Lee Braver has an excellent article titled 'Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein here
Logical analysis brought philosophy to maturation the way math did for physics, allowing it to put away the childish things of its past by “clear[ing] up two millennia of muddle-headedness about ‘existence,’ beginning with Plato’s Theaetetus” (Russell 1945, 831).
Sadly, it had no such power. Logic develops as Mathematics develops. Is there an 'Absolute Proof'? If so Godelian Platonism is kosher. What of a 'natural proof' (re. P not equal to NP)? If so, there is some type of learning which terminates in the thing to be known. An intension ultimately has a well defined extension. There is an algorithmic way to generate all valid knowledge.
The fact is, because of the 'intensional fallacy' Economics is riddled with 'existence proofs' which are meaningless. The same may be the case for more respectable disciplines.
In particular, logic enabled him to avoid anything that remotely smacks of Kantian anti-realism.
Which Kant arrived at through logic.
The idea that “the mind is in some sense creative... is essential to every form of Kantianism”
It is true. Woe to the philosophy which assumes otherwise! Why not simply say 'Language speaks us. Society controls what goes on in our so called minds'? The next stop is to acknowledge that shape shifting lizards are controlling our minds and causing us to believe we live in a world with a blue sky and white clouds and green grass. We are actually human battery cells like in the Matrix movies.
but “all knowledge must be recognition, on pain of being mere delusion;
But this recognition could be Platonic anamnesis.
Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians” (Russell 1996, 450–51).
In which case, we didn't create the concept of God. God exists the same way Indians do.
Only thus is it the world that our philosophy is capturing and not our own shadows on the wall.
Such philosophy captures nothing but stupidity or the need to earn a little money as a lecturer in a shit subject.
Braver then gives us an elegant precis of the early Witlesstein-
The Tractatus uses logic as a decoder ring of reality: once correlated, we can read the deep structure of reality from the rules of logic.
Which logic? There are many. Some philosophers back then thought that Aristotelian Logic proved abstruse stuff about the nature of the hypostases composing the Holy Trinity.
We get to logic through language since all language must obey logic,
Yet, in every language, it is easy to be self-contradictory in a variety of ways
or else it would be unintelligible,
the cat's purring and the dog's bark are intelligible to us. The blather of the intellectuals seldom is.
so if we understand language, we can understand logic, and if we grasp the system of logic, we can project that into the structure of the world.
So you first create a structure and then say the world has it. But the world doesn't and what you have constructed is a rope of sand.
Ultimately, the function of language is to
solve coordination and discoordination problems and thus generate utility or survival value
say what the world is like, with all other linguistic activities parasitic on this central one.
People need to survive, not to say what the world is like. It is likely that language evolved at some point because it had survival value.
Using a Kantian-style transcendental inquiry, Wittgenstein argues that whatever is required to say that anything is the case–the conditions for the possibility of saying the world–must hold as well.
Which is why flying unicorns and other Meinongian objects exist.
Asserting (or denying) what is the case succeeds only if the assertions can picture or mirror the states-of-affairs they assert.
No. Assertions succeed when the course of action they counsel are acted upon by the party addressed.
States-of-affairs are made up of parts whose arrangements determine what is the case–the cat is one part and the mat another; their arrangement is one of a number of possible spatial relationships (cat on mat, mat on cat, side-by-side, etc.). An assertion can only represent the fact that the cat is on the mat if it is composed of corresponding parts whose arrangement reflects that of the objects.
Any assertion can represent anything at all. If harangued by a virtue signaller at a cocktail party I repeat very slowly and sweetly 'Cat is on the Mat' till my interlocutor goes away. At other times my plaintive cry 'Cat is on Mat' represents a longing for pussy.
Thus, we have a strict parallel between the configuration of basic propositions in our language and of states-of-affairs in the world.
Then Witless realized no one knew of any 'atomic propositions'.
