Episode 231 - Transcript

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophize this on there. Hope you love the show today.

So there’s a tactic that’s become pretty popular in what some people call the debate space of the internet these days. There’s a TRICK someone will do…where at the VERY beginning of the conversation they’ll ask the other person to DEFINE the exact thing that they’re talking about that day.

It’ll sound like this: just to start out: can you please give me your defiNITION of God? Can you give me a definition of abortion, or insurrection, or justice, WHATEVER it is that day.

And then the other person will usually take the bait, try to give their TAKE on it maybe they’ll say an insurrection…is when a group of people try to overthrow some form of authority out there.

Then the other person will say back well based on YOUR definition…is a prison riot…an insurrection then? That’s people overthrowing an authority.

If a union fires a manager that’s harassing employees is THAT an insurrection? How bout if my two kids both kick me in the shins at the exact same time…is THAT an insurrection? I mean if you can’t even DEFINE what it is we’re supposed to be talking about today…are you even qualified to BE here?

All the while this person’s USUALLY winning POINTS with the crowd that’s watching the debate. I mean if the other side can’t get to the essence of what we’re talking about…then what are we even talking about?

This scene, actually, isn’t too far away from something a lot of you will be familiar with from the history of philosophy.

There was a guy that used to DO something like this… although HE did it in good faith and was trying to AVOID rhetoric while he did it…his name was Socrates.

Remember he’d GO out into the public square with people shopping and walking around…and he’d ask them to give him a definition of something like justice. And when they GAVE him that definition…he’d rip it apart, point out all the limitations in it, point out how there are examples of justice that CLEARLY fall outside of the rational protocol that you’ve set up there. Would you like to try again with ANOTHER definition of justice.

And again he DID all this…because he THOUGHT this was what was necessary to get closer to an understanding of the essences that must be at the root of all these things.

But what if ALL of this is not what it seems. What if this is NOT people misunderstanding definitions and trying to get to better ones…but people playing two very different, LANGUAGE games… at the same time. In fact, what if MOST of the problems philosophers seem to HAVE…PUZZLES that have stumped them for CENTURIES when it comes to knowledge or metaphysics…what if EVEN… how COMMON it is these days for people to be talking PAST each other in political or religious conversations or debates… what if ALL of this…is actually just a misunderstanding about the way that language works?

By the end of this episode…we’ll understand Ludwig Wittgenstein’s LATER work…where he explains the final case he ever made for language in his life…and why he thinks what we’re talking about here… ISN’T too crazy of an alternative theory.

Should be said: when Wittgenstein sets out to critique basically every human before him that has ever looked at language…he’s not doing this stuff trying to be MEAN to anyone.

Remember this is his LATER work…and that’s because in his EARLIER work when he was writing his book the tractatus…HE fell into this SAME TRAP he thinks many OTHERS are falling into.

Here’s where he’s coming from: MOST theories of language at some point ask the question: where do words get their meaning from. How is any word we say or write down on a page meaningful at all? It’s kinda crazy that it IS if you think about it.

And if we ever wanna answer the question of the debate MASTER, from the beginning of this episode…if we want PERFECT DEFINITIONS…it’s gonna be helpful to know where these definitions COME from.

Wittgenstein's LAST book called Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, OPENS with him talking about what he calls the Augustinian theory of language. A reference to St. Augustine and HIS work.

Now this theory…is a very COMMON way of thinking about language… that HE thinks has POLLUTED the way that most people think about how words work. It goes like this. Say that somebody writes a sentence…Wittgenstein uses the example of a shopkeeper in the book…so lets say: John has five red apples. That’s our sentence.

Augustine would refer to the words on display here…as essentially just stating a list of names. Meaning a sentence is quite LITERALLY…a list of the names of various THINGS… that can be POINTED to out in the universe somewhere.

John can be pointed to. The number FIVE, the color red and apples can all be pointed to as well.

And to Wittgenstein, explaining how Augustine is THINKING about all this, every word here “stands for” some object out there… and the implication is that when we communicate with each other using words…it works by what he calls ostensive definition. It’s a fancy term that just means a word POINTS to something.

That words get their definitions and meanings… because they correspond to something that really EXISTS, that can be POINTED to.

Now if you wanted to EXTEND this…to talk about the ESSENCE of something like an apple…you know, the common trait that makes all very different looking apples, STILL all APPLES…well that’s still a matter of exploration. To Augustine, we can probably do the work and ultimately discover the essences of these things if we try hard enough.

