to understand ordinary language. — Fooloso4

We fail to understand what the ordinary is until we understand why philosophy wants more. Just because the ordinary normally works (although we still come to a loss) does not mean we understand how it works or see its part in connection with why philosophy normally wants to flee from it. That philosophy claims that everything is before us does not mean it is already understood. Our ordinary expressions are right there, but philosophy still has work to do.

I'm not sure I can respond further, as you have't explained enough about all of your other claims or shown their relevance to the matter at hand nor provided any context or evidence for me to get your interpretations of the quotes you’ve given. I've tried to piece it together myself but I'm at a loss--there is some belief about mystery and science and maybe philosophy's role, but I don't followed. And it's not clear to me your fundamental disagreement or misunderstanding with what I am saying.

"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)

He is talking about ways of seeing things. — Fooloso4

The point of view that Witt is claiming is that the method and tools of philosophy are in plain sight. My point was only that philosophy does not achieve this through empiricism but through understanding how and why we desire and create the picture that anything is hidden. This is not "ways" of seeing things, but a singular way that is different than traditional philosophy. I will grant that it is "fertile" as well, but because it is not hoping for the perfect conditions to be met before it begins. Other than that, I do not understand your interpretation of this quote nor how you believe it is relevant, and there is no effort to provide evidence of any view except the quote itself (as if it were self-explanatory). I could try to unpack it for you to argue or agree, but I leave that responsibility to you.

I don't think he is using the term "ordinary" in a way that is not ordinary. — Fooloso4

In #108 he is contrasting the voice of "ordinary life" with the speech of "the philosophy of logic", the context of our world against the "non-spatial, non-temporal". In #402 he is contrasting the "expression of ordinary language" with the "disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists". In saying that "ordinary" is used in a technical sense, I am saying it is different than its usual senses because it is always meant in comparison. Witt's ordinary is not naturally understood or easily grasped. The ordinary is special and distinct because it is seeing our everyday world as unusual and extraordinary, without escaping to another or claiming it is hidden from us. Another word he uses is "everyday", which, in #116, is a place philosophy returns to from the "metaphysical". Ordinary is a descriptor of our language and expressions and their senses (uses), which is only truly understood against the expressions of traditional philosophy and the senses of our words that it manufactures.

To some extent [your sense of wonder] must [remain mysterious to me] ["I think you do not know what the sense of wonder I am thinking of is."]. Wittgenstein connected wonder and awe with the mysterious and unknown. But if we ask what these things are I have no answer. — Fooloso4

But I am not asking what wonder is; asking that you answer its mystery--make explicit your experience of it. I was guessing at what use of wonder you were speaking of ("sense" in Witt's way of the options a concept has, which one of its possibilities).

Both Plato and Aristotle say that philosophy begins in wonder. It is, however, the pursuit of philosophy that led to modern science: — Fooloso4

An example of the use of wonder as curiosity would be one wondering about how something came to be, the answer of its (hidden) cause. Wonder as awe is surprise and amazement, as if an answer is impossible or unnecessary. Science and philosophy may both start in wonder, but science seeks an answer, to explain that which is hidden (in mystery), and the philosophy that Witt is doing merely lays the ordinary before us, to be struck by it (#129 @Luke), as in awe.

If philosophy is what is possible only before science's curiosity (#126), then the "complete clarity" (#133) at the end of philosophy (each time) is not the answers of science, but making aware our lives right before us.

It is not by such ordinary criteria that "a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved a fertile point of view". — Fooloso4

But this is science and empiricism (repeatability by anyone allowing for stability and certainty). This is the “explanation” that Philosophy for Witt is not involved with. Thomas Kuhn does a grammar of scientific revolution, and this would be something Wittgenstein could have done as well.

Ordinary criteria are not like beliefs or agreements, like a prevailing opinion. “Ordinary” in this sense is like a technical term defined in contrast to the singular criteria of crystalline purity, logic, certainty, that Witt is widening after the Tractatus and which was the standard of Plato’s forms or Kant’s thing-in-itself. It is the multitude of grammar which are different for every thing. Our lives embody our judgments, these limits, identity, distinction, etc.

I think you do not know what the sense of wonder I am thinking of is. — Fooloso4

Is this to remain mysterious? or just to end the discussion? I don’t mind someone attempting a take on what I have said, but if that is unwanted I apologize.

If "an ethic" can be used to apply to any course of action, then I would agree. — Luke

But the Pi does not only morally implore us to take certain actions, but to do so in the name of our betterment, not only in thinking, understanding, teaching; in being rigorous, clear, deliberate, honest, fair; but in learning about our responses to our human condition (our separateness), our fears, our desires, our blindness. But the Pi also uncovers our ethical obligation in the groundlessness of our world and the limitations of knowledge. To treat someone as if they have a soul; that it is not our knowledge of another’s pain, but our response to it that matters.

This is not a traditional moral philosophical theory or just a set of ethical principles because it subsumes the is and ought, the in and out, etc. What I would think is relevant here is that the discussion of explanation vs description and hidden vs plain-view shows our part in ontology, or desires for epistemology, and thus our moral part in philosophy, to be better people, do better.

Witt is not taking the same problems and answering them with a different thing, he’s not abandoning the problems, it is not just seeing the problems differently, it is a new way, a larger you, a changed world.

