Mats Furberg arrives in Oxford

He holds a grant (in his pocket) from the British Council. He has to meet Grice and become a doctor under him.

This below from an online writing by this genial Swedish philosopher -- much discussed by R. E. Dale in his "Theory of Meaning:

http://www.phil.gu.se/posters/festskrift/festskrift_furberg.pdf

Section 4 is genially entitled:

"4. … and meaning"

What is right with LPA, I guess the author of PU would say, is the attention it pays to silence and, possibly with Plato, to silent demonstrations changing

the meaning

of what is demonstrated. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy shows next to no tendency to take meaning for granted, a something we just grasp or fail to grasp."

"It becomes more and more like a living thing, growing and decaying in ways none of us can do much about individually, although we as a collective can and do much about it."

"By fits and starts,

meaning

also ceases to be something we have and turns into something we do."

"From a noun, ‘meaning’ is

on its Gricean way

to the present participle of the verb ‘mean’."

"An ideal language has settled

meanings,

a distressing plural of a distressing noun."

"A living language is ever changing, mostly so slowly that we see its alterations only in a long retrospect."

"New

meanings

grow out of old ones."

"The growth metaphor points to a collective process, foreign to protagonists of ideal languages, impervious to improvement and reform as well as to deterioration and degeneration."

"Daily life is full of unexpected circumstances demanding our attention. We can and do deal with them in our woolly vernacular but would have been helpless had we spoken only an ideal language, precise and unambiguous. The world being what it is, we would most of the time be speechless but not dumb 16. We would have the gift of speech but seldom an opportunity to use it, for empirical phenomena are usually blurry, ambiguous, without sharp definitions.17. Even if I invented new words whenever a new type of phenomena cropped up, they would be of little avail until the people I spoke with caught the new-fangled

meaning.

How often do you understand exactly what I say and vice versa?"

"How often do we understand exactly what we ourselves

mean?"

(Note 16 The criticism recurs in PU. It picks out another strand of thought than the one leading up to the impossibility of a private language).

(Note 17 Suggestions of ideal languages often presuppose a sharp distinction between language and world – here the labels, there the objects to glue them to. When the parable is abandoned, the charm of ideal languages starts fading away."

"If a misunderstanding crops up, must there be something we miss, a something escaping us?"

"Can’t the truth be that there is as yet nothing to understand linguistically?"

"Meaning and understanding, countable (Note 18) nominalizations of
verbs, seem made for each other."

"Their “mechanism” (the -ing form of verbs), is for collective
use and collective assessment."

"New words for new phenomena are foggy, inpalpable, undisciplined."

"The implicatures of such words and sentences are even less docile."

"A perfect language cutting up what we empirically perceive into atoms of

meaning,

thus making our perceived world clearer – such a language is a pipe-dream."


5. “Laß uns menschlich sein”19

"LPA doesn’t even flirt with perfect languages20 – that’s why Wittgenstein got furious and disappointed with Russell’s introduction. A letter in May 1920 says,
Deine Einleitung wird nicht gedruckt and infolgedessen wahrscheinlich auch mein
Buch nicht. – Als ich nämlich die deutsche Übersetzung der Einleitung vor mir hatte,
da konnte ich mich doch nicht entschließen sie mit meiner Arbeit drucken zu lassen.
Die Feinheit Deines englischen Stils war nämlich in der Übersetzung –
selbverständlich – verloren gegangen und was übrig blieb war Oberflächlichkeit und
Mißverständnis.21

"Misunderstanding is the obverse of understanding; you can’t have the one without an
inkling of the other. As little as there is a plural to ‘meaning’, as little is there a plural to ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’. This “linguistic” turn of philosophical issues took a long time in coming."

"With the benefit of hindsight we can, however, find its embryo
already in LPA though seen through a glass, darkly. Let’s take three examples.