But the BIGGER point is: if this theory is true… you can imagine the scene you could paint…of the origins of how language, as a human activity, may have gotten off the ground in the first place. Language is created… when someone goes out. Finds an apple. Points at it. And then everyone agrees lets call this an APPLE…. quick, quick, write it down in the dictionary over there.

Wittgenstein thinks this image…is a picture that holds us captive, he says in the book. When it comes to our understanding of language.

One of the big PROBLEMS with it for him, and this will extend to OTHER theories of language that RESEMBLE this approach from Augustine which is a LOT of them…one glaring problem is that these theories are usually looking for some hidden ESSENCE to each and every word… or some INSIGHT that an individual person can point to and arrive at… that EXPLAINS what the meaning, or the definition of the word IS.

Now it would be wonderful if the world were like this if we wanted to give the debate master a perfect definition. But for Wittgenstein: words don’t have some ESSENCE that can be figured out if we just think about them really hard.

Language is ALWAYS for him…a complex, COMMUNITY ACTIVITY, that is constantly going on.

Meaning: no one person just POINTS to something in the world and gives it a name.

And what he’ll argue… is that what these theories tend to NEGLECT…is just how important the FUNCTION of a word is… when it’s USED in a community setting.

That the meaning of ANY WORD, always requires a GRAMMAR… or a set of community generated RULES and practices underneath that give it context…and these are rules that we’ve been heavily TRAINED on by all the interaction we have with the other PEOPLE in the linguistic community we’re speaking in.

Put another way: we can’t just point to a red fire truck…tell a newborn baby that’s trying to learn the language that “THIS IS RED”...and EXPECT that the baby will know exactly what we’re talking about.

Cause if you were to DO that…that baby would have NO way of knowing… whether red is a color…is red the truck itself? Is red the sound the firetruck is making? Does the word red represent ALL forms of transportation that we HAVE as human beings? And hundreds of other examples.

For that baby…to EVER figure out what we’re specifically talking about…it will NEED a deeper CONTEXT that is informed by the linguistic community it LIVES in.

Wittgenstein is drawing attention here to an important place that the meanings of our words are coming from. Again a community generated, pretheoretical set of rules and practices, these are NOT written down anywhere…and these are things that THEMSELVES to Wittgenstein… ONLY really SERVE this purpose they DO, because there are people currently going ALONG with them. In other words, ALL of this is subject to change should the community change.

These rules and practices… sort of crystallize into what he calls a “grammar”...and that grammar becomes the thing that makes ANY statement anyone ever makes SEEM coherent or not.

Now, it gets SLIGHTLY more complicated than this, but we’re ALMOST there. Bear with me for another minute or so because:

Wittgenstein would ALSO want us to consider…that these rules and practices that INFORM our language…don’t just materialize out of thin air.

We ARE human BEINGS after all…there are certain natural tendencies we have just as creatures…and those tendencies will ALWAYS be at least a PIECE…of ANYTHING that we EVER want to say that’s meaningful.

Wittgenstein CALLS these: forms of life in the book. And these are things he’d want us to respect deeply…they’re a source of us finding common GROUND with each other…he’d want to just make sure we remember these things are always driving us to some extent.

HUMAN things like caring for loved ones, the desire to survive, joking around with each other, mourning for the dead…there’s always an undercurrent of our own humanity…that has an impact on the things we ever decide to communicate and what rules and practices make sense to us.

Now if it HELPS you…HE doesn’t lay it out this way but if it HELPS you and you’re a VISUAL person…when it comes to thinking about this whole PROCESS that explains the meaning of a word and how it arises.

You could think of the BASE of this process as those forms of life we just talked about. Those ladder up into, and collaborate with, the rules and practices that collectively emerge. The rules and practices crystallize into a grammar of what makes anything coherent. And then FINALLY, after ALL THAT…the MEANING of a word ONLY arises for Wittgenstein… when a person decides to SPEAK it…and USE it PUBLICLY…IN a community setting.

At the risk of redundancy here, again: this doesn’t come from an essence. This doesn’t come from POINTING at something and giving it a definition. The meaning of a word HAPPENS, it is created and RECREATED IN REAL TIME…when it is USED by people in a particular way, WITHIN a linguistic community.

And this is what is MEANT when people say in Wittgenstein's LATER work: that the meanings of words come from USE.

Now I promise we’ll come back to this… but there’s an obvious, juicy REBUTTAL… to all this so far… that is really going to help me make his point for the rest of the episode about some of the DETAILS here.

You know, someone could hear what’s being said so far and say: well, what about triangles?

