Episode #097 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope y’all love the show today.

So, I want to start today by talking about a very strange ritual that all of you engage in. Most of you don’t even really think about it. You just do it. It’s disgusting. I’ve seen you though. Look, I’ve kept my mouth shut for a long time, but I am not going to let you destroy this family. I’ve seen you pull out that piece of dead tree, get your little stick with the carven ink on the front, and you just squiggle lines on a piece of paper trying to convey meaning. Yeah, I was hiding in the closet that day. I saw you. Look, I’ve heard you make sounds with your throat and mouth, trying to take an idea that’s up in your head and put it into the head of another person. Look, as much as I don’t like putting labels on things making people uncomfortable, I’m going to need to refer to it as something moving forward with the episode. I think I’m just going to refer to it as “language” from now on.

Now, the good news is, you’re in good company with all this bizarre behavior you’re engaging in. Practically every human being alive engages in the very same ritual. In fact, practically every human being that’s been alive for the last 100,000 years has made a similar choice. And just for the sake of the show today, there are some noteworthy figures throughout history that also fall into this class of people who have chosen to use language to communicate ideas, like, say, I don’t know, every philosopher we’ve ever talked about on this show.

Just think for a second how massively important language is. Whether you’re Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Karl Popper, whenever you are conducting philosophy, ultimately, you are a human being that is conducting philosophy from within the confines of a language. I mean, think about it. It really is the only tool that we have to be able to communicate these ideas inside of our head.

Now, one thing that naturally follows from that if you’re a philosopher is that you have to eventually ask yourself the question: what are these languages that we’re all using? Where’d they come from? Who invented them? Alexander Graham Bell? Was that Tesla that did that? More seriously I guess, was it a philosopher king who sat around for decades pondering and assigning meaning to each and every word which he then compiled into a giant tome that he called Webster’s Dictionary?

No, that’s not how language is formed. Language—and there’s many different theories about the origins of language, but it’s pretty clear it wasn’t ever a philosopher king—generally speaking, language is this patchwork of mutually-agreed-upon names that a group of people sort of stumble upon mostly to be able to communicate with each other about everyday things. Language is great if you want to order a Double Quarter Pounder with cheese. It’s great if you want to tell someone down at the grocery store, “No, I would not like to donate a dollar to help starving lizards in the Congo.”

But if you’re a philosopher and you’re in this business of being as clear and distinct with your ideas as possible, in the business of communicating those ideas as effectively as possible, is this language that we use—this thing really just created by a bunch of people ordering cheeseburgers over the years that’s constantly being tweaked—is this language necessarily capable of perfectly describing every possible thing that can exist, any idea a philosopher could ever have? Seems unlikely. Seems like language has these sort of built-in limitations, limitations that are almost certainly having a drastic effect on every philosopher’s work that had conveyed their ideas through it.

Now, in that world that philosophers operate in, understanding language becomes incredibly important, and philosophers over the years have realized this. And even though we haven’t really talked that much about it on this show, there’s actually been a lot of work done in this field of analyzing language. People have asked all kinds of questions, fun questions. In fact, you know what, I’m going to give you a cheat sheet right now. Here’s some good criteria if you ever want to know whether something’s a good philosophical question. It has to make you instantly intrigued and hungry to think about it, but simultaneously it has to make some average person walking down the street with you jump off the nearest bridge: questions like, “What is a word?” “What is a sentence?” “What is a proposition?” “What does it mean to mean something?”

Well, another one of these questions that philosophers have asked over the years trying to get to the bottom of language is, how do words get their definitions? Who or what assigns these definitions? What criteria do they use to know whether something’s a complete definition or not?

Now, today we’re talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein. And around the time he’s coming of age in the world—early 1900s—the prevailing theory when it comes to this question of how we arrive at the definitions of words is that the definition of a word is discovered when you understand the conditions for what’s called both “necessity” and “sufficiency,” or when you understand the necessary conditions and sufficient conditions that makes the thing whatever it is that you’re talking about. For example, a necessary condition is some thing that needs to be present in order for a thing to be whatever it is. For example, a necessary condition for being a triangle is that you must have three sides. If you don’t got three sides, you’re not a triangle; you’re just a jealous parallelogram. Get some therapy.

That’s a necessary condition. A sufficient condition is something that is sufficient for a thing to be whatever it is, but it’s not a mandatory property. For example, having an RSS feed that’s posted to the Podcasts section of iTunes is a sufficient condition for being a podcast, but it isn’t a necessary condition because—I’m sure you can imagine—somebody could easily create a podcast, upload it to Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud, but just never upload it to iTunes.