Instead of going through the front door of examining reality through our own idiosyncratic faculties, an avenue blocked by Kant,
Not really. Kant had no objection to empirical investigation of any type. He was merely trying to provide a philosophical justification for belief in Newtonian substantivism because that seemed a useful thing to do. Sadly, Kant was wrong.
logic gives us a backdoor into metaphysics via the language we speak everyday.
but metaphysics turned out to be nonsense. Everything gives us a backdoor and a front-door and a side-door into babbling vacuous shite.
Logic represents the structures that structure language’s structure
No it doesn't. That's why there is no universal translator.
–the vocabulary at the base of all vocabularies,
no such thing exists. Otherwise it would have been easy to create a world language which all nations would find easy to learn.
the grammar governing all grammars
grammars don't govern shit. They can be useful in learning a foreign language to a level where one can speak more or less correctly if not idiomatically.
–meaning that it captures the fundamental composition of all that is the case and all that could be. Each unit of language (propositions) tells us how a particular piece of the world (states-of-affairs) is like; language as a whole shows us how the world as a whole–to the very limits of possibility–is.
This would be cool if, like Chomsky, you could believe there was a magical gene mutation which spread instantaneously at some point in the history of our species. The plain fact is Language is pragmatic, utilitarian, and evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape.
“Logical form… is mirrored in [propositions]....
No. They are imputed to it. True, I can say- on meeting Princess Kate- 'it's like looking in a mirror!' but she does not welcome the inference that she looks anything at all like me. Still, she gets that I'm a narcissist and am trying to pay her a compliment.
Propositions show the logical form of reality” (4.121).
Which is as meaningless as 'Reality shows the form of the logic of the proposition.'
Logic then is the deliquescence of the fog of language into clear drops of logic.
A beautiful sentence but meaningless. Cats are the entelechy of the hypostasis of cats.
“Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world.
There was a mystical practice termed 'speculation' involving looking at yourself in a mirror till you went bonkers and realized you incarnated the entire Universe or, if you were a bit picky, a much nicer Universe with lots of flying unicorns.
Logic is transcendental” (6.13).
Because it is impossible to experience anything till you have completed a PhD in logic- right? That's why all such people are virgins.
Instead of going through the front door of examining reality through our own idiosyncratic faculties, an avenue blocked by Kant,
did he really lock up little babies and ensure they had no experiences before they learnt logic?
logic gives us a backdoor into metaphysics via the language we speak everyday. While languages may be relative to cultures and time periods, like the forms of our mind organizing experience anthropocentrically, they all must share the same logic form, thus revealing the deep nature of reality underlying all varying opinions about it.
Yet there are more possible logics than there are atoms in the universe. Indeed, even great logicians can be shown to have more than one logic. I think you would need a 'divine axiom' to show any logic is consistent. I may be wrong. Even a 'divine axiom' may not be enough.
“Logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself.
Principia Mathematica wasn't about what Russell & Whitehead wanted to express. It was the 'absolutely necessary' speaking for itself and saying it wanted a fucking drink. Also pussy. Lots of pussy.
If we know the logical syntax of any sign-language, then we have already been given all the propositions of logic” (3.124).
Just as, if I have been given the Russian alphabet I have already been given a place in Russian literature equal to Doestoevsky.
Logic liberates thoughts from thinkers so absolutely that not even God can contravene it (5.123).
Unless he sends a meteor to wipe out the species just as the 'thinker' is about to publish.
Wittgenstein’s two early influences–Frege-Russellian logicism and Schopenhauerian ethics–merge in this logical realism, as logic allows us to fade into a pure will-less spectator who merely gazes upon the rigid symbolic machinery of the universe–a logical beatific vision.
Anything at all allows us to fade into such a condition more particularly your g.f running off with your best friend who also happened to be a cat. Worse still they took the mat with them.
Wittgenstein’s later work still pursues the same question—how do we succeed in meaning anything?
we do something useful or, at the least, get married and have children. However stupid and ignorant you are there is a brief period when you mean something to the baby.
—but instead of focusing on the inherent logic in all language and the autonomous operations of the crystalline clockwork of meaning, the emphasis is now on the “we” who mean.