What does our ordinary means of judgment mean? — Fooloso4

They are our ordinary criteria; how we judge that a thing (or act) is that thing, what matters for it, counts in our culture, etc., and for each thing or act individually (having an opinion, dreaming, reading, intending), rather than the singular standard of whether we can be certain, logical, in everything. The PI is a series of examples of ordinary vs, say, philosophical/metaphysical/math-like criteria.

Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary is not for most of us our ordinary way of seeing things — Fooloso4

I agree (though the second "ordinary" is used differently, in the sense of usual rather than not special). Our everyday criteria do regularly go unnoticed; we are not aware of every implication--not everything matters all the time (there may be no reason for them to). But also, none of us see them all of the time (there is no lasting enlightened vantage or knowledge) this why we are amazed (stunned) at the unexamined implications (grammar) of, say, walking, or, another's pain. There has been no need for it to strike us (an event for philosophy).

Is it our ordinary means of judgment and identity that leads to new inventions and discoveries? — Fooloso4

Witt is not talking about leading as if caused or guided by. In saying “before” there is the sense of “not until”, as if there is something obstructing us, perhaps a house of cards, and, once reduced to rubble, it prepares the ground for profitable labor. But also that philosophy is limited to a different work, done apart, before.

Are we ordinarily awake to wonder? — Fooloso4

If we are struck by the ordinary, we are in a state of awe, but the sense of wonder you are thinking of seems like a curiosity, for discovery.

in 129: "we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful."

Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. — Fooloso4

I absolutely agree. Instead of wanting some specific criteria, we come to see our ordinary means of judgment and identity and felicity as good enough. We throw out the desire to explain things in order to be certain, to be able to see (describe) the varied rationality that were always there. And, yes, I would categorize seeing the ordinary as extraordinary as a course of action, an ethic @Luke.

@Luke brings up an excellent quote that furthers the discussion here through a distinction in the senses of “hidden”. What Witt is talking about is not hidden in the sense of not accessible, unexplained (as philosophy has historically framed it), but hidden in the sense of what we are blind to, and because of ourselves. We do not “notice” our ordinary criteria for, say, what is thinking, because we don’t usually have any need to make explicit what is important in judging it.

Our failure is that the familiar does not occur to us, and, he says, unless the not-occurring-to-us strikes us as strange, so that we come to understand why we overlook the criteria right before us. 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.

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

Yes, I agree that philososphy believed in hidden things (still does). But Wittgenstein did not "crack the code" in the sense of solve the problem. He diagnosed it; he discovered that it is the desire for a particular kind of wisdom (knowledge) that creates the picture of something hidden, and that understanding (describing) the world is actually open to everyone without a special explanation (is not about "knowledge"). What about that, if anything, is a misinterpretation of #126 and the surrounding?

“This is the very fixation that I have been discussing this whole time” — Antony Nickles

I have as well. — Fooloso4

So if we are in agreement, I must have been confused in taking the following as a statement or claim that you are making, rather than a diagnosis of the skeptic’s manifestation.

If the world does not yield to our intellect then it must be because there is something hidden from us. — Fooloso4

To reiterate my further point, this logical conclusion is forced upon us by our desire to have knowledge take care of everything for us, or be able to claim we are not responsible because something is hidden.

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, which Wittgenstein investigates in the PI (though starting out we “do not yet see how it occurs”, see below). “We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this ‘must’. We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there.” (#10) We try to force certainty onto the world, and when that is not met, we create a hidden world because we require everything must submit to our demand for crystalline pure logic. This is the driving force behind (the “nature of”) this “must”, and it occurs through our projection of a fixed singular means of judgment. The whole point of the PI is to understand this need for a hidden world, and to show that everything we really want is open to view already.

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. I would agree in the sense that we have a responsibility to make ourselves and our claims about the world understandable to others; that people have a tendency to duck their role by claiming a poverty of language or to reserve a personal mysteriousness.

With that said, I would point out that if the claim is that the entire world is intelligible, that misses the fact that our world is not entirely subject to knowledge. Not that it is therefore unintelligible, but that there is more to the world than knowing it, i.e., information, being certain, catalogued ahead of an event of time, etc. The most glaring example would be the claim and necessity of action, including within the moral realm (what do we do?).

Thus the conclusion that the "the world... does [not, I assume you meant] yield to our understanding" is a misapprehension, perhaps caused by the desire and presumed requirement for knowledge (certainty) to be the only guide and standard. This forced picture leads us to condescend to our ordinary (other) ways of the world (criteria other than knowledge) as being "messy" or, historically, emotive, rhetorical, illogical, etc. The fear of our lives outside knowledge is that we do not have the same exactness, predetermination, foundation, consistency, etc. In the face of this fear, we project a world that is entirely knowable (Plato, Kant) but is only (as yet perhaps) hidden or not intelligible. Thus we save the world (as knowledge) by putting it beyond our reach (vision). Cavell calls this "living our skepticism".

It is in investigating this picture that Wittgenstein is claiming that our ordinary criteria are sufficient and that they are open to us, that the world is not removed or closed off. "...we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us." (#98)

Since I donate, I can attach files; so attached is the Meno, by Plato, which is I believe the text under discussion about the knowledge of virtue. The link is here.

