Therapy, Co-operation and Self-Diagnosis in Wittgenstein's Method.

1 Therapy, Co-operation and Self-Diagnosis in Wittgenstein’s Method. The idea that good philosophy is therapeutic occurs frequently in the later Wittgenstein. Sometimes he employs explicitly medical analogies, e.g. comparing philosophical error to a disease (PI, I, 593); sometimes the idea is more generally that victims of philosophical perplexity need help, e.g. the metaphor of the fly and the flybottle (PI, I, 309). But consider this: The substitution of ‘identical’ for ‘the same’ (for instance) is another typical expedient of philosophy. As if we were talking about shades of meaning and all that were in question were to find words to hit on the correct nuance. That is in question in philosophy only where we have to give a psychologically exact account of the temptation to use a particular kind of expression. What we ‘are tempted to say’ in such a case is, of course, not philosophy; but it is its raw material. Thus, for example, what a mathematician is inclined to say about the objectivity and reality of mathematical facts is not a philosophy of mathematics, but something for philosophical treatment. (PI, I, 254) It is the last sentence on which I wish to focus. Clearly Wittgenstein wants to help this benighted mathematician and cure him of the inclination to talk what Wittgenstein undoubtedly considers nonsense. But there is no suggestion that the mathematician recognises his predicament for what it is, comes to Wittgenstein for help and co-operates in his treatment. There are suggestions that philosophical therapy can, should, perhaps must, be a co-operative procedure elsewhere in Wittgenstein but, if I am not mistaken, they tend not to occur in the works he regarded as more or less suitable for publication. This may be significant. Perhaps he never quite worked out what he wanted to say about co-operative therapy. Perhaps we cannot speak of his considered view here. I do not however wish to base, or to seem to be basing, my assessment of the idea of co-operative therapy on this possibility and so I have relegated further discussion of it to an appendix. What matters is how good the idea is. It seems clear that Wittgenstein credits himself with having recognised the errors of mathematicians of the sort he is criticising and with having done so without help from them.1 They are certainly not presented as acknowledging their errors. It may be that Wittgenstein thinks he recognises these errors because he has made them himself in the past, or been tempted to do so; and so he might credit himself with an insider’s knowledge of the situation. But the only help he would get then would come, as it were, from himself. The kind of claim to be adopting a therapeutic approach that is made in the passage we are considering could, I think, be made by virtually any nonsensicalist (one who makes use of the notion of philosophical nonsense).2 Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, the logical positivists, for example, in so far as they accuse other philosophers of talking nonsense, want to put a stop to it and presumably think that the accused will be better off for having their errors corrected. Even such a highly polemical work as Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic has a genuinely therapeutic intent in this sense.3 As does Tractatus 6.53.4 The would-be metaphysician is surely expected to learn from his errors. With what am I contrasting this kind of ‘therapy’? Well, I do not think that the passages in which Wittgenstein sponsors a co-operative approach are numerous and, 2 as I have said, they tend not to occur in the writings that he regarded as definitive. But they are potentially very important. Take this: One of the most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the reader says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it’. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error. Indeed we can only convict someone else of a mistake if he acknowledges that this really is the expression of his feeling/if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling. For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis.) What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought.5 Now there is no explicit mention of nonsense here and the first paragraph even seems to admit that ‘the reader’ meant something. Yet it would be astonishing if in this passage Wittgenstein had reverted to what he normally considered the outmoded view that mistaken philosophical utterances were simply false.6 So I shall assume that Wittgenstein is talking here about convicting philosophers of talking nonsense. Of course, I don’t want to imply that he thinks that philosophers never assert what is meaningful but false or commit familiar logical fallacies, i.e. illicit transitions between meaningful statements. Wittgenstein is stressing the importance of acknowledgment and sees an analogy between his method (the method he is talking about here, whether or not it is his usual practice) and psychoanalysis. Just as Freud thought that one could only be sure that someone