So, again, the prevailing theory around the time Wittgenstein starts doing his work was that if you understood all of these necessary and sufficient conditions of any one thing, you’d be able to provide the definition of that thing. Well, Wittgenstein didn’t agree. But to understand why he didn’t agree with this, I think it’s important for us to have a little context. It’s important to understand how fascinated he was with the field of mathematics.

So, if you look at the life of Wittgenstein, very early on in his life he’s fascinated with mechanical engineering, actually starts going to school thinking that’s the field he’s going to eventually work in. But then something happens. Bertrand Russell—another philosopher—publishes a book in 1903 called The Principles of Mathematics that was so influential it changes Wittgenstein’s entire outlook on what he should be doing with this life. That’s how big it was. He quits mechanical engineering, transfers to Cambridge, so he can study under Bertrand Russell who was teaching there at the time.

Guess I’m trying to think of exactly where to start with this. When you think about it, math is a pretty fascinating thing, especially if you’re a philosopher. I mean, it’s not a coincidence that so many of the great philosophers throughout history have also been mathematicians. Just think about what you’re doing there. When you’re doing math, you have these propositions that you can state, and you can say these things with about as much certainty as you’re ever going to get as a human being that’s making propositions. For example, 1+1 = 2. You can say with pretty much complete certainty that 1+1 = 2. To doubt the validity of that statement is to either be mistaken or to not understand the definitions of the things that are being questioned, for example, the concept of 1 or the concept of addition, etc.

Now, the thing that’s so interesting about math, the thing that typically intrigues philosophers about math is that here we have this equation, this equation that we can state with absolute certainty. Yet when it comes to things that actually exist in the real world, what is the concept of 1? What is that even? I mean, what is the concept of 3? Where is that concept of 3 in the real world? Is it lost? Is it down in that crack on the driver’s side of your car between the seat and the door where everything else gets lost? Where is this concept of 3 in the real world? And of course, the answer is, the concept of 3 doesn’t exist physically. We can’t hold onto it or empirically study it.

So, what ends up happening is, math becomes this very strange realm where we can arrive at certainty about stuff, but it’s all stuff that doesn’t actually exist in the world we navigate our lives through. But, as I’m sure you can imagine, if you’re somebody that is interested in arriving at certainty about things that do physically exist, promising place to start might be to try to emulate what people are doing in mathematics, to try to apply that process to things that do physically exist, see if we can get the same level of certainty about things.

This has been tried dozens of times all throughout history, but it’s still an intriguing prospect in 1903 when Wittgenstein reads Bertrand Russell’s book on the principles of mathematics. Now, the problem with mathematics just by itself is that it’s kind of its own institution. It’s not really useful at informing decision-making or helping us think correctly about things or anything like that. However, Wittgenstein thinks that there’s something else we can look to, something else that we do that has to do with human thought. And when you put it side by side by mathematics and look at them, starts to look like an incredibly similar thing.

The thing he’s talking about here is formal logic. Think about it. In the same way we can arrive at certainty about the notion that 1+1 = 2, we can also arrive at certainty about the notion that if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. If all As are Bs and some Bs are Cs, then some As must be Cs. Logic provides us with parameters for our thinking so that we can be sure we’re thinking clearly. But on the other hand, when it comes to math, really, when was the last time—barring you working in some sort of profession that requires advanced math on a daily basis, which I respect tremendously. Tremendous amount of respect for those good, good people. You wouldn’t believe how much respect I have for these people. It’s incredible. Barring that, when was the last time you ever used anything beyond basic arithmetic in your everyday life? When was the last time you triangulated the position of the oatmeal in the pantry?

Point is, it may not often be very practically useful to know that the circumference of a circle is πr2. Just like it may not be very useful to know that some Bs are Cs and some As must be Cs. And logic and math may resemble each other in this way. But a key difference between them is that, unlike math, at least logic can be applied directly to our thinking and help us determine if we’re thinking correctly.

Now, what naturally follows from this when you say something like, “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal,” the thing that’s implied when you say that is that there must be some sort of fundamental logical structure to all thought. Because otherwise, what are we referencing when we use formal logic? And what follows from that, if you’re Wittgenstein, is that if there’s a logical structure to all clear thinking, there must be a logical structure to communicating those thoughts. We have a name for this logical structure of communication. It’s called “language.”