He was babbling meaningless nonsense to young people who could have been studying something useful. Still, some of them got jobs regurgitating that vomit.
Now he “stick[s] to the subjects of our every-day thinking” (§106) by “talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” (§107)
as opposed to what? The lesbian and actuarial phenomenon of language?
in order to resist getting “dazzled by the ideal” (§100).
This was a big problem facing plumbers. You'd call them to fix the toilet but they'd get dazzled by the ideal and end up drinking up all your Gin. Also they'd pork your wife.
Rather than peering through the vapors to discern the ultimate structure of reality, Wittgenstein now sees philosophy as “a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding” (§109)
a struggle everybody else had won long ago.
--a seduction into believing that it makes sense to talk about “ultimate” structures and the one true method of discerning them.
Beating people or sacking them can be a great antidote to such bewitchment or seduction. Even plumbers get around to fixing toilets when they realize they won't get paid otherwise.
Wittgenstein describes this bewitchment in quite Kantian terms, for instance, in discussing the Tractatus’ identification of the core function of language.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (4.5): “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.”
No. The general form of proposition is 'blah blah blah'
—– That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times.
Not if one has a proper job or a wife who will beat you if you don't take out the garbage.
One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it (§114).
Nonsense! We spend a lot of time thinking out women without their clothes on. We tend to retrace their boobs from time to time while wondering what a pussy looks like. Does it have teeth?
He had earlier seen this as a profound discovery about language, but now he locates it in the surface of his approach. The demand that language have but one ultimate function was, so to speak, an a priori requirement he imposed on his study of language instead of an empirical result derived from it. “The crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not something I had discovered: it was a requirement” (§107).
but one only of a crystalline logic with magic properties. This is like the requirement that a flying unicorn shoot out rainbows from its ass. This is a requirement because otherwise the unicorns would be shitting on the heads of the nude Princesses who populate that universe. Also, their pussies don't got teeth.
He compares it to “a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off” (§103).
We take off our glasses to clean them. Do we take off our crystalline logic to give it a polish from time to time?
This analogy was in fact coined by Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (based on lectures from 1941-42) to explain Kant’s anti-realism.
“If you always wore blue spectacles, you could be sure of seeing everything blue (this is not Kant’s illustration). Similarly, since you always wear spatial spectacles in your mind, you are sure of always seeing everything in space. Thus geometry is a priori in the sense that it must be true of everything experienced, but we have no reason to suppose that anything analogous is true of things in themselves, which we do not experience (1946, History of Western Philosophy, p 642,).
Then Einstein discovered space-time is curved. Empirical evidence showed Kant was barking up the wrong tree. If we nothing of noumenon, we also know nothing of phenomena. We may make assertions about both but empirical evidence may turn up which shows we were silly billies.
To resist bewitchment, Wittgenstein proposes a revolution in our philosophical approach towards the approach itself: “the preconception of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole inquiry around” (§108).
Nonsense! A preconception can be removed by slapping people or sacking them. My preconception that policewomen like to have their breasts fondled earned me a beating and a long stretch of porridge
Instead of blithely assuming we are directly gathering information from the object of our examination,
e.g. does the g.f's pussy have teeth?
we must turn our gaze around to critically examine the tool by which we are conducting our examination.
If you start examining your tool half way through, your g.f will leave you.
He now holds that “we misunderstand the role played by the ideal in our language
It turned out that i-languages of any type were shite
…. We want to say that there can’t be any vagueness in logic.
but the sorites problem was ancient
The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality” (§100).
In which case it would be real, not ideal. Why not say cats must henceforth only be found in dogs?
Dazzled by Frege’s dream of absolute exactness in meaning,
restricted comprehension is good enough for any practical purpose
we summon a fully determinate reality that can justify our ways of acting and thinking.
It would determine them. It couldn't justify them. It is clear that mind-control by shape-shifting lizards caused me to fondle a police-woman's breasts. Still, this does not justify any such action.