At the start, Plato says something that will sound familiar: that he does not know what virtue is, or more interestingly, that he can't remember the knowledge (from Gorgias). But he believes Meno can speak as an expert (as if any of us can), even though "I [Plato] have never yet met anyone else who did know." And then he continues "Speak and do not begrudge us, so that I may have spoken a most unfortunate untruth when I said that I had never met anyone who knew, if you and Gorgias are shown to know." (71d)

In saying that they must be "shown" to know, Plato reveals that he already has requirements for what he will accept before beginning his questions; spoiler: virtue will not meet them. As an example, Meno says each thing has its own virtue, but Plato wants virtue to be singular, universal to any particulars (72), as, he claims, "all human beings are good in the same way" (73c). It will turn out that Plato never finds this singular quality, getting sidetracked on what virtue would need to consist of to be such a thing; so the Meno is more an epistemological dictum than an investigation of ethical action.

The threshold is that virtue must be able to be taught--rather than something that could be found (say, within oneself, in action)--thus to be a kind of knowledge (in the sense of information), outside of which there is "nothing good" (87d). (Wittgenstein comes to the same conclusion in the Tractatus, because he is also projecting beforehand the criteria of certainty, universality, etc., and rejecting anything that does not meet those requirements.)

This is the point, at 88d-89, at which Plato comes to the conclusion that virtue must be a kind of wisdom as opposed to ignorance, though not of knowledge, but as a lack of "discipline" that is "reckless", "foolish" (id.), as if unconsidered, without first understanding. These qualities could be considered the realization (lessons) of ordinary ethical guidelines, however, Plato rejects that virtue is teachable because he assumes, as, at 97, that it must have "correctness" or "right"; something that can be "tied down" which will "remain" and "guide" us. This desire for predictability and consistency comes from a need for the consequences of our actions to be known in advance; that, with knowledge, we could act and always be judged correct or right. Without meeting those requirements we are "soothsayers" or "prophets", simply guessing.

Of note though, he says "they have no knowledge of what they are saying", as if what allowed for virtue was a kind of self-awareness (through our language, of our culture's judgment of what is said), that the "knowledge" he seeks is not something new or novel, but a "recollection" (81d). He goes on to stun, or "numb", someone who volunteers their answers by bringing them to be at a "loss" (84b)(in this case, to do mathematics, something that must be certain, which is another forced criteria of virtue for Plato). Plato calls our unexamined first impressions "opinions" (85d), but the crux is not that opinion (as in, belief) is opposed to knowledge (as, justified certainty), but that the loss or grief that we come to requires us to look for something we do not seem to have (84c), but something we come to as if we are remembering what we already know (as if from another life (81b)). Wittgenstein will do this by investigating the implications of the practices of our ordinary (though unexamined) lives through our language for them, making their structure and criteria explicit; in a sense known, though as: aware, realized.

Also, Plato says that those who are statesmen--leaders of themselves as it were--cannot make another a statesman; as if our virtue was ours alone to make, that we create ourselves, as if virtuous is something we become, exhibit. Plato's requirements for knowledge, however, force the matter into either knowledge or shadow, insisting that we find the nature of virtue but leaving the matter for us to answer (perhaps as if for ourselves--with our selves--say, when we are at a loss).

As I understand it, what is at issue is the status of a mental picture — 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; as if an assumption like a map that already determines all the relationships between the different paths. A "point of view" in the PI is not a cohesive theory; it is an attitude, in the sense of an inclination, a disposition. He is trying to get us to look beyond our own nose, as when we are inclined to give up on someone (#217), treat them as merely an object of knowledge rather than a person making a moral claim on us (P. 223), than someone with a soul (p. 178). This is not looking at them through a framework, it is being in a position towards them, in response to them.

It is not pictures but the picture of something hidden that he rejects. — Fooloso4

Leaving aside a seemingly fruitless argument about pictures (or not), I agree that the picture of something hidden concerns Witt. It comes up in many forms: a reality our words might correspond to, something inside me or something inside the other, and the ordinary criteria we use every day. But I would suggest we look further than treating this like an ontological argument--as if the point was: there cannot be a private language!--or some alternative to that serving the same purpose. This hidden world is the kind of picture that we are tempted or forced to. His question is, why? What compels the interlocutor to ask the questions he does? demanding satisfaction of what? It is not that something is hidden; it's not even: what hides it? 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.

I guess my point in saying that he abandons pictures was more to mean that he is not replacing the picture of something hidden with another picture (that we need only look at the outside of things) and the important part is that the desire remains, our need for certainty still threatens to overwhelm the ordinary criteria which do not provide the answers, justification, and solution to our skepticism. It will always be "difficult to remind oneself" of the ordinary "for some reason" (#89); and that reason is that we would rather take the straight road to certain knowledge. (#426)

Well it appears the use of "picture" that I am focused on is not the only way in which Witt uses that word in the PI (there are more than 300 instances). A lot of the time he is talking about actual pictures (like paintings); at other points it is a mental image (picturing something to yourself); and, during his discussion of aspects, he creates the terms "duck-picture" and "rabbit-picture" to differentiate the two aspects of the "duck-rabbit" picture. 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).

A summary of the relevant quotes below is that this kind of "picture" (I emphasize "Picture" in bold) is what we "want" (have a reason to desire) or are "tempted by"; at times he says which "suggests" or "forces" or "obtrudes" a particular use of a concept on us, blinding us to other uses, creating a "conflict" in us; or that we "exert" ourselves to "construct" or "conjure up" for, as examples: creating "reality" (#59); taking away our responsibility (#222); fixing a sense "unambiguously" making the ordinary seem "muddled" (#426); and, mostly, imagining that the world is hidden from us (#92)(including the other).