This is the central task of Wittgenstein’s entire body of work: to try to understand how language is even possible between human beings, to understand the function of language, to understand errors that people make in communication that inevitably lead to errors in their thinking. But think about it. In order to fully understand these things, you can’t just look at language. Not only do you have to look at the relationship between language and the things it's describing but also the relationship between our thoughts and language.

Wittgenstein has two major works that cover this territory: one published after he died called Philosophical Investigations and one published earlier in his life called the Tractatus. By the way, just to give you an idea, despite the fact that his later work tries to refute a lot of the stuff he laid out in the Tractatus, despite the fact that the Tractatus is only 75 pages long, if you had a list of the top 10 greatest works on the philosophy of language, both of these books would be on that list. That’s Wittgenstein for you.

So, let’s get into it. So, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein lays out what’s more commonly known as the picture theory of language. Famous story—apparently, he had some kind of eureka moment when he was reading the paper one day about a court case where they were going to reenact the scene of the traffic accident using fake people and fake cars to give the jury the clearest picture possible of what happened. It was in that moment that he realized, apparently, that the function of proper effective language is descriptive. It describes state of affairs occurring in the world.

See, practically everybody doesn’t use language in a way that’s as precise as Wittgenstein thinks is necessary in the Tractatus. Most of us just sort of cavalierly throw around words and, I guess, never really think about it beyond that because it does the job well enough. Right? Like, for example, I could be telling you guys a story about how I was walking through the park the other day, and I saw this naked dude wearing a sandwich board; it had “Capture Nicki Minaj” painted across it. And he was screaming at the top of his lungs about how she is an ancient shape-shifting mythical creature that’s lived for thousands of years and terrorized every society that’s ever existed. And now she’s doing it to us through her music. We got to stop her!

Picture that scene. Now, consider the fact that every person who just pictured that scene pictured a scene that was similar to others in some ways but very, very different in others. And the reason there’s so much variance between the pictures that I put in your heads, by the way, is because I didn’t respect the function of language which is descriptive. Think of how many details I left out there. Was it nighttime or daytime? What was the weather like? How tall was this man? What color was the sandwich board? Are the police officers that are arresting this man state patrol or local precinct? I told you a story, and the arrangement of words that I used worked well enough to relay to you a fun, educational anecdote about Nicki Minaj.

But imagine somebody much more skilled than I at describing things that was capable of using the exact right words in the exact right configuration that could put the exact picture they have in their head into yours. In this way, language, when used properly, pictures the world into somebody else’s head. Wittgenstein thought that if you analyze any sentence closely enough you could eventually break it down into two primary parts: things he called names, which are terms that describe things in the world—things like the sandwich board, things like the grass and the trees in the park, the police officer’s cat-o’-nine-tails whip as he whips the man into submission—and the second part is how these names are specifically configured within the sentence. He thought that in the same way there’s a logical structure to the world and a logical structure to our thinking—What’s the relationship to language? —there must be some logical way that we can configure all these names, some order that directly mirrors the relationships between what actually happened in reality, thereby creating a picture of the scene.

But for us, it’s not enough just to be able to describe reality how it actually is. We want to be able to speak clearly about every possible way that reality can be, right? So, what follows from this if you’re Wittgenstein is that, whenever you state a proposition—anything—it falls into one of three classes. If the proposition does picture reality as it truly is, then the proposition is true. If it doesn’t accurately describe reality but describes a state of affairs that is theoretically possible—say it was a girl wearing the sandwich board—then that statement is false. But if the proposition describes something that is impossible or goes beyond the limits of language, the proposition is meaningless.

Now, Wittgenstein writes this 75-page book. And does he kick his feet up on the desk and have a keg party like every other philosopher does? No. No, he publishes the book, and then proceeds to quit philosophy. He quit because he thought the book solved every philosophical dispute that had ever existed. He thought it was the last philosophical work that would ever have to be made.

Let me explain. See, in his eyes, people all throughout history have really been wasting their time. You know, from the very beginning people are asking questions like, “What is the meaning of my life?” “What is a life well lived?” “What is beauty?” You know, they’ve talked about this stuff, and they’ve argued back and forth. And they can’t ever seem to come to a consensus on any of it. Well, what if the reason this has always been the case is because philosophers are using the wrong tool for the job? Asking things like “What is beauty?” “What is the meaning of my life?”—these are transcendental questions. Let me get this straight. You’re trying to use language—this thing designed to describe states of affairs in the world, this thing haphazardly thrown together by people ordering cheeseburgers over the years—you’re trying to use language to contemplate what the meaning of your life is?

