Ajit Sinha wrote:
The Investigations are radically incomplete, consisting of numbered
sections, often of just a sentence or so, written in an oracular style
and ranging over a wide range of subjects; but all basically dealing with
issues that have troubled philsophers in the area of the philosophy of
language and epistemology. Most of it is a rethinking and savage
critique of Wittgenstein's earlier positions on the nature of logic and
language in THE TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. He only published the
Investigations because philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle were
"borrowing" what they thought were his views and extending them in other
areas e.g. Ryle's CONCEPT OF MIND- a philosophical classic in itself.
Wittgenstein thought others were interpreting him incorrectly so he
wanted to at least get out in public what he actually thought.
Unfortunately, the INVESTIGATIONS themselves are about as clear as the
Bible--and among many 20th century philosophers just as influential.
Myself, I read the Investigations in a much narrower way than many. I see
them as addressing rather technical problems in the philosophy of
language that W. thought that he had solved in his earlier work.
Wittgenstein influences many postmodernists. I expect if he were
alive this would make him puke. His aim was always clarity even when he
didn't achieve it. Although his style changes considerably in the
Investigations you find none of the cloudy complex rhetorical crap
endemic to pomos. Wittgenstein remained firmly in the analytic tradition
and opposed to obfuscation, or clever but often unclear or meaningless
rhetoric.
In some respects he is writing about quite technical problems.
He was trained as an engineer and to some extent the technical and
practical approach to problems. He doesn't speculate about NOTHINGNESS
but about how the operator 'not' works. If he could figure that out he
could quit driving himself nuts trying to solve philsophical
problems. However, he often used analogies and pithy sayings, even
stories and what he calls language games, that call up all sorts of ideas
and imaginings in the reader's mind usually inappropriate but often
independently interesting--as in Ryle's work.
Wittgenstein was one of the few profs. who was able to cancel a class
because it had too many students and get away with it. By the way he was
quite anti-semitic. He was also gay but not at all gay about it.
I didn't realise that Wittgenstein had any influence on Sraffa. I
though the influence was the other way around. Sraffa sort of woke
Wittgenstein from his dogmatic slumbers. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein
holds that all language, to communicate, must have a certain logical
structure. An ideal languages would make this structure transparent
whereas it is obscured in ordinary language. Symbolic logic basically
gives you the form of this structure without any content. (Wittgenstein
developed truth tables independently of the mathematician Post.
Wittgenstein thought they gave you a picture of "logical space".)
Wittgenstein was explaining his ideas to Sraffa and Sraffa made a gesture
of contempt. I gather that it is a movement of the hand under the chin
that Italians use. Sraffa said: What is the logical structure of that?
Strangely enough , since he usually didn't pay attention to criticism,
this really impressed Wittgenstein. He said to himself. Shit. Maybe it
doesn't have a logical structure. Here I thought I had solved the basic
problems of the philosophy of language and have been saying THIS MUST BE
SO when any idiot, even an economist, can see it AINT SO. The
Investigations explores this idiocy in language which seems to inspire
people to go off on wild imaginative tangents, as Wittgenstein himself
had witnessed. Notes on his thoughts had already been spread around by
his students in the BLUE and BROWN books and these were the sources for
numerous papers published in philosophical journals.
How did Wittgenstein influence Sraffa? What does Chomsky say
about Wittgenstein? That the Tractatus was correct and the Investigations
wrong? Chomsky does think that logic, at least as deep syntatical
grammatical structures, does exist through all languages, doesn't he? And
that understanding of these is innate-- so that he writes a book called
Cartesian Linguistics. Most psychologists, and contemporary philosophers,
tend to pooh pooh the idea of innate ideas but it seems to me they could
be understand as structures
of interpretation that are built into the brain rather than learned or
developed through experience or abstraction from incoming data.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
>
>
> 81. "F.P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a
> 'normative science'. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was
> doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in
> philosophy we often COMPARE the use of words with games and calculi which
> have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language MUST be
> playing such a game.-- But if you say that our languages only APPROXIMATE
> to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding.
> For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an IDEAL
> language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum.--
> Whereas logic does not treat of language--or of thought--in the sense in
> which a natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that
> can be said is that we CONSTRCUT ideal languages. But here the word "ideal"
> is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more
> perfect, than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to shew
> people at last what a proper sentence looked like.
> All this, however, can only appear in the right light when one has
> attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning, and
> thinking. For it will then also become clear what can lead us (and did lead
> me) to think that if anyone utters a sentence and MEANS or UNDERSTANDS it
> he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.
>
> 82. What do I call 'the rule by which he proceeds'?-- The hypothesis that
> satisfactorily describes his use of words, which we observe; or the rule
> which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he gives us in reply
> if we ask him what his rule is?--But what if observation does not enable us
> to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light?--For he did
> indeed give me a definition when I asked him what he understood by "N", but
> he was prepared to withdraw and alter it.--so How am I to determine the
> rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself.--Or, to
> ask a better question: What meaning is the expression "the rule by which he
> proceed" supposed to have left to it here?" (All the emphasis are by
> Wittgenstein)