---
Note 18 on 'meaning' as countable: "A common noun is countable if it (a) has a plural, (b) in the singular allows the indefinite article, and (c) can be preceded by words as ‘every’, ‘each’, ‘either’. To say that meaning and understanding are countable is to say that it makes sense to speak of (say) two meanings and three understandings."

19 Vermischte Bemerkungen, revised edition, p 36.

20 ‘If its first part expounds logical atomism, it expounds a perfect language, doesn’t it?’ Yes, as long as it stays with mathematics and logic. But are mathematics and logic languages in their own right? Are they more than regimentations
of parts of a living language?
21 Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, p 87.
(i) The letter to Russell doesn’t support a communicative pessimism. Poetry communicates between the lines but can’t initially dispense with the lines. Later on it can leave
them behind but in the beginning it needs them to get off the ground. To my mind this is optimism, a belief in the possibilities of spoken or written language to get across – but not a belief that the possibilities are used or, if used, are reducible to sentences. We take or fail to take care of words, a remark less about language than about us language-users."

"Suppose Wittgenstein took Uhland’s poem as immanent and transcendent, the words
on the lines helping us to see words between the lines22, see them and start working up a whole of speech and language. A “good Gestalt” combines situation, immanence, and transcendence, where immanence precedes transcendence. Wittgenstein may have tried to make the text of LPA carry a cargo impossible to word23 but intelligible enough. Prima facie, the attempt isn’t self-stultifying, whatever we may think of its plausibility."

"(ii) I don’t hear much regret in “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man
schweigen”. It is more a fanfare to a philosophically neglected phenomenon, that of
silence, and to a philosophically neglected art, that of keeping quiet.24
What can’t be said or written is by no means necessarily unthinkable. If it were, LPA
would have failed. For its aim is, according to p 2 of the preface,
dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen, oder vielmehr – nicht dem Denken, sondern dem
Ausdruck der Gedanken: Denn um dem Denken eine Grenze zu ziehen, müßten wir
beide Seiten dieser Grenzen denken können (wir müßten also denken können, was sich
nicht denken läßt).25"

"The project of setting a limit to thought is, in the few words within the parentheses, rejected as absurd. It is replaced by a wish to set a limit to ”the expression of the thought”. Exchange the definite singular articles with indefinite plural ones, and you have a leitmotif 22 The poem gives no good example of the importance of silence, e.g. in the form of pauses, a phenomenon of which
Wittgenstein the music-lover must have been well aware. Cf Ch 3 of my Den första stenen.

23 Where ‘word’ is a verb.

"24 ‘Neglected by whom? By Heidegger the sigetic?’ Philosophy is often parochial.
25 Dr Frank Lorentzon has suggested to me that Wittgenstein (who was obviously influenced by Kant) uses ‘Grenze’ as an opposite to ‘Schranke’. This may well be so, but at present I can’t make much of the difference. of PU and a possible explanation of Wittgenstein’s wish to have his two books published
in the same volume – an illustration of the tenet that small differences may cause big
philosophical mutations.
(iii)

"Hintikka & Hintikka claim that Wittgenstein abruptly switched from
“phenomenological language” to “everyday physicalist language” (Investigating
Wittgenstein, p 168) in October 1928 (p 138), many years after LPA. I agree that LPA is phenomenological and non-Husserlian. But its phenomenology is ”physicalistic”. A wish
to think up a limit to thought is inconsistent. A wish to show what we can’t say is not.
That’s a lesson of 5.5423 on the Necker cube.