For instance, we want to say that rules (such as the right way to do logic) must have a Meaning if they are to be meaningful.
Why would we want to say any such thing? It is like saying black things must be black in colour in order to be black things.
There must be an objectively correct way to follow them independently of what we think or do to evaluate our thinkings and doings as either correctly or incorrectly following them.
But that 'objectively correct way' will only be known after the fact. But then, at 'the end of mathematical time' maybe 'naturality' or 'non-arbitrariness' will prevail and it will become clear that there really was an 'Absolute Proof' and an objectively correct approach. Equally, the opposite may be the case because flying unicorns shat on everything.
As Russell had said, “on pain of being mere delusion; Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies.”
Columbus thought he had reached India. That was a delusion. I am writing this shite. I could say I discovered whatever shite it is I am writing but that is merely a figure of speech. On the other hand when I find out my g.f has run off with the cat, that is a genuine discovery. I had believed one thing and then found out I was living in a fool's paradise.
The set of all numbers that form the correct outcome of the function +2 must actually exist and it is what we grasp when we understand the rule.
but that number could have an imaginary component or represent an inaccessible Cardinal. Math is always coming with new types of numbers.
“Your idea was that that act of meaning the order [+2] had in its own way already traversed all those steps: that when you meant it your mind as it were flew ahead and took all the steps before you physically arrived at this or that one.
This is merely to say that there is an algorithm or 'law-like' choice sequence for that activity. But we don't say our mind 'flew ahead' and solved the arithmetic problem we gave up on because a pretty girl had entered the room and we were busy picturing her without her clothes on. Also what does her pussy look like? Does it have teeth?
Thus you were inclined to use such expressions as: “The steps are really already taken, even before I take them in writing or orally or in thought.” And it seemed as if they were in some unique way predetermined, anticipated—as only the act of meaning can anticipate reality (§188).”
Cats anticipate reality all the time when the catch mice. True, this is an 'act of meaning' but plants too are capable of such. Indeed, one subscribe to 'Panpsychism' and say that every subatomic particle is thinking about how to observe the laws of quantum physics. Sadly, they get distracted by thoughts of what the cute quark next door might look like without her clothes on.
That explains how we’re able to reject wrong answers without hesitation.
It certainly explains why reject the bill the waiter brings me. How can a steak and a bottle of wine end up costing me a hundred smackers? There is something wrong with your till. Tell you what, I'll give you a tenner and some valuable coins I picked up on my last trip to India. That should make us quits.
“A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied.... The form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series” (PI 426).
Only if we are committing an 'intensional fallacy' which violates Liebniz's law of identity. It is useful in some cases to treat infinities like finite series but there may be paradoxical consequences- e.g. Banach Tarski.
God looks upon the completed infinity,
but the Deity may subscribe to a Dialethia. Indeed, it is likely that there's one rule for us and another for Him.
while we plod through one step at a time, leaning on crutches and cobbled together contrivances like “and so on” or “. . .” or “etc.,” and so on. The sets really do exist in their totality, we are assured, but our heads are too small to encompass them, our vantage point too low for us to see more than a few steps ahead—just enough to keep trudging on. We may only be able to gesture at the correct way to follow a rule, but it exists—it has to exist if there are to be correct and incorrect acts of following it.
This is nonsense. Rules are merely Schelling focal solutions to coordination problem. But every coordination game can give rise to a discoordination game and there can be arbitrage between the two. Thus standard analysis is very useful but non-standard analysis may be even more so in certain respects.
This logical determinism removes us from the picture, thus avoiding the weak link in the epistemological chain that Kant exploited. “‘All the steps are really already taken’ means: I no longer have any choice. The rule, once stamped with a particular meaning, traces the lines along which it is to be followed through the whole of space.... When I obey a rule, I do not choose” (§219).