Is the definition of a triangle… something that only makes sense when some person SAYS it? And if there were a bunch of DELUSIONAL people that all came along and decided triangles actually have TWO sides…are we supposed to just LISTEN to them? I mean look: this is an a priori FACT of the universe. A triangle is a polygon with exactly three sides and three interior angles. To USE the word in any other way than that…is to misunderstand what the word IS.

Wittgenstein would AGREE with basically ALL of this in spirit…but he’d want to bring this person’s attention to something that they’re doing there. In HIS terminology…this person is playing a totally different LANGUAGE game, than we TYPICALLY do when we TALK about everyday concepts.

(landa) More specifically this is a person operating in the language game of Euclidean Geometry.

Remember those rules and practices that ultimately crystallize into a grammar…and how that grammar determines the criteria… for what makes something a coherent statement or not?

Well, Geometry… has a VERY specific set of these rules and practices that are distinct to IT.

For example: answers have to be calculable within the rules of the system, terms have to be grounded in shared definitions or axioms, proof, is the primary thing that makes something justifiable in geometry.

Now these rules and practices…are DIFFERENT than the ones we use when we have conversations in more ordinary scenarios. And notice…how everything ABOUT this different GRAMMAR…is similarly grounded…in a PRACTICE, of communally agreed upon criteria… and how all of these as RULES…only hold UP because there are other people that are willing to go along with them.

And just anticipating an objection here: do not mistake the axioms themselves… for the rules and practices that govern the language game.

In other words: Geometry… is an absolutely beautiful, closed system of rules, that allows for certain people willing to USE this grammar…to SPEAK in a PARTICULAR WAY, to each other, while OPERATING in the community of geometry.

These are people playing a very different type of LANGUAGE game…that has a very different kind of GRAMMAR…where if it was applied to many OTHER areas of our life, it would make it almost impossible to still be functional.

I mean just to ILLUSTRATE this: imagine someone’s a big fan of CHESS, ANOTHER great closed system of rules. They’re such a big fan of chess it turns out…that they decide they’re gonna transpose the RULES of chess onto their dating life. (flat) Bro how was your date? (surfer) Uh itwas guud. she asked me a really hard question…but I used the sicilian defense on her bro. Bro do you think she likes you? I don’t know, like, I THINK she does? But I’m hoping we can castle queenside once all the pieces get out of the way. It’s like you’d be an IDIOT to live your life in this way.

And to Wittgenstein this really is a STORY that’s gone on over and over again throughout the history of philosophy. There’s a certain archetype that pops up a lot…of the mathematician turned philosopher. They wanna find out the truth about EVERYTHING…and they’re really INTRIGUED by the kind of certainty and precision that math seems to provide to people. So whether it’s Plato, Descartes, Spinoza: whoever it is…these are people whose projects came up short…NOT because they’re stupid…but because they’re LITERALLY trying to do the impossible. They’re applying a grammar that lies at the heart of ONE language game…to a completely different language game.

This is WHY by the way this is such an effective rhetoric tactic by the debate master from the beginning of the episode: you’re GIVING your opponent an impossible TASK, something that makes sense in a TOTALLY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE GAME…and then you can just sit back, relax and point out all the exceptions to it as they scramble for answers and people start to doubt their knowledge.

See whenever we talk about something with ORDINARY language…there IS no singular, static definition of a thing that’s going to apply to all the cases: it uses a completely different kind of grammar. It’s FAR MORE open-ended than something like geometry or CHESS.

CONCEPTS…LIKE insurrection, justice or WHATEVER it is…Wittgenstein says concepts have blurred edges in ordinary language. They’re not these clear cut things… that someone can just lay out an airtight definition of.

At BEST what we have whenever we look at a concept he says…are a BUNCH of different takes on something complicated… that bear a sort of “family resemblance”, as he says. Let’s describe what he means by that.

The example he uses in the book is to ask the question: what is a game?

Think of all the different kinds of games there are. Hopscotch. Poker. Tic tac toe. Call of Duty. Rock paper scissors. All of these are GAMES…and the temptation by a LOT of people is to try to find something similar, between all these EXAMPLES.

Some ESSENCE to them… that makes them all GAMES.

But Wittgenstein's point… is that no matter how much work you do trying to craft the absolute perfect definition of a game…you’re ultimately committing a category error.

When someone, ANYONE out there, HAS an understanding of the word game in ordinary language…what they’re DOING there is LESS analogous to having a perfect definition of the word…and it’s MORE analogous… to knowing your way around a family album. You know those books of photos people keep of when they’ve gotten together for the holidays over the years? I mean I don’t do it…but if I had a family. Just kidding I do now.

Understanding the word game is like opening up one of those albums… and saying oh there’s aunt Gladys. She’s an oncologist. And oh and that over there is danny her sister’s son. That one is grandma Beatrice still hanging in there strong!