6. The Necker cube
"The Necker cube can be seen in two ways26. We can tell each
other how to turn from one aspect to the other, but the instruction
can’t replace the picture. You can help me to see differences,
for we live in the same world and see much of each
other.27 But you can’t describe or draw a picture of one of the
aspects which isn’t true also of the other.
Pointing isn’t saying, nor is saying pointing. A (shallow)
reason why we can’t always say what we think is that we often think referringly, the
thought including an act of physicalist or mental gesturing towards something. In such acts
I don’t watch myself pointing, not in the way I see you point with your hand or your glance.
Nevertheless I am apperceptively aware of myself and my act of reference. I believe that
much thinking can’t be moral without a good measure of referentiality.28
26 Wittgenstein holds that “wahrnehmen, daß sich seine [the cube’s] Bestandteile so und so zu einander verhalten” is
seeing a fact: to see a black cross on a white bottom is to see another fact than that of a white cross on a black bottom.
The author of LPA is, indeed, a phenomenologist with a physicalist background.
27 The cube’s surroundings are disregarded. So do also Gestalt psychologists.
28 To insist on this indexical aspect of moral thinking is to stir up a hornets’ nest. At least from Kant universality or, as
a minimum, universalizability has been considered a necessary condition of morality.
The Necker cube
We may show what we can’t say. Being silent is a state. Keeping silent is an action.
So is showing and displaying what we keep silent of. Referring actions are less signs of
thinking than themselves pieces of thinking. Such thoughts enter most ponderings, however
commonplace. They don’t enter all by themselves. An agent guides them.
Keeping silent is an action, taking an agent. Being tongue-tied is a state with no
conceptual link to agents. A stutterer stays a stutterer even when he doesn’t stutter. As we
normally think of being tongue-tied, a person who starts speaking fluently is no longer
tongue-tied even if he later on relapses. This asymmetry between agential and “static”
concepts is employed in Biblical accounts of the wonders Jesus worked – see for instance
Mark 7:32 – 36.
The last word of LPA is schweigen. There is more to keeping mum than not talking.
It is the act and sometimes the art of not talking. The author doesn’t just perform an act of
being (actively) silent; he is silent about [über] something, X. However loquacious, he
keeps his oath of silence as long as he says nothing about X. In everyday life he hasn’t
taken an oath to keep quiet, but the language of oaths makes a telling gesture to the quality
and even standard [Gehalt] of his silence.
7. Encircling ethics
According to the Ficker letter, LPA is essentially ethical. 6.421 and 6.432 broaden
“ethisch” to include aesthetic and religious phenomena. Even so, only a few pages are
ethical in this broad sense. What Wittgenstein thinks sayable, as opposed to showable, of29
broad ethics is squeezed in between 6.3 and 7 and is fairly free from a language of ethics,
in Hare’s and also Nowell-Smith’s sense.
6 - 6.24, i.e., right up to 7, attempt to show, first, that a good number of propositions
that prima facie don’t touch ethics are bogus; secondly, that no genuine proposition is
ethical in Wittgenstein’s sense; and, thirdly, that Scheinsätze (pseudo-propositions) may be
in good working order but have no truth-value. 6 and its subordinate propositions 6.001 –
6.54 form a threshold between “alles was der Fall ist” on the one hand and, on the other
29 Or in. The distinction between Wittgenstein’s ethics and metaethics is not a sharp one.
hand, everything valuable. “Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion” is given in 6. It
is “die allgemeine Form des Satzes”30, were the Sätze ar both truth-functional and factstating.
6.1 deals with propositions of logic, claiming that they are tautologies or contradictions
and therefore say nothing. The message of 6.2 is that mathematics is a logical method
and its propositions “Gleichungen, also Scheinsätze”. 6.3 tells us that the “Erforschung der
Logik bedeutet die Erforschung aller Gesetzmäßigkeit” and that “außerhalb der Logik ist
alles Zufall”.31 6.4 states that all propositions are of equal value, a statement that in LPA