LEJ Brouwer, who was both more mystical and more mathematical than either Russell or Witless, came up with the notion of a law-less choice sequence. Gentzen calculi appeared by the Thirties. Actual game theory in its modern form was appearing during that period. Meanwhile Witless was babbling nonsense to Anglo-Saxon retards. Incidentally, Turing used Brouwer's choice sequence to establish a 'context free' result in the Thirties.
However, once he revolves his inquiry to include the inquirer, he finds that all rules can be understood and followed in many different ways by people sincerely following them as they understand them, with fundamental limits to our ability to justify our way over theirs.
Justification is either protocol bound or based on outcomes. If the former is 'buck stopped'- even arbitrarily so, e.g. by Legislatures or the Bench- then there the matter rests. I suppose one could argue the toss re. outcomes but there is little point doing so. Gentzen was a Nazi. He didn't get that if Germany made the same mistake again, its punishment would be more severe.
Examples and past applications are finite, after all, whereas rules extend indefinitely, which means that in principle rules always apply to more than has been or can be definitively settled in advance.
Not if those applying the rule starve to death or get sacked and then their g.f runs off with the cat and they take the mat with them.
It is “possible to derive anything from anything according to some rule or other—nay, according to any rule with a suitable interpretation” (RFM 389).
But this is ex falso quodlibet- an explosion of nonsense.
He now realizes that there is no such thing as a self-applying rule; they always require someone to understand and apply them which will always be a matter of their upbringing, interests, instincts–their form of life.
Which, for most people, depends on having a fucking job.
He had dreamed of the ideal where “logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it” but now he has broken its spell to see that “we can’t smuggle the use of the sign into its introduction (the rule is and remains a sign, separated from its application)” (NB 11, PG 444).
The solution was Piercian pragmatism which btw is friendly to non-standard analysis. It's a pity that America ignored Pierce in favour of imported Continental shite.
And now it looks as if we have lost precisely what we were trying to secure, the meaningfulness of language evaporating under our examination of it: “how am I supposed to follow a sign-post, if whatever I do is a way of following it?” (RFM 414).
But only seeing the sign-post and deciding to go in the direction it suggests constitutes 'following the sign-post'.
If a myriad of ways of behaving can be made out to be in keeping with any rule then
we are babbling nonsense
no one of them can count as The Right One,
Djikstra concurrency problems mean that no rule is non arbitrary. More generally, Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' applies. Still in restricted contexts and for particular purposes there is a categorical theoretical 'naturality square'.
and even minor-scale attempts to use language’s descriptions to correspond to reality become untenable.
save for some useful purpose.
We cannot justify our language-games by appealing to Reality Itself
We can't justify shit save by appealing to some other shit. What matters is whether we get paid or are punished in some way.
because it is only through some game or other
instead of 'game' we could just as easily say some type of masturbation or other. Using a word loosely and outside its proper context means that whatever we say of a thing can be said of shitting or eating it.
that we can access reality,
we pay good money to bar-tenders to stop fucking accessing it.
determine its significance,
we determine the significance of things by either eating or not eating it or fucking or not fucking it.
and then perform any kind of comparison.
e.g. between apples and Portuguese actuaries.
However, this kind of semantic nihilism misunderstands the situation. “It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in the foundations.... The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfills its purpose” (§87).
It does not have a purpose. The guy who put it up might do. But he may be merely fulfilling a legal requirement rather than seeking to convey information.
The vast majority of the time we do follow rules unproblematically;
No. We respond to incentives in a predictable manner.
we only trip ourselves up when we philosophize about them because this places us into the highly atypical state of staring and ruminating on the sign-post instead of just glancing at it and following its direction.
This isn't a highly atypical state if you take a lot of drugs or- like me- are simply stupid.
We are confused by the contrast between flawless ideality and messy reality, the demands of the pure ‘ought’ endlessly let down by the ragged “is.”
Confused people may be confused about a lot of stuff. Why not simply say 'Philosophy is stooooopid.'?
Returning words and actions back to their normal circumstances where we are proficient in using them returns our normal semantic sanity and skillfulness to us.