The reasons and process of this picture-creating, this intellectualizing of our everyday lives, is the subject of the Investigations (starting with Augustine's vision of language as only naming). "[A picture] must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. This is how it takes us in." P. 184. We "convince" ourselves for reasons we do not yet understand (p. 223), that we must gain perspective on, learn to avoid, working to humble ourselves to the world (#426).

"'A name signifies only what is an element of reality. What cannot be destroyed; what remains the same in all changes.'—But what is that?—Why, it swam before our minds as we said the sentence! This was the very expression of a quite particular image: of a particular picture which we want to use." #59

"We see component parts of something composite (of a chair, for instance). We say that the back is part of the chair, but is in turn itself composed of several bits of wood; while a leg is a simple component part. We also see a whole which changes (is destroyed) while its component parts remain unchanged. These are the materials from which we construct that picture of reality" #59

"Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world." #96

"The picture of the cube did indeed suggest a certain use to us [a box], but it was possible for me to use it differently [as a triangle prism, which is also a cube]" #139

"What was the effect of my argument? It called our attention to (reminded us of) the fact that there are other processes, besides the one we originally thought of, which we should sometimes be prepared to call "applying the picture of a cube". So our 'belief that the picture forced a particular application upon us' consisted in the fact that only the one case and no other occurred to us. " #140

"The line intimates to me the way I am to go." — But that is of course only a picture. And if I judged that it intimated this or that as it were irresponsibly, I should not say that I was obeying it like a rule." #222

"The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our faces against the picture of the 'inner process'. What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word "to remember". We say that this picture with its ramifications stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is." #305

"One is tempted to use the following picture: what he really 'wanted to say', what he 'meant' was already present somewhere in his mind even before we gave it expression." #334

"But here we are constructing a misleading picture of 'intending', that is, of the use of this word. An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions." #337

"Instead of "imaginability" one can also say here: representability by a particular method of representation. And such a representation may indeed safely point a way to further use of a sentence. On the other hand a picture may obtrude itself upon us and be of no use at all." #397

"When as in this case, we disapprove of the expressions of ordinary language (which are after all performing their office), we have got a picture in our heads which conflicts with the picture of our ordinary way of speaking." #402

"In numberless cases we exert ourselves to find a picture and once it is found the application as it were comes about of itself. In this case we already have a picture which forces itself on us at every turn, but does not help us out of the difficulty, which only begins here." #425

"A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense un-ambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied." #426

"While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going on in his head." In saying this, one is not thinking of brain-processes, but of thought-processes. The picture should be taken seriously. We should really like to see into his head. And yet we only mean what elsewhere we should mean by saying: we should like to know what he is thinking." #427

"The picture of the special atmosphere forced itself upon me; I can see it quite clear before me—so long, that is, as I do not look at what my memory tells me really happened." #607

"If the picture of thought in the head can force itself upon us, then why not much more that of thought in the soul?" p. 178

""The mind seems able to give a word meaning"—isn't this as if I were to say "The carbon atoms in benzene seem to lie at the corners of a hexagon"? But this is not something that seems to be so; it is a picture." p. 184

"What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. This is how it takes us in." p. 184

""I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible." p. 223

a representative overview is said to be of fundamental importance. — Fooloso4

Representation was the wrong word; what I was talking about was a picture, like meaning as correspondence (word to world). I agree that a broad view and seeing connections are part of Witt's ethic, but this is different than a picture, which I would equate with a theory. Also, when I said that we could not "get out of" a picture, what I meant is that that there is not some world or reality with which we would have some direct connection (or not).

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

I think here I agree and would hope we are on the same terms now at least. I equate "the conditions for the possibility of representation" as the requirements we project--among other things, the desire for purity--which we are constantly drawn too, rather than something he is "no longer concerned with".

"107. The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement)."

In this way, we do not get outside of that temptation. To leave it open is to realize we cannot settle into some general, universal, justified answer or framework; we constantly have to work in each case we become lost, which I would agree is:

to see connections between things, how they relate to each other — Fooloso4

That science has frameworks (paradigms, as Kuhn says) is part of its grammar, not part of how the rest of the world works (or a measure of it), but, as I said, what, say, doing justice is, may change over time, may die off, as a way of our lives with each other. We may come to the end of its criteria, and it is not ensured in the same way science is, but science is an "ordinary way"; it has its criteria just like ethics does. Part of the point of the PI is to put them on even ground, that science does not have a corner on truth ("truth-value, say "facts" corresponding to "reality"), but that they are just different. An excuse for my actions is a particular form of life that can come off or not, however uncertain the outcome compared to science.

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

It is a "picture" that held him captive in the Tract. He does not reject a condition, he rejects pictures; that there is a single framework we have, or could change, or get out of, such as that of "representation", the picture of a correspondence between word and world (and thus a separation between them), as if words were all names of things. As a single picture, our world can be seen either as fact or value, the world or our feelings, truth or opinion. My point is that the desire for this pingeon-holing hides the meaningful (different) ways everything is connected in all our realms.