Remember, language wasn’t created in a lab by a philosopher king who made sure to include all kinds of neat words to be able to describe anything regardless of how transcendent it is. What if language is just incapable of describing these things? What if the reason “What is the meaning of my life?” is such a perplexing question to us is because we’re always trying to find an answer to it while using language? Maybe language just is not the right tool for the job. It’s like trying to hammer in some drywall with a water bottle. It’s just not going to work.

It should be noted, Wittgenstein does think you can find an answer to this question, “What is the meaning of my life?” It’s just not going to be through language. And if you end up discovering it, you’re never going to be able to describe it through language. If it’s possible to get an answer, it seems like it’s something that you have to experience, to Wittgenstein. He says this in one of his most famous lines. “The truth shows itself. It is not said or even expressed in thought. What can be said can be said clearly. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.”

That’s his famous line. And so many people out there hear that line out of context, and they think he’s just saying, you know, “Well, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you should probably keep your mouth shut.” No, he’s not parroting some warmed-over truism here. He’s saying that language is insufficient at describing these transcendental concepts and that all these questions that philosophers have been agonizing over like “What is the meaning of my life?”—this is just a result of their thinking being tangled up and confused about the limitations of language.

The question “What is the meaning of my life?” is nonsensical to Wittgenstein. It’s completely devoid of meaning. To even ask a question like that to somebody that truly understands the limits of language would just confuse them. For example, when I say, “1+1 = 4,” people that understand basic math instantly know that something is very wrong there. Like I said before, for me to say something like, “1+1 = 4,” that implies that I’m either mistaken or I don’t understand the definitions of what I’m talking about.

To Wittgenstein, asking a question like, “What is the meaning of my life?” is like asking a question like, “How much red paint would it take to be funnier than sound waves?” It just instantly shows the person’s hand as someone that’s confused about the limitations of language. And just how, if I asked you that kind of ridiculous question, you wouldn’t respond back to me with an answer, right? “Oh boy, it’s going to take at least half a gallon of red paint to do that kind of job!” No, you’d be like, “Wait, what? What are you talking about now? Funnier than sound waves?” In other words, you’d ask clarifying questions back to try to unpack this very tangled, confused view that I have about the limits of language.

This is the role of philosophy to Wittgenstein, to undo these misconceptions that people have about the limitations of language. And what happens at the end of that process, as the famous line goes, is that you’re like a fly being let out of a fly bottle. Don’t worry, I had no idea what a fly bottle was either. Apparently flies have always been a nuisance, and it’s a really old-fashioned way people used to trap flies. And then they sit there around it and watch it in its little prison as entertainment—watch it do pushups. Sometimes flies group together and form gangs in there. We’re trapped in a metaphorical fly bottle is what he’s saying. Philosophy’s job is to show us the way out. Through philosophy, we eventually realize that all these things we used to agonize over like “What is the meaning of my life?” aren’t actually problems that need to be solved at all. We arrive at peace.

So, as I said before, Wittgenstein writes the Tractatus and then quits philosophy thinking that he has solved every major philosophical problem. Now, later on in his life, he came to believe that he had drastically oversimplified what language is in the Tractatus. I heard it said beautifully once that in the beginning of Wittgenstein’s life he was concerned with the relationship between language and reality, and toward the end of his life he was more concerned with the relationship between language and us as human beings. Probably one of the biggest changes between Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and Wittgenstein in his book Philosophical Investigations comes down to how he views the definitions of words and where words derive their meaning.

Well, if we’re going to talk about his brand-new theory, might as well go back and talk about what people used to do when they were looking at a definition. Let’s go back to our old pal Socrates. What would he do? Well, he’d go into the public square asking people to give him a definition of the word “beauty” or “justice” or whatever he was interested in that day. And he’d have conversations ad nauseum with his fellow philosophers trying desperately to get to a perfect definition that includes any example of beauty you can come up with. Now, if you remember, so often in these dialogs a person will try to give an example of a perfect definition. But Socrates—somehow, he’s always able to find an example that doesn’t fit the definition or an example that fits the definition that nobody would agree should be a part of it.