doesn’t imply that all proposition have value but on the contrary that they have no value:
otherwise they weren’t propositions. 6.5 holds that alleged questions of values, norms, and
the meaning of life are perplexities about what one can’t say [aussprechen]: there are no
ethical and religious questions, nor, 6.51 adds, any ethical or religious doubts.
Wittgensteinian ethics is, then, encircled by other types of Sätze. This shows the
artificiality of his form of ethics. Neither everyday ethics nor everyday aesthetics is, I
daresay, fundamentally Sätze. If anything, the two are Einstellungen (outlooks more than
attitudes) with entailed actions or inclinations to action. His propositionalization is to my
mind a step in a wrong direction and isn’t repeated in PU.
There is a watershed between on the one hand profane Sätze and on the other hand
allegedly ethical judgments; the latter are Scheinsätze. The watershed is to be found
somewhere between 6.3 and 6.4. 6.3 is concerned with laws of induction, laws of
mechanics, laws of physics, and laws of “the will” (≈ the psychic?).32 None of them is what
it seems to be, viz, a picture of a fact or a possible fact; they are all Scheinsätze. So are also
30 A preliminary title of his book, revealing Wittgenstein’s focus of interest, was Der Satz.
31 The implicit contrast between Zufall and (I suppose) necessity suggests that 6 and its sidekicks try to illuminate a gap
between logical and non-logical necessity. The former necessity is dealt with in terms of tautology and contradiction.
The latter necessity can’t be so handled. Kant tried to tell the difference by crossing the semantic distinction synthetic /
analytic with the epistemic distinction a priori / a posteriori. Accepting neither the semantic distinction nor Hume’s
reduction of factual necessity to perpetual regularity, Wittgenstein has to attempt another tack: the necessity at issue
can be shown but not described.
32 What is said of “the will” is poorer than and incompatible with what is said in Notebooks 1914 – 1916 out of which
he took many a remark in LPA. There his view of the will is mostly an agent’s; in LPA it is mostly a spectator’s, in the
spirit of Spinoza.
the “propositions” of ethics and aesthetics. Their closest relatives are, I suppose, those on
the will, the home of Tractarian “ethics”.
8. “The transcendental”, immanence and transcendence
My survey may be taken to show that the “ethical” part of LPA has shrunk from six pages
into one, the one embracing 6.5 – 7. The suggestion is awry. Wittgensteinian ethics permeates
the whole book, “transzendental” as ethics is and identical with aesthetics ( 6.421).
The term ‘transzendental’ as opposed to ‘transzendent’ is Kantian, signifying a condition of
the POSSIBILITY of syntheticity a priori. Syntheticity a priori is hardly Wittgenstein’s
cup of tea. But he may have used ‘transzendental’ to signify a condition of the POSSIBILITY
of human EXPERIENCE. Then it makes some kind of sense33 to claim that aesthetics
in the old sense of aisthesis [perception] is one and the same as ethics – a concern with how
we look at and act in a world we are acquainted with primarily through our senses.
The trouble is that ‘transcendental’ occurs also in 6.13 where it is tied to logic. If my
interpretation of ‘transcendental’ is plausible, logic seems confined to the realm of human
experience, a contra-intuitive restriction. But let Wittgenstein’s point be, phenomenologically,
that human experience is impossible without logic as well as without ethics /
aesthetics: wherever human experience is possible there is and must be room for ethics and
aesthetics and logic.
5.5423 is Wittgenstein’s first discussion of an ambiguous figure, the Necker cube. He
gives an account of its shifting aspects and comments that we really see two distinct facts, a
comment again bearing out that LPA is phenomenological.
The immanence idea does not by itself give a good sense to the idea of absolute unsayables,
for instance those of value. It gives no guarantee that different poems, melodies,
paintings… can lodge one and the same X or, much weaker, list criteria for counting what
this sonnet shows up as the same X as that shown up by another sonnet. Without such
criteria, immanent unsayability does not meet an important demand on “das Mystische”,
33 Remember that what you say may make more or less sense than what I say. That is, there is a gradual transition from