harboured unconscious thoughts of one sort or another if they could be brought to consciousness and acknowledged by the patient7, so Wittgenstein seems to be saying that one can only definitively recognise philosophical nonsense if the philosophical ‘patient’ realises the nonsense he is talking and repudiates it as such. Is this absolutely necessary? Someone might say (and I suspect that many Wittgensteinians would say): No doubt, ideally, when a philosopher talks nonsense he can be brought to realise this and relinquish his nonsense. In such a case we can talk of ‘therapy’. But we do not live in an ideal world and many, probably most, philosophers never realise the nonsense they are talking. We can however (sometimes) recognise it and (sometimes) induce its perpetrators to recognise it. We should be thankful for this but to make it a criterion of the recognition of philosophical nonsense that the nonsense-talker should come to acknowledge his nonsense would be too demanding. Perhaps this is why this exceedingly stringent notion of what it is to unmask nonsense never found its way into the Investigations. It would just be too restrictive. One can realise that someone is asserting a falsehood, even though he does not and perhaps never will acknowledge the fact. The diagnosis of nonsense is in a similar position. It should not be shackled to an unrealistic ideal.8 But there is a problem. One can convict people of asserting falsehoods or reasoning fallaciously without denying that they mean something by what they say. Indeed one has to assume they mean something in order to do this. It is not at all clear how one could convict someone of not meaning anything by what she says. This is the Problem of Diagnosis, which I have expounded many times elsewhere.9 A very brief formulation must suffice here. It is self-defeating to ascribe a meaning to an utterance 3 in order to show that it has no meaning and if one ascribes no meaning to it, it is not clear how one can get beyond ‘I do not understand’ or ‘That is not a grammatical sentence of the language’, or perhaps both. There seems nothing one can do with an utterance to which one ascribes no meaning10 and hence nothing one can do to show that its utterer meant nothing by it. It seems to follow that one cannot refute anyone by convicting her of talking nonsense: one cannot use the concept of nonsense polemically. One can claim, sincerely or otherwise, not to understand her and, rightly or wrongly, that what she says is not in accordance with the rules of the language. But if one tries to do anything further with it, one will inevitably find that one is ascribing some sort of meaning to it. So, contrary to what the nonsensicalist I imagined above is claiming, the only possibility open to one, the only conceivable way of diagnosing nonsense, would seem to be a co-operative procedure of some sort. What might this involve? Non-polemical philosophy. Suppose someone is genuinely baffled by a philosophical problem: answering the sceptic, say, or resolving a logical paradox, or delineating the relationship between the mental and the physical. He has heard that some philosophers regard such problems and the putative answers given to them as nonsensical. He is sufficiently taken by the idea to give it a try. He is open to the idea that he might have been bewitched by language into taking nonsense for sense. He asks a nonsensicalist to relieve his perplexity. He does not have to be a convinced believer in the efficacy of such treatment as the nonsensicalist might offer; just willing to give it a try. He is like a neurotic who is sufficiently desperate to be willing to give psychoanalysis a try. Now it is here that the idea of acknowledgment might come in. The Wittgensteinian nonsensicalist proposes to him that he has been thinking along certain lines and he is, or he is not, prepared to acknowledge this. ‘Thinking along certain lines’ is deliberately vague: in particular it is not supposed to have any implications for whether the utterances that result from such thinking are meaningful or not. But if someone does acknowledge that he has been thinking along certain lines, it can then be asked whether this is sufficient to give meaning to his words. Let us rewrite the passage quoted above so as to express this idea. It will not require huge changes: One of the most important tasks is to express all mistaken thought processes so characteristically that the reader says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I was thinking’. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error. Indeed we can only convict someone else of a mistake if he acknowledges that this really is the expression of his feeling/if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling. For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis.) What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought. The reader will observe that I have only in fact altered the first paragraph. Notice that this passage is a world away from the arrogant diagnoses of the positivists, but also, I would say, from Wittgenstein’s own usual practice and that of most of his followers. (Compare it with the passage about the mathematician quoted earlier.) Now do we have here a possible way of diagnosing the talking of nonsense, one that 4 requires the co-operation of the talker of the nonsense? Before considering this question, let us ask whether two people need be involved at all. If it is possible for someone, with the aid of another, to realise that he has been talking nonsense, it surely ought to be possible for him to realise this unaided. Indeed one might wonder whether the diagnosis of philosophical nonsense could ever have got started unless someone had once done this. In fact, it might be suggested that, as far as modern nonsensicalism is concerned, that person was Russell when he decided that certain ways of talking about classes were nonsensical, though whether he went through any internalised, self-directed analogue of the process Wittgenstein is describing is unclear, to say the least.11 Nevertheless I suggest that the possibility of a co-operative version of therapeutic nonsensicalism and that of self-diagnosis need to be considered together. Now suppose that someone does acknowledge or realise that he has been thinking along certain lines – for example, that, as suggested in the above passage, he has been influenced by certain analogies, grammatical analogies perhaps; or, to take another suggestion that is frequent in the later Wittgenstein, that he has been influenced by certain pictures. It does not follow from this that there was anything wrong with his thinking and a fortiori it does not follow that utterances prompted by such thinking were nonsense. There are false analogies and even good ones can be pressed too far12, but any defect in someone’s analogical thinking needs to be demonstrated in a particular case. Similarly with mental pictures: there is no reason to think that their influence is always, or even usually, pernicious.13 Acknowledging what Wittgenstein calls ‘the source’ of one’s thinking is not necessarily confessing to error. The supposed error we are concerned with here is that of talking nonsense. How can someone, with or without the help of another, become aware that he means nothing by his words? I assume that he is not deliberately talking nonsense, in which case there would be no need for him to become aware of this. I am assuming that he originally thought he meant something but now realises that he meant nothing. How might this have come about? It is not clear that Wittgenstein’s talk of ‘acknowledgment’ sheds much light on this. It seems more relevant to a diagnosis that has already been made. Or perhaps the idea is that in acknowledging ‘the source’ of his thinking, he would ipso facto realise that he had gone wrong. There are various ways in which this might happen. If one is brought to realise clearly that one is making an assumption, it might become equally clear to one that that assumption is unwarranted. Or spelling out the form of an argument might make it pretty obvious that that argument is invalid. But neither of these possibilities seems relevant to the case of talking nonsense. To repeat, how is someone to realise, with or without the help of another, that he means nothing by his words? I am focusing on the most co-operativist14 passage I know in the whole of Wittgenstein’s work15, and still find myself left with this question unanswered. Could one ever rationally conclude that one had been mistaken in thinking one meant anything by what one’s philosophical utterances? Could one have reason for thinking oneself in the position of Wittgenstein’s would-be metaphysician who is shown that he has ‘failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (TLP, 6.53)? 5 Consider: ‘I used to think ‘p’ was true; now I am not so sure.’ ‘I used to think ‘p’ was true; now I think it is false.’ One often has reason to say things that have the general form of these admissions. But what of these? ‘I used to think I meant something by ‘p’; now I am not so sure.’ ‘I used to think I meant something by ‘p’; now I think I meant nothing at all.’ Ceasing to seem meaningful. The most obvious suggestion as to what could give one reason to think that one did not mean anything by an utterance is that it should lose all appearance of meaningfulness. People high on drugs sometimes think they see a profound meaning in some locution, write it down and find when they come round that it seems utter gibberish. It seemed meaningful at the time but does so no longer. The most natural account of what has happened is that the person was mistaken in seeming to see a meaning in it in the first place. Let us assume that this is at least a possibility. I myself regard such drug-induced experiences as the best available empirical evidence for there being such a thing as illusions of meaning.16 Might something similar happen in philosophy – a philosophical thesis or question ceases even to seem meaningful? There are two obvious problems with this. First, it does not in fact seem to happen. Second, it would almost certainly not be conclusive even if it did. Let us consider them in turn. If we consider standard