Wittgenstein would see Socrates spending his entire life looking for these definitions as yet another example of somebody wasting their life because they didn’t understand the nature of language. Wittgenstein would say that the meaning of words—it just doesn’t work that way. That Socrates could live a thousand lifetimes and he’d still always be able to point out these exceptions to these strict definitions that people like to throw out.

Wittgenstein uses the example of the word “game.” What is a game? Let’s talk about it. Can we get a strict definition of the word “game?” Is a game a competition between two or more people? Well, solitaire’s a game. Is a game just a fun activity that somebody engages in? Well, riding a roller coaster’s fun. We certainly wouldn’t call that a game though. What criteria do we use to determine what a game is?

Wittgenstein would say that the problem with us looking for this sort of strict definition of the word “game” is that we’re looking at definitions of words in the same way people have for centuries. We’re trying to find those necessary and sufficient conditions that define every example of a game that we can possibly think of. But what if it doesn’t work that way?

Wittgenstein would say, stop trying to find a perfect set of necessary and sufficient conditions. You’re never going to do it. And, instead, reflect on the very strange fact that everybody knows what a game is. I mean, when I said “solitaire” right there, somehow everybody knew it was a game and that it was the exception to the rule. When I said, “going on a roller coaster,” somehow everybody knew that that shouldn’t be classified as a game. What does that mean? How is that possible if we don’t have some definition somewhere up in our heads?

What it means to Wittgenstein is that the meaning of the word comes down to how it is being used in a particular linguistic community, and that unearthing the meanings of the words that we use is a process of observing the way that people use the word. The meaning of a word isn’t something that can be simplified into necessary and sufficient conditions. No, language is a complex, vibrant, living organism that’s constantly shifting and changing. And that if literally everyone literally started using the word “literally” to just mean the same thing as “seriously,” the meaning of the word “literally” would change entirely.

In this sense, it’s impossible to ever come up with a dusty tome filled with the end-all-be-all definitions of words—a perfect definition for the word “game,” for instance. But what actually happens in reality is, we see things throughout our life like basketball and bowling and Call of Duty and hopscotch, and we hear the people around us use the word “game” to classify all these different activities. And our brain at some level recognizes similarities between all these games, and we can sense it somehow. We see it.

Wittgenstein says that what we’re sensing there are family resemblances between things. Kind of like how you might look like your mom but not really like your dad. Or your second cousin might look like your uncle but not your mom. Or your grandpa may have the same male-pattern baldness that your sister has. There certainly are very distinct differences between you guys, but you all share the same family. And even if you don’t look like your dad, you sure look a lot more like him than I do coming from a different family.

Same thing goes with the meaning of words, to Wittgenstein. It’s not that there’s a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions that describes every game out there. There are just some games that resemble each other more just like some family members resemble each other more. Basketball, football, baseball—all very similar. Two teams playing against each other, and they have a ball. But Monopoly is also a game, right? There’s no ball in it, but it certainly shares certain characteristics with football, right? Like millionaires ruthlessly fighting against each other.

What Wittgenstein’s trying to do is illustrate how crucial culture and people are in the process of forming or developing a language. He thinks Descartes sitting around wondering if anybody else actually exists is absolutely preposterous, because to even be able to articulate yourself through language is evidence of a giant gift that you’ve inherited from many people before and around you.

He has this famous example called the beetle in the box analogy. Do you have any friends or coworkers where you have, like, inside jokes with them, and you refer to things as codenames? Like, if anybody from outside of your group heard you talking about it, they’d just be confused, but nonetheless it has an established meaning between the two of you. This is a perfect example illustrating Wittgenstein’s point of how meaning is derived from use and that a language can’t just be created in a vacuum by a single person because words get their meaning from an understanding between speakers.

He goes the other way though. He says, imagine everybody in the entire world had a box that they carry around. Inside of this box is something everyone refers to as a beetle. Problem is, no matter what, nobody can ever look inside of anybody else’s box and see what they’re referencing as a beetle. Well, in that world, there’s no way for you to ever be able to use the word “beetle” in any sort of meaningful way. You have no idea what they refer to as a beetle. And they have no idea the meaning you attach to the word “beetle.” So, what ends up happening is, the word “beetle” just becomes kind of meaningless.

Language is a team effort. You always need at least one other person who knows what you’re referencing for a word to ever have meaning.

Anyway, hopefully some thought-provoking stuff for you this week. Thank you for your patience regarding the infrequency of the show, and also this completely awkward, abrupt ending to the show. No excuses, I just got done moving. Getting back into a routine. I won’t take up any more of your time.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.