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PPE Notes Wittgenstein Notes

Hacker Philosophical Method Notes

Updated Hacker Philosophical Method Notes

Wittgenstein Notes

Wittgenstein

Approximately 96 pages

Notes on Wittgenstein's later writings on meaning, language, rules and philosophy of mind, together with extensive notes on secondary literature, including Russell, Kripke, Child, Blackburn and Baker & Hacker....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Wittgenstein Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Peter Hacker - Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein

Chapter Six: Wittgenstein’s Later Conception of Philosophy

1. A Kink in the Evolution of Philosophy

  • There are significant similarities in Wittgenstein’s earlier and later conceptions of philosophy, but also differences

    • Wittgenstein saw his method as the creation of a new subject, beyond philosophy

      • it was no longer a cognitive pursuit, as it has been for

        • Plato - philosophy concerned with eternal truths about abstract objects

        • Descartes - concerned with the study of the foundations of all sciences

        • Russell - philosophy as continuous with the natural sciences

        • British empiricists - investigation into the essential nature of the human mind, to clarify the extent of the possibility of human knowledge

        • Kant - investigation into the conditions of the possibility of experience which would yield knowledge of truths

      • For W, there are no philosophical propositions and no philosophical knowledge

        • philosophy does not aim at accumulating fresh knowledge, like science

          • hence it cannot be the foundation upon which science rests

        • the Empiricist idea that, in order to keep scepticism at bay, we must have self-certifying indubitable knowledge is a Cartesian myth

          • scepticism must be shown to be nonsense, rather than answered with positive theory

        • philosophy is concerned with the bounds of sense by not with the synthetic apriori truths that describe them (as with Kant)

      • Wittgenstein saw past philosophies as casting ‘norms of representation in the role of objects represented’

        • i.e. seeing features of the grammar of representation as essential truths about the reality we represent through language

        • thus past philosophies are not false, but nonsensical

      • Wittgenstein also rejected the idea that philosophy should construct an ideal language

        • in the Tractatus he claimed that the idea that natural languages were defective was absurd, and that the idea that a better/logically more perfect one could be created was ridiculous

        • later he refuted the idea that a concept script could represent the logical syntax of a natural language, because language is a family resemblance concept - languages don’t have one thing in common

          • in fact natural language are dissimilar to logical calculi

          • natural language is where philosophical problems arise, and creating a logical language isn’t going to solve these problems

2. A Cure for the Sickness of the Understanding

  • For W, the positive aim of philosophy is to order/rearrange our ideas, to establish an order in our use of language

    • it must give a synoptic view (of our modes of representation)

      • W saw grammar as analogous to geography: we can walk around a place quite comfortably (as we can use language), but find ourselves unable to map it - this is the job of philosophy

      • it is to be achieved through description of ordinary uses of language

        • we may, for instance, be perfectly comfortable in using the grammar of certain terms (e.g. sensations) but unaware of the logical differences that are covered up by uses of this same term

        • likewise, we might be comfortable using number-words, but unaware that some uses might suggest that numbers actually exist; are objects

          • thus we fail to see the difference between the use of names and the use of number-words

  • Negatively, it must eliminate the misunderstandings that give rise to philosophical perplexity

    • this means philosophy has a therapeutic role

      • like psychoanalysis, philosophy must take latent nonsense (theories of idealism, realism, solipsism) and render them patent nonsense

        • thus the philosopher must draw out what already exists (application of grammar)

      • there should be no disagreement in philosophy; where there is disagreement, something has not been expressed clearly

      • philosophy must identify the confusion/entanglement of rues that has led to crisis/contradiction (e.g. in mathematics), not resolve it through (mathematical) discoveries

3. Philosophy, Science, and Description

  • Philosophy is essentially descriptive; unlike the natural sciences, it contains no deductions

    • the only correct method in philosophy is to say nothing but what can be said - empirical, non-philosophical propositions

      • whenever anyone tries to say anything metaphysical, we must show them that they have failed to give a meaning to certain signs in their propositions

    • science constructs theories that enable prediction and explanation, involve idealization and are testable in experience

      • they may approximate more or less closely to the truth

      • these theories can constitute discoveries, and add to human knowledge

    • science cannot in principle solve philosophical problems because science either presupposes the very concepts at stake, or employs different concepts, bypassing the problem (and often generating further conceptual confusion)

      • changes in scientific paradigms do give philosophers new problems that call for a surview, however

    • whereas science is stratified, philosophy is flat; there is no hierarchy of explanation, because it is simply description

      • but maybe it does explain, in revealing conceptual connections that were not previously articulated ‘in a perspicuous surview’

    • there is no progress in philosophy

      • we are still trying to solve the same problems as the Greeks because we have the same model of language, with the verb ‘be’ alongside ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, and adjectives ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’

        • these words, with confusing/similar grammar, cause intractable, nonsensical philosophical ‘conundrums’

    • although philosophy concerns itself with linguistic use, it is not empirical - its problems are the conceptual problems of philosophy, not the empirical problems of linguistics

      • there are no real empirical solutions, nothing new, merely grammatical truisms

4. Philosophy and Ordinary Language

  • In the Tractatus W claims...

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