What WE call games…like PEOPLE in a FAMILY…SHARE a kind of family resemblance that you can be more or less educated to SPOT.

But despite the people in the photo album all bearing SOME kind of resemblance…there’s no SINGLE characteristic about them or ESSENCE…that MAKES that resemblance what it IS.

The edges… are much more blurry than that. It’s a lot more like a bunch of Venn diagrams all overlapping each other in different ways. Some overlap some more than others. Sometimes two of them, both still part of the family, don’t resemble each other much at all.

And so TOO with games, or with any OTHER concept we understand in this particular kind of language game.

You can also see to Wittgenstein, not only why it becomes easy for philosophers to get lost in puzzles that don’t actually exist, when they try to rationally unify concepts down into things with hard edges. But you can ALSO see why it becomes so EASY… for people to talk PAST each other.

Because consider how language games operate in a REAL world example if Wittgenstein is RIGHT here. And I know this is a CHARGED example…but I hope I’ve earned enough respect with you as someone writing these in good faith, to be able to use it…it’s an absolutely PERFECT one to show what he thinks the consequences of these language games can be.

Gender identity.

ONE side of the table might say that gender is biological FACT. That male and female is either an xx or xy chromosome situation. That I can look under a microscope and TELL you…EXACTLY which one of these you are, male or female.

Now the other side of this may say something like: look when I think of male or female… I’m not thinking of chromosomes under a microscope. I don’t think of XX or XY…I think of a mustachioed man…or a woman with long flowing hair. Point is to this person: gender is a community generated set of norms…and its MEANING is DEFINED… by a social performance OF the gender roles of either male or female within a CULTURE. That the edges of those concepts are going to be a bit more blurry. And that it’s going to come down more to a practice rooted in communal criteria…rather than being able to read axioms out of a book about biology.

Now to Wittgenstein…these are two people COMING to the table using two VERY different language games…and as long as they remain rooted in only theirs…they will never see eye to eye on this stuff.

The SAME WORLD, in other words…can be seen through different grammars, and different language games…and the specific language game you’re using…can shape what aspects of the world stand out as meaningful or even visible to you.

For Wittgenstein another way to PUT this would be to say that classification and perception interfold each other. And if you remember the recent episode we did using the Duck rabbit as an example…you may remember that I was borrowing that example from the work of Wittgenstein. Well, here it IS.

Now on THAT episode we were using it to describe different experiential framings of reality. But in THIS case: Wittgenstein is saying that there is no single language game that somehow CAPTURES the hidden ESSENCE of reality. The SAME EVENTS in the world…the SAME PROBLEMS to be solved can be looked at through different GRAMMARS…and different obvious SOLUTIONS will emerge BECAUSE of the rules and practices we’re bringing to bear upon it.

Whether you see a duck or a rabbit…or whether you see an event as a protest or an insurrection…or whether you see gender as a social performance or a biological fact…this has LESS to do with you uncovering the hidden essence of reality…and MORE to do with the specific language game you’re playing.

To simplify all this so far: if you wanted TWO THINGS that Wittgenstein’s later work says is MISSING from many theories of language…it’s going to be a consideration of the role of practice, and difference. PRACTICE meaning that underlying grammar that so many people ignore the importance of. And DIFFERENCE meaning the actual family resemblances of words with blurry edges, where they DON’T necessarily have some sort of clear essence that we can define when the debate master asks you to.

And for whatever it’s worth it won’t be a coincidence that so many philosophers AFTER this book comes out… will USE the words practice and difference in their work so much more.

Now I’m sure you’ve guessed where all this is going. If we buy what Wittgenstein’s SELLING here…then this isn’t gonna be just two or three of these language games that are going on COMPETING with each other.

Not ONLY…is there usually a diversity of languages that people are speaking in any given area. But imagine each person…is now oscillating between God knows how many different language games…with varying levels of self awareness that that’s the way that communication works.

Picture the sheer quantity… of just dumb, completely irreconcilable arguments there are going on between people…and think of how many of them believe that if they just push a LITTLE FURTHER in this ARGUMENT they’re having…this other person’s gonna come around.

More than that: IF Wittgenstein is RIGHT here…then it’s really interesting to consider how the role of a philosopher changes in this new world. I mean what do they have left to DO?

The idea that we’re gonna sit around…EXPLAINING these HUGE mysterious concepts like TIME or MIND…it just STARTS to seem pretty delusional.

Because these things that SEEM like they’re huge philosophical problems…become AFTER you accept his premises… just mistakes of grammar that need to be clarified.