And this is the difference between meaning as referrent and meaning as importance. But it is not what is important to me (until it is), but what matters in the history of our culture with each thing, its criteria (its grammar). With a fact, what is important to us is the scientific method: that if we separately do an experiment (competently), we will come to the same result (that it doesn't matter who I am). With ethics, what we do is important because it creates who we are, and the result hangs on the relationship between you and I.

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

Seeing things in a "new way" is not changing to another set of glasses (#103), it is remembering our ordinary ways, apart from, say philosophy's desire for purity, which hides the ordinary from us. The conditions of a thing must be actively unearthed, but this is not a change to the form of that part of our lives, as, say, an apology or pointing (though that is not to say our human life never changes, nor those forms never come to an end).

Ethics/aesthetics are not a matter of certainty but of personal experience — Fooloso4

To clarify, I am not saying Witt is denying personal experience in the PI; just that the only options are not so black-and-white as my experience or scientific certainty (to pit my individual values against abstract morality). Sure, there is the ineffable, the inexpressible, but that is the outer edges of all the ways in which we can express things. The idea that our experience is "hidden" within us is to avoid my responsibility to make myself known, your responsibility to respond to my moral claim on you (say, being in pain) without having certainty.

[ The conclusion about ethics in the Tract ] was not a matter of certainty, but of propositions having a sense, a meaning; they represent some state of affairs in the world. Ethics/aesthetics do not represent what is the case. Ethics/aesthetics are not a matter of certainty but of personal experience. — Fooloso4

The picture of "representation" of the world, or what is the case, is what is taken apart in the PI as the product off the requirement for a crystalline purity (to give us the certainty we desire). It is representationalism that creates the idea of objective/subjective (personal "experience"), of fact/value.

No. Just the opposite [Witt did not want ethics to be reducible to logic]. He said that ethics/aesthetics are transcendental. They stand outside the relations of things in the world, outside logical relations. — Fooloso4

You are not allowing a distinction between what he says and the reasons he says it. He says the things about ethics in the Tract because of the requirement he has for us (him) in that work in order to be said to say anything. In the PI he dissects why he wanted (we want) that requirement by first looking at the varied "logical relations" that each thing has, even ethics.

he is using [transcendental] in Kantian sense of the condition for the possibility of experience — Fooloso4

I too think that the " 'possibilities' of phenomena" (#90) is analogous to Kantian "conditions", but Kant's, as in the Tractatus, were a pre-requisite, a threshold (logical) necessity (as with his imperative)--set out by us (unknowingly even) beforehand. But in the PI, he comes with an open mind, investigating first for the varied conditions we use to judge a thing to be what it is (categorically Kant would say, e.g., to follow a rule, or not)--he calls these conditions: criteria.

The conditions for such possibilities are, however, no longer regarded as a priori. — Fooloso4

As he shows in the PI, these criteria (the logical form of a thing) are already there, in our language, which holds our culture, which is the history of all the ways we are in the world. "We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena." (#90., emphasis added)

By the logic of our language he means a priori logical form. But logical form cannot be represented, there can be no propositions about logic form. — Fooloso4

The logical form of a thing (its grammar) is captured in the statements we make about a thing (not "represented"). We need not do a study to come to the criteria for an apology, understanding, thinking, pointing, following a rule; it is not a matter for science to find out. Our ordinary criteria are not "hidden", but open to plain view, if we but allow them to come to us rather than blinding ourselves with the criteria of purity.

one should not need to know or study the work of Wittgenstein or whoever else to find out what they mean about philosophy and whatever other terms or concepts are involved in these statements. — Alkis Piskas

Even with Witt--someone classed as an "ordinary language philosopher"--he has terms, like, criteria, grammar, aspect, etc. But his way of doing philosophy does not end up with something he "means"; it is a process of examples and answering questions and self-analysis, like Hegel's "dark path". This work is done with interacting--conversing--with the work. We can try to emulate that process in a discussion, but some philosophy is about the work and struggle rather than statements and summaries.

Only if one assumes there is an objective morality to be uncovered. — Fooloso4

I guess the analogy--of something "hidden"--here isn't straightforward. But, if we require certainty for moral deliberations, it "hides" the ordinary possibility for agreement, the steps we can actually take; that there are practical ways in which we actually can come to agreement. We are not relegated to the obscurity Witt originally put ethics and aesthetics into because of his requirement for statements to have certainty.

The Tractatus attempts to show that it is not reducible to a science. — Fooloso4

My point is that it was not something that he believed that he was trying to argue for or support. He was not "attempting to show" it. He wanted it to be reducible to logic, required it to be; everything and the only things in the Tractatus were what he could say with certainty. When you come out of the gate with that single criteria, you miss all the regular ways we can and do discuss and agree in morality and aesthetics. Later, in the PI, he showed that every different type of thing has its own criteria, and that philosophy should draw those out to show why we want to overlook them and grasp for the single purity he had required previously.

It is a fact that morality and aesthetics are not science; that does not mean we do not have means of discussion along with the opportunity, and more importantly the responsibility, to create agreement. The failing is not morality not being scientific; it is our decision to want it to be because of the fear that we must stand in its place.