sense to nonsense and from being meaningful to being meaningless.
that of intersubjectivity. In theory, intersubjectivity is a more lenient demand than that of
objectivity. In practice objectivity boils down to ‘what can’t be effectively gainsaid’, where
‘can’t’ only amounts to ‘isn’t ever’. Intersubjectivity does, like objectivity, stand against
pure subjectivity, the tenet that there isn’t more to truth, or goodness, or duty, than strictly
personal likings. However psychologically interesting, a purely subjective mysticism is not
worth a philosopher’s while.
A note on p 6 says that “[the] Decimalzahlen als Nummern der einzelnen Sätze [in
LPA] deuten das logische Gewicht der Sätze an, den Nachdruck, der auf ihnen in meiner
Darstellung liegt”. So he asserts or stipulates that 6 is more important than34 6.1, 6.2 and so
on. The suite 6 - 6.54 is immediately followed by 7. Does 7 follow from it? No. There is
no entailment, nor does the suite together with 1 - 5.641 make 7 inevitable or almost inevitable.
But isn’t that what the title Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung promises?
6.54 suggests that it is wrong to treat the numbered propositions as premisses in an
inference, presumably with 7 as its conclusion. They are more like the rungs of a ladder. In
any ladder worth its name, rungs have an order but not in a logician’s sense; to think of the
whole as inductive or deductive or abductive is amiss. Wittgenstein raises his metaphorical
ladder against something we have to overcome. Though odd, the metaphor isn’t more
difficult than most metaphors – until we add that a climber who has reached the coping has
to [muß] kick the ladder away. The ladder has done its duty when he steps on to the top of
the wall. Why “muß [er] diese Sätze [1 – 6.53] überwinden” in any other sense than that of
climbing past them? Why “muß [er] sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr
hinaufgestiegen ist”? Why must he do so to see the world aright?
I have no answer. Wittgenstein’s position is far from commonsensical. Valuejudgments
as well as religious judgments diverge from factual statements in a number of
important ways. The very fact that we call the former ‘judgments’ and the latter ‘statements’
indicates that the judge is not supposed to report but to form an opinion, sound or
unsound rather than true or false. Are such judgments not proposition? Sometimes I think
34 This isn’t readily reconcilable with 6.4 (“Alle Sätze sind gleichwertig”) even if we take him to mean that no Satz
harbours a value
they are, with a “constative” illocutionary force35. But equally often their dissimilarities to
ordinary statements make me hesitate
9. Aspect switches and brute facts
5.5423, the Necker cube passage, is tied to 6.43, LPA’s first clearly moral enouncement:
Wenn das gute oder böse Willen die Welt ändert, so kann es nur die Grenzen der Welt
ändern, nicht die Tatsachen; nicht das, was durch die Sprache ausgedrückt werden
kann.
Kurz, die Welt muß dann dadurch überhaupt eine andere werden. Sie muß
sozusagen als Ganzes abnehmen oder zunehmen.
Die Welt des Glücklichen is eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.
The most plausible reading I know of is categorical: whenever [wenn] the good or
bad will changes the world, then… and so on. In 5.5423, an “inside” perceiver sees another
fact than an “outside” perceiver. In 6.43 no facts are changed, ”only” the limits of the
world. If the analogy with the Necker cube holds, internal relations between the facts
change the configuration of alles, was der Fall ist, that is, the very nature of the world
waxes or wanes. The change is not due to my efforts; the world “ist unabhängig von
meinem Willen”. But the world of a happy man does indeed differ from that of an unhappy
man. The difference is prima facie ego-related and perspectival.
A common reading is that “was der Fall ist”, i.e., “eine Tatsache”, is a brute fact, for
instance the uninterpreted drawing in 5.5423. The reading can’t be true, for “wir sehen
eben wirklich zwei verschiedene Tatsachen”. But Wittgenstein’s comment won’t do either.
For what is die Figur (definite form singular), die Figur we see as two different facts? The
basic assumption is after all that we see it – the one and only Figur, involved in two
different facts. What is the status of that assumption? The world of a happy man is, ex