As HE says in philosophy, “all explanation must disappear… and description alone must take its place”.

The job of a philosopher then…becomes something ALMOST like being a cartographer of language. Making maps.

Philosophy TURNS from something where people are sitting around, kind of tortured, trying to come up with these GRAND THEORIES that EXPLAIN BIG things…and it turns INTO something… that more resembles a kind of therapy, he says.

Let me explain what he means here because there’s multiple different THERAPIES, he thinks philosophers should be providing.

FIRST of all: when people are talking PAST each other. If the debate master is someone demanding the essences to things…then the philosopher should be something like the opposite of that. JUST like a cartographer they should be gathering and surveying as many EXAMPLES of how a word is used…as they CAN. Then once they SURVEY the different usages of a word…their job is to lay them out, side by side so that they can be compared by people.

This is therapeutic…just because of the context and humility it brings to people. It helps them understand how language is actually FUNCTIONING.

As he says: “What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed… I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities… [Now] you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.”

Another thing a philosopher has to do now if we accept Wittgenstein’s work…is to spend more time clarifying those rules and practices…that dictate so much about how our language works.

There’s tons of moments in his work where he thinks that even a SLIGHT correction that goes on at the level of grammar…can solve some of the most seemingly IMPOSSIBLE philosophical problems. Think about how the debate between free will and determinism starts to dissolve…once you and whoever you’re talking to STOP treating the words like they exist in isolation…and start acknowledging the ordinary contexts that GIVE those words meaning in the first place to you. Words like “can”, “cause”, “responsibility”. To Wittgenstein there is no hidden ESSENCE of these things written into the universe waiting for us to EXPLAIN them with some theory.

More than that think of how this applies to TIME or MIND. Two MORE monolithic concepts that people torture themselves over. Instead of thinking of TIME as something hidden and mysterious about the universe…try thinking of the way the word time actually FUNCTIONS in our ordinary language about it. How we talk about keeping time. Instead of MIND being a category of the universe that Descartes needs to explain to us through some big dualistic SYSTEM…INSTEAD think of the way the word mind FUNCTIONS for us. How do we use it? When is something just a brain? When does it become a mind?

A philosopher’s job is to REMIND people…of the ordinary contexts and grammar…that allow for ANY of these words to make sense to us at all.

ANOTHER type of therapy a philosopher should be doing he says: is what he calls marshalling reminders and analogies. What he MEANS is trying to come up with memorable reminders…that illuminate how language works…and thus guides people out of confusion. And this is MORE than just confusion. Like, there are SO many disputes out there…that SEEM like they’re huge issues that people have been arguing about for years between themselves…where when they get OUT of abstract theorizing…and instead start focusing on the concrete USES of the words that they’re arguing about…sometimes problems that seem BIG between two people can just completely dissolve.

As he says, “If misunderstandings result from the ambiguities of our language, then philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday,”

If philosophers do MORE or less what I’ve tried to do on this episode today and come up with ways that actually communicate these ideas to people…then this is another kind of therapy he thinks is worth providing as well.

Now somebody could say back to all this: let’s play devil’s advocate for the debate master. Is Wittgenstein really saying that there’s no room for asking someone for their definition of something? It SEEMS like with so many USES of ordinary words going on out there…clarifying what you’re talking about is going to be one of the FIRST steps of ANY productive conversation.

And first of all: that’s right! Wittgenstein would CERTAINLY agree with that point. The QUESTION becomes: when someone in a debate DOES this…ARE they using it as a rhetorical tactic like it was described at the beginning? Asking for a definition and being poised ready to poke HOLES in it? Or are they doing it in good faith? And IF someone was really COMING from this place…wouldn’t the question be formulated a bit differently than it often is?

Wouldn’t another way of framing this same sentiment be to just say: hey, first let’s clarify what each of us means BY insurrection in this context. Isn’t that a little DIFFERENT?

See for Wittgenstein…it’s about finding a way to negotiate meaning…BETWEEN different grammars and language games. It’s not about DESTROYING your opponent. It’s not about making them REALIZE HOW DUMB they are about this thing. ALL of that just presupposes that there’s some ESSENCE to the discussion that YOU have an individual, privileged access to.

TRULY negotiating meaning though, THROUGH conversation…is a cooperative thing. Because once you acknowledge that the meanings of words lies in their USE…then any shared understanding we might seek to have with each other…the ONLY way that happens is through dialogue…and adjustment along the way. Not debate masters.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you all for making the podcast and my family’s life possible. Book’s coming along good I think you’re going to be happy when it comes out next year. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.