The problem is, we do not possess the facts and logic to bring moral deliberation to a satisfactory conclusion. There is no moral science. Moral deliberation, although rational, is not reducible to facts and logic. — Fooloso4

So we could both agree that it is true that we can not ensure agreement in ethical and aesthetic dialogue; agree that that is part of the grammar of those subjects--their workings, in that they are capable of failure, coming to nothing. They are not science, which has facts because it doesn't matter who it is: if they do the science right, they will reach the same result. It is reproducible, predictable ahead of time, dependable, independent of us. Aesthetic and moral discussions rely on us, our possibilities for irrationality, fear, obsession, denial, cowardice, deception, etc.

But intellectualizing this as a "problem" makes the world seem hidden, which Witt is claiming need not happen. The desire (to have moral deliberation reducible, a science) is the same desire Wittgenstein had in the Tractatus; a requirement before anything could be accepted, but only one standard (Witt calls them criteria in the PI). The interlocutor is the embodiment of this historic desire of philosophy for certainty, apart from which philosophy exiles everything else as unknowable, inexpressible, "emotive" (say, as Kant's thing-in-itself or Plato's forms).

What happens in PI is that he shows examples of how the world is not so black and white. One example is that the Interlocutor wants to know (for certain) someone is in pain. But we do not know someone is in pain, but that is simply just not how it works--we react to them as a person in pain (acknowledge their pain, or not), much as we treat someone as if they have a soul (p. 178)--grammatically that is not a matter of knowledge. We are responsible for bridging the gap of our separateness, much as we are responsible for making our moral reasons known to each other, attempting to see what you see in art. We can shirk those duties, but then it is not a failing of those realms, but ours.

...statements like "Philosophy simply puts everything before us", I, etc. do not mean anything, because one must first define philosophy, i.e. tell us what kind of philosophy he is talking about. Isn't that so? — Alkis Piskas

He's within and responding to the tradition of western analytic philosophy (the problem of other minds, epistemology, ethics, education, skepticism, etc.). And philosophy is always partly self-criticism. Witt is making the claim that philosophy is a method, in the sense of more like a practice than a "philosophy", in the sense of a statement, or theory, or a position.

The point is that perception is not passive, it is active, constructive. — Fooloso4

Maybe it would have been clearer to say that picturing "perception" as something special happening in us (as if, all the time) is mystifying what is just the expression of what I am experiencing. There is nothing outside of the need to clarify (construct) for someone else what possibility of a thing I am focusing on--which aspect of it matters to me right now (along its grammar). "It's true I say 'Now I am having such-and-such an image', but the words 'I am having' are merely a sign to someone else; the description of the image is a complete account of the imagined world." PI, #402.

Relevant to this discussion, there is nothing "hidden" that I possess (see #398). We (and philosophy) want to be indeciferable sometimes so that the failings of our world can appear to have an intellectual quality that we can solve for (as guys want to believe they can fix everything). Witt discusses this as the desire to have knowledge of the pain of another.

And yet he says very little about morality and aesthetics in his later work. What exactly is he replacing the earlier picture with? — Fooloso4

The point of the PI is to show that there is not one logic, but that everything we do has its own criteria and rationality, which is a revocation of the fixed criteria of certainty enforced in the Tractates that created the picture of aesthetics and ethics as a mystical part of our world (though the world is not without wonder and mystery). He is replacing the earlier picture with, in this sense, one for each kind of thing (its criteria and grammar).

The demand for crystalline purity does not extend to the ethical/aesthetic. They are not matters of fact and logic. — Fooloso4

It is exactly the desire for purity that creates the idea that they are outside fact and logic. Just because we may not come to agreement does not mean there is no rationality, no discussion--that there is something hidden or mystic about which nothing can be said. As elsewhere in the PI, our desire for force and surety hides the ordinary means of moral and ethical discussion and agreement, all the means for which are at our disposal, so we remain responsible for what comes between us or what we fail to show each other.

how one sees things is a prominent and recurring theme for Wittgenstein — Fooloso4

I was trying to fill out Witt's story of how philosophy is led to imagine and search for something "hidden", rather than working with what is in plain view. The picture is that the world is only an appearance, with something real that is then hidden (behind that), which Witt realizes comes from our desire for something more perfect and certain than our everyday assessment of things (our ordinary "criteria" he calls it).

I was equating that with phenomenology's picture that we always possess a "conception" of the things we see, which we imagine as the product of some inherent ability ("perception") tied to our "consciousness" (say, my framework), which is either known only to us, or which needs to be understood generally to "really" see things. This is the flip side of imaging the world as an appearance, allowing us to keep ourselves hidden. The analogy of conceiving as building is that it exactly is an action, a place we get to, work towards in actual ways: like broadening the context, incorporating more evidence, keeping an open mind, seeing from another's shoes, "taking side roads" (#426), etc., rather than unethical acts of thought, like grasping in a flash, imposing our desire for certainty, generalizing, etc.

But Witt's examples show that we recognize different aspects of a thing because and only if those aspects are possibilities for that thing (a "phenomena")--which aspects (senses) come to us from our culture, through our regular, transparent ways of talking about those things.

The other way the world becomes hidden is if it is deemed inaccessible to us (as we imagine ourselves unknowable by others). Your quotations from Witt's earlier work amount to the limitations he projected onto our ability to (rationally) discuss or understand morality and aesthetics. But it is exactly this picture that he is questioning and replacing through the work of the Philosophical Investigations. Specifically, it was his requirement for crystalline purity in the Tractatus that stopped him from realizing the regular ways we talk about these subjects, causing him to feel this part of the world was "mystical".