hypothesi, the same as that of an unhappy man, even if the happy man’s view of the world
differs from that of the unhappy man (6.43).
35 J.L. Austin: How to do Things with Words, the last lectures.
LPA needs brute facts. Without them its ideas of perspectival changes and aspects
become unintelligible or hopelessly subjective. The relations between brute and perspectival
facts cry out for an elucidation that they are not given by Wittgenstein.36
The facts he thinks of are, I repeat, perspectival and ego-related. That this is so
explains his excursion to a non-psychological ego entering [the truth of?] the assertion that
the world is mine, where the ego is neither a human being nor his body nor his soul but
“das metaphysische Subject, die Grenze – nicht ein Teil – der Welt” (5.641).
10. Perspectives and the metaphysical subject
Now we have reached proposition 5.633:
Wo in der Welt ist ein metaphysisches Subjekt zu merken?
Du sagst, es verhält sich hier ganz wie mit Auge und Gesichtsfeld. Aber das Auge
siehs du wirklich nicht.
Und nichts am Gesichtfeld läßt darauf schließen, daß es von einem Auge gesehen
wird.
What is said in 5.633 is only that IF the analogy holds, THEN the ego appears as little
as the eye appears in its visual field. But Wittgenstein seems to accept the analogy, turning
the paragraph phenomenological, like those of the Necker cube and the happy or unhappy
man.
If the ego doesn’t show up in alles, was der Fall ist, it is inconceivable. For, says 3,
that a state of affairs [Sachverhalt] is thinkable means that we can picture it to ourselves:
what isn’t depictable is unthinkable.37 Nor can anything be said of it, since a thought is
defined as a sinnvoller Satz (4) and a language defined as “die Gesamtheit der Sätze”
(4.001). “Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also
36 Many long and intense discussions with Frank Lorentzon have helped me to a clearer view of many problems in the
last four paragraphs.
37 So in an awkward sense eine Figur, gloomy or brilliant, is necessary to morality, to aesthetics, and (I daresay) to
religion.
auch nicht sagen, was wir nicht denken können” (5.61). Nevertheless we can sometimes
show it.
11. Summing up
To my mind, the crux is neither unsayability nor the seeing of aspects; the crux is the
implication that important truths may be less ineffable than unthinkable. The letter to von
Ficker indicates, however, that Wittgenstein saw his book as a long argument to the effect
that many unsayables are thinkable. If he did, then proposition 3, “Das logische Bild der
Tatsachen ist der Gedanke”, goes by the board as well as proposition 4, “Der Gedanke ist
der sinnvolle Satz”.38 And if two of the seven main propositions have to be removed…'

References

Engelmann, Paul (1967).

Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.

Furberg, Mats (1994). I stället för vetande?[Instead of Knowledge?] Stockholm: Thales.

Furberg, Mats (1999). Den första stenen. [The first stone] Göteborg: Daidalos.

Grice, H.P. (1989). ”Logic and Conversation” (1967), reprinted in his Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hare, R.M. (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford: OUP.

Heidegger, Martin (1927). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

38 It looks as if the fact that we can’t say that p proves that we can’t think that p. ‘The fallacy is so blatant that
Wittgenstein can’t have committed it’, many of us protest. Those who take a dimmer view of his gifts may laugh
and believe their eyes, without even Othello’s ”But yet the pity of it, Iago: oh Iago, the pity of it Iago”.

Hintikka, Merril B & Hintikka, Jaakko (1986). Investigating Wittgenstein. Oxford: OUP.

Janik, Allan & Toulmin, Stephan (1973). Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York, N.Y.

Nowell-Smith, P.H.(1954). Ethics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969). Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Oxford: ***.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961). Notebooks 1914 – 1916. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung / Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1998). Vermischte Bemerkungen. Revised edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
– The English translation of the revised edition is rebaptized Culture and Value.

(To edit).