philosophical questions – the ones that students are introduced to at an early stage – it would be little short of incredible17 if a trained philosopher were to say that they no longer even seemed to convey anything to him.18 He might, if he is a nonsensicalist, say, ‘Scepticism (or the mind-body problem or the various answers that have been given to it) seems meaningful enough, but that appearance is illusory’.19 But one would expect him to be able to state the problem as fluently as ever. This observation, I hasten to add, does not dispose of nonsensicalism. The well-known visual illusions, the Müller-Lyer and Hering illusions, persist even when one knows the facts. Lines of equal length continue to look to have different lengths and straight lines continue to look curved. Philosophical illusions of meaning might be like these: if they occur, will have to be credited with what I have elsewhere called staying power.20 The appearance of meaning(fulness) will persist in spite of a philosopher’s intellectual conviction. But suppose the appearance of meaningfulness did vanish. Someone might suggest that we are only in the infancy of nonsensicalism and that its techniques are not yet well-developed? Perhaps one day it will be possible to strip away the appearance of meaningfulness from philosophical nonsense. We might, that is, be able to take a piece of philosophical nonsense that seems meaningful enough to the beginner, make certain logical points, and it will no longer seem to do so. At the moment we are only able to given reasons for thinking that, in spite of appearances, it is really nonsense. But then we will be able to destroy the appearance, remove the disguise.21 6 It is hard to imagine what such techniques would be like but it might be replied, ‘Of course. That is because they have not been invented. One cannot – in any detail – predict inventions’. So I will admit the abstract possibility that it might one day be possible to make philosophical nonsense no longer seem to make sense. But I would emphasise that, whatever techniques are used, they must be logical, not psychological, techniques. Some people find that, when a word is repeated many times, it begins to seem to lose its meaning.22 Perhaps this could happen with a whole sentence or perhaps some other way of treating it, say chanting it with an unnatural rhythm, might achieve this result.23 There would surely be no reason to think that this was in any way the fault of the sentence. So, whatever psychological techniques were devised for making a sentence seem to lose its meaning, it is hard to see how they could show that one was not right first time in thinking it meaningful. I suggest that most people, if they were to experience this, would regard it merely as a strange phenomenon and assume that they were right first time and that it was the apparent loss of meaning that was deceptive – especially if the appearance of meaningfulness returned. As for logical techniques, must we simply await developments? Discrediting a persisting appearance of meaningfulness. For the rest of this paper I shall assume that philosophical nonsense, if it exists, has staying power and that the nonsensicalist will not expect its appearance of meaningfulness to dissolve, even when it has been exposed for what it is. How might one convince someone that, although a form of words seems and continues to seem meaningful, it is not? Or how might he come to see this for himself? Let me begin by making a comparison that will almost certainly strike anyone with even a slight sympathy for nonsensicalism as unfair but which I think will be helpful in demarcating the problem. There is a neurological condition called Capgras’ Syndrome in which the patient rejects his friends and relatives as impostors. It is not some failure of memory that is involved; nor is it an inability to recognise faces. The sufferer is quite clear who the impostors are trying to impersonate. It is rather that he regards himself as having seen through the deception, even though his friends and relatives behave as they normally do. I have never seen a convincing explanation of this phenomenon, though there is little doubt that it occurs.24 Now the nonsensicalist who says, ‘I know it seems perfectly meaningful; nevertheless, that is an illusion’ and the philosopher who is persuaded by a nonsensicalist that what he thinks is sense is really nonsense might seem rather like the sufferer from Capgras’ Syndrome. As might the self-diagnostician, the philosopher who claims to have seen through his own nonsense. The nonsensicalist needs to show that this comparison is indeed unfair and that it is possible to expose utterances as nonsense in spite of (persisting) appearances. How? The options are surely limited. One is debarred from using techniques that one might use to show that something is false, even necessarily false. One can say, ‘If what you say were true, then …’, but hardly, ‘If what you say made sense, then …’. 7 Or rather the latter would be useless, since what would follow would depend on what sense it made.25 One must always remember that nonsense has no logical