So, philosophy isn't just stooopid, it is also clumsy and crazy. Why stop there? Why not say Philosophy shits itself incessantly and its Mummy doesn't love it?
These are supported not by reality-in-itself, but by the way our form-of-life winnows out the vast majority of possible understandings, leaving the one we have been raised to follow self-evident.
But 'forms-of-life' are winnowed out by economic and environmental factors. Even then, the 'understanding' needed to sustain a 'form of life' is 'multiply realizable'. One may believe what one is doing is good and beautiful and necessary or you may understand that you need to go through the motions because doing this stupid shit is better paid than any other gig you can get.
If you’re hooked on realist justification, this can seem deeply inadequate grounding since it leaves the framework of our thinking arbitrary in some sense.
Sadly, it can't be non-arbitrary because Evolution is all about uncorrelated asymmetries and 'bourgeois' strategies.
“When I say that the rules are arbitrary, I mean that they are not determined by reality in the way the description of reality is.
The reality is that life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape. This means 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- who is related to whom and how closely (the Price equation) or who owns what or who has prior claim to territory- arbitrarily break symmetries in a game.
And that means: it is nonsense to say that they (rules) agree with reality” (PG 246).
Nomos is not Phusis. Who has ever denied this?
We cannot justify our language-games by appealing to Reality Itself because it is only through some game or other that we can access reality, determine its significance, and then perform any kind of comparison.
Justifying stuff involves talking. Justifying talking involves talking. Appealing to stuff to justify stuff is just talk is all. As for justifying language-games- which means talking- and which involves nothing but talking- it is like condemning farting by farting or legitimizing laughter by chuckling.
“I cannot use language to get outside language....
Sure you can. It is easy to get outside anything merely linguistic and you can use any means you like. True, you may convince yourself that you can't get away from the machinations of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbour's cat but there are pills you can take for that.
Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules” (PhR 54–55).
Not if you disrespect the fuck out of them. Ungrammatical speech can be more informative or have greater imperative force than the perfectly grammatical gibberish spouted by pedagogues in non-STEM subjects.
All attempts to get completely outside our language-games must themselves be moves within a game just to be able to have meaning for us, including the meaning that they occur outside of all language-games.
Why? If I want to get out of the world of on-line gaming, I can retrain as a rent-boy. True, I may want to believe that what is happening to me is just some sort of simulation or 'virtual reality', but the truth is my ass is very very sore.
“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language” (PG 162).
We don't want 'harmony' between thought and reality. We want utility and stuff that cures cancer and generates green energy. Also what would be cool is finding a portal to a dimension where men have smaller dicks than mine.
“Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it—is it then certainly true?
If that's what we get paid to say- sure. Otherwise why bother?
One may designate it as such.—But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts?—With this question you are already going round in a circle.” (OC §191).
Not if you got paid to say 'yes' and then went home and had a nice dinner with your wife. However, if vaginas have teeth- as all the women I've asked have confirmed- you may just want to hold hands.
Whereas logic was independent of human logicians in the early work, so that it could hook onto the world, now language is underdetermined by the world in virtue of being interpreted by us.
Logic is independent of any particular human logician in the same way that mathematics was independent of mathematicians. But it does not 'hook onto the world' though if we find an 'Absolute Proof' maybe it can do so before the end of mathematical Time.
“The connection between ‘language and reality’ is made by
species which have the language faculty. However language can also be connected to incompossible fantasies or telling me I've got a tiny dick even though it has never been anywhere near a vagina and thus could not have been nibbled down to a stub- as I like to suggest.
definitions of words,
lots of words are undefined. Indeed, in any discipline the key words are Tarskian primitives- i.e. undefined- precisely because otherwise you get circularity or infinite regress.
and these belong to grammar, so that language remains self-contained and autonomous” (PG 97).
Why stop there? Why not it is its own 'unmoved mover' and only efficient cause and that if you wanna get right with Language you must stop wanking or thinking about girls with their tops off. Yea, I say unto you, verily, Language, your Language, is a jealous Language and will smite you with boils if you say nasty things about 'the Linguistic turn'.