Excuse my ignorance. Are you claiming that Witty was in favour of ordinary language philosophy? — emancipate

The term ordinary language philosophy was coined to refer to Wittgenstein's method, not a position that he is for or against (though Moore and others are lumped in, confusing things). He is using it, doing it--not arguing in favor of something. J.L. Austin has a similar method, as did Socrates (Witt and Austin ask his questions of themselves, and trust the answers more). The method is related to this topic because in investigating our normal ways of talking about a thing or topic--which Witt refers to as that thing's "grammar"--and, once we accept that: "yes, that is the kind of phrase we say in talking about, for example, following a rule"--he uses the implications of those phrases as evidence for philosophical insight.

Our forms of speaking are "in plain view" because the implications and workings of our ordinary ways of doing things can be claimed and agreed to by anyone. They are not hidden, mysterious, special, or requiring arcane or abstract explanations. That is not to say that his conclusions from that data (a thing's grammar) are not eye-opening; only that it is simply making explicit the things we all understand implicitly (why Socrates calls it "remembering", as if something we knew before birth). It seems this way because our language already holds the world (our ways of judging, differentiation, assessing whether something comes off right) into which we are trained by example and picking things up (rather than being "told" everything, as knowledge would be.)

Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more a working on oneself. On one's interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) — Witt., Culture and Value, p. 16

In distinguishing what is viewable from what is hidden (the doable from the fantasy), I take "working on oneself" to be an ethical admonishment--work on changing your acts rather than somehow altering (or understanding) our perception (as phenomenology wishes); that philosophy for Witt is not about seeing in a new way, but, to use this re-framing, realizing what we can expect from interpreting and seeing, say, by finding the limit of what they (and we) can and can not do.

By the possibilities of phenomena he means the various ways in which we can see things. — Fooloso4

Yes, I know, he does use the word "phenomena", but he is not focusing on a thing or action or occurrence themselves (empirically, as it were), nor their "appearance", nor our experience of them, but their possibilities (and impossibilities). "One's" way of seeing things is not in the sense of yours or mine (as if an "interpretation" is like an opinion, and not a process), so any "various ways" are just the different criteria for judging each thing to be that thing (and not another). He will also call this: different "senses". For example, knowing can be in the sense of knowing a phone number, as opposed to a knowing look, or knowing as accepting, acknowledging. These different senses of knowing are not dependent on me; we do not "conceive things".

More to the point here, Witt is broadening our focus to stop us from fixating on our insistence that there is something special or hidden about things (say, their "essence"); stop us imagining we lack some kernel of knowledge (say, understanding perception) just because that would be easier for us than facing our ordinary relationship with the myriad ways of the world, and all their implications and responsibilities and fallibility and limitations.

This [ desire for a single complete resolution (PI, #91) ]--"as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light... [ finds expression in questions about essence ] ...not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but [ we imagine ] something that lies beneath the surface... something that lies within, which we see [ only ] when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out." PI, #92 This is the human compulsion to "penetrate" (PI, #90) the world by way of knowledge that Wittgenstein is turning from in glancing sideways at what is essential about a thing by examining what Kant would call its "conditions"; that our ordinary expressions reveal what something can be (is possible of, and limited to).

126. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Ed. 3

I don't think [ that "everything lies open to view", above ] means we understand things simply by looking at them. I think he is alluding to what was called ordinary language philosophy. — Jackson

That "everything lies open" is not to say it is clearly evident, but that we do not need special access or are learning anything new or creating a special generality, and this "openness" is the basis of the validity of Wittgenstein's method (dubbed ordinary language philosophy--see, ad nauseam, here). His descriptions have truth ("truth-value") because you acknowledge them; when we do not or would not disagree (#128), but also that anyone can and may disagree, because there is no force but its clarity and comprehensiveness with the goal to bring you along; you are to look for yourself, "prove" it to yourself (each reader, not agreement generally as consensus or convention).

As @Banno points out, the work is to make explicit what is implicit (express our intuition Emerson says; Plato will call it "remembering"; Heidegger: letting the object come us), or, as Witt says: "putting everything before us". For example, we might advance the description that: when we say "by mistake", we imply that we wanted to take a specific action but mixed up somehow, as opposed to "by accident", where something happens unwittingly (J.L. Austin's example). This is what Witt refers to as a grammatical statement; it is a provisional claim but not an empirical observation (a discovery), nor a statement (or belief) that he is claiming is justified, nor the proposition of a (undeniable/logical) cause.

Many stop at this point (here, including @Banno and @Janus) and take Witt only as describing the unspoken "rules" of the world (say, for what counts as walking)--as if he is just giving us different knowledge rather than pushing for an ethical change in our conduct--or take his point to be that philosophy's problems are merely a trick of language (misreading #109), but Witt is drawing out examples of our ordinary practices as a means of personal revelation, as, for example, our bewitchment by our false, preconceived need (#108) for something universal, abstract, and predeterminable which will remove us from our fears and responsibilities (through simply more, better knowledge).

Instead of (pre-)imposing our desire for certainty (requiring/accepting only logic), Witt turns around (as in a cave) to draw out (investigate) each thing's own criteria for what matters for it to be what it is, so that, through these examples (rule-following, pain, seeing aspects, etc.), we might see our part (as in an epiphany), our obsessions, and change in the process (for example, adopting a new "attitude"--#310, #575, p. 179 "IV"). For instance, Austin's example of accidents and mistakes is to show that "intention" is only a question asked after the occurrence of something unexpected, and that to imagine it as a cause special to each person's acts is a means of sliding out of our moral responsibility to explain ourselves, answer to each other.

Aren't we--as you point out with global warming--strictly talking about the use of the scientific method and the limits upon that (or, as it were, the treatment of its objects)? Only to ask, is there anything that would change the method itself? As you say: with anyone (competent) running the same experiment, we get the same results (or is there something I'm missing about science, which could easily be true). And then what would be a specific example of a change in the method? I ask for clarification as my understanding (from Cavell) is that it is the consistency of science based on its method that gives a fact its stature, its certainty, its ability to be predetermined, its reliability, its foundational structure to build upon, in short, its "objectivity" (rather than the measuring of a thing-in-itself--as shown by, for example, Thomas Kuhn's exceptions undermining the traditional concept of an object). That it is the consistency of the fundamental process which is paramount.

This leaves us simply with limits on what we can experiment on and what acts we can conduct, which is interesting nevertheless, and still leaves us with the disappointment of being kept from knowledge, closed off from part of the world (imagined as existing beyond or outside morality). Science being constrained by moral considerations seems unfair, or, unscientific (its method being without the need for any particular human, or, it then seems, humanity entirely).

But, as in most moral considerations, we have concessions. We have waivers and volunteers in medicine, and, I only imagine, consent of authority to damage the natural world if it is returned to its previous state; as a war could be deemed just to allow someone to kill without being judged to have broken an oath not to. By analogy, the importance (necessity) of the knowledge would outweigh the cost. And perhaps the thing is that our modern moral judgment doesn't allow for this wider calculus (economics?); we now narrowly judge the act alone removed from any context, which modern moral philosophy (Nietschze, Wittgenstein, etc.) would say actually removes the (messy) "human"--in a sense, attempting to turn morality into a kind of science. And, I take it, another concern would be the (arbitrary or all-encompassing) framing of the subject, making it rarified without equal weight given to what might exempt the act (and actor) from judgment.

I'm not familiar with the particular brand of philosophy you seem to be championing. — Agent Smith

I would suggest not worrying so much about boxing things into a "philosophy" that we just defend or attack. It seems to get in the way of even starting. Good luck.

does your philosophy have psychological underpinnings? — Agent Smith

“Psychological underpinnings” sounds like you think it is not a rational (analytical) claim or argument. As to learning about our motives, philosophy began as a search for self-knowledge, to better ourselves by being aware of what is right and true. I’m not claiming our thought is shaped by our psychology (though what is Plato “remembering” but what we call unconscious). Our doubt, and fear, and desire for certainty are situational, part of being human.

I'm afraid I lack the background to grok your post. — Agent Smith

I do take those who need to put something a particular way (say, Emerson, the later Heidegger, Wittgenstein (and Austin), Nietszche) to be as analytical as, even in response to, Kant or Plato (who insisted on things being put a certain way), say, by mustering "arguments" to get around our integral defensiveness to abandoning certainty as the only acceptable criteria of reason. Philosophy is inherently in critique ("review") of itself--reading itself differently, obliquely, further. The dismissals of: emotivist, subjective, relativism, or other easy label ("strain"), are analogous to logic's exile of "poetry", equivalent to the brush-off of saying something is "rhetoric" (syntax), in the same way that anything not involving "reality" is illusion, because we can not face that life (our categorical condition) is subject to illusion, isolation, madness, judgment, consequences, injustice, frailty, temptation, so we cling to certainty and are left with only chaos as the alternative, blind that we approach perfection, however pedestrian our ways.

Doing serious philosophy here for me would involve first questions and discussion, but what we probably have is a lack of interest rather than capability.

are we baffled or not? — Agent Smith

We are beyond being merely stymied and reflecting on our history and practices to problem-solve; we are lost and don't know how to continue (having come to an end, Witt says); all our knowledge has not prepared us for this novelty or won't stand in our place, make the new decision for us, settle our accounts with each other. But from this moment (this "event" Ricoure points out) the skeptic has generalized to everything (and created reality as a solution), all the time, stuck trying to solve for the future.

Our doubt (Aporia, I gather) creates our fear (yet perhaps trembling), our wish to slip out from being held responsible for our choices and words. We court our confusion hoping for something "objective" "real") so it won't matter who stands on this precipice, whose character is forged by acting into the void. This is the time for philosophy to turn us on our community (for Witt, through language--what we say) for the possibilities of its extension, and the creation of our next self. Perhaps our perspecuity, our new attitude (as in perspective), our expansion, the ordinary made alive, is like Aratraxia as an epiphany, a deeping into the unnoticed already-there, a settling, at peace with our duty in response.

Well we should probably leave Witt out of this, but I was only in a way agreeing with your conclusion that there is ultimately nothing "essential", nothing we can know, that saves us from the skeptic’s claim. There is no ultimate predetermined, right, certain, "real", in a word: knowledge that solves the intellectual problem we concoct to control our separateness from the world and each other. Not that the problem is silly, or that the skeptic’s framework is correct, but we collude by fighting in the same arena because we want knowledge to allow us to avoid our being a part (individually) of the equation.