Russell’s realism would find this subjective idealism, condemning the object of our knowledge to be solely our knowledge as in Kant’s critical inquiries.
This is stupider than any shite in Kant who, after all, was trying to be useful by providing a philosophical defence for Newtonism. The alternative was some sort of relationism which would be bound to end up as either Occassionalism or a Pragmatism which would kick Philosophy in the goolies and take away tenure from its professors.
Here it happens that our thinking plays us a queer trick. We want, that is, to quote the law of excluded middle.
which Brouwer was happy to do without.
. . . “In the decimal expansion of π either the group ‘7777’ occurs, or it does not—there is no third possibility.”
Such an expansion is constructible. You get verification the moment you reach the desired sequence. What is questionable is whether we can say any thing about infinite sequences or things not known to be constructible- e.g. truly (rather than pseudo) random numbers.
That is to say: “God sees—but we don’t know.”
Why would God need to look at a decimal expansion?-
But what does that mean?—We use a picture;
No. This is something we construct or which someone trustworthy constructed. It is not a picture. It is a stream of data.
the picture of a visible series which one person sees the whole of and another not.
Nobody sees the end of an infinite series.
The law of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that.
No. It says nothing whatsoever.
So it really—and this is a truism—says nothing at all, but gives us a picture.
It doesn't even give us a cartoon let alone a picture of a girl with her top off.
And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not?
Why? We may ask if a picture is realistic- e.g. does a beaver shot show vagina dentata?- but we don't expect reality to change so that we begin to look more like the muscle bound hunk we might picture ourselves to be.
And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how—but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied (PI §352).
Please Sir, is the answer 'it should be applied in the manner of a suppository?'
We find this picture compelling, but it cannot inform our actual knowledge practices in any way: whatever God sees or doesn’t see can be of no consequence to how we mortals conduct our business, a prayer wheel whose turning leaves the machine unaffected.
God doesn't see any merit in our doing stupid shit- like sacrificing your first born- so as to ingratiate ourselves with him. That's what Scripture says.
In its language-game [a claim to know something apparent, like that one is sitting in a chair] is not presumptuous.
It may be. James Bond says 'I'm sitting in a chair.' Blofeld replies 'you are too presumptuous, Mr. Bond. What you think is a chair, is actually my henchman Odd Job. He has injected you with a nerve agent which has caused you to lose sphincter control. Thus you are actually shitting on Odd Job which, incidentally, is how he gets his jollies. Indeed, I only stole the nuclear missile so as to lure you to my lair. This is my birthday present to Odd Job.'
There, it has no higher position than, simply, the human language-game.
Yes there is. There is the eating-humans game which tigers enjoy.
For there it has its restricted application. But as soon as I say this sentence outside its context, it appears in a false light.
It is shit in any context.
For then it is as if I wanted to insist that there are things that I know. God himself can’t say anything to me about them (OC §554).
I am welcome to insist that God can't use the sort of filthy language which captures the little that I know because God didn't grow up in a brothel.
We know how we know, how to check claims against reality in everyday practice–if someone says there are 46 chairs in the next room, go and count them. None of this calls for any metaphysics. Wittgenstein “would like to reserve the expression ‘I know’ for the cases in which it is used in normal linguistic exchange” because “it is as if ‘I know’ did not tolerate a metaphysical emphasis.” (OC §260, §482).
Because metaphysics is not knowledge. Epistemology may be about knowledge just as Religion is about God but it isn't itself what it is about.
We have a philosophy designed for a God, as the Tractatus sought, and so utterly useless to us. When we philosophize, echoing Hume and Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein asks, “let us be human” (CV 30).
Let us be cats. Better yet appoint actual cats professors of Philosophy. The thing is useless. This is not to say that the greatest mathematicians won't continue to do genuine philosophy which, as Socrates pointed out, is all we can do with respect to 'open problems' but their salaries will be paid by STEM subject Departments or Research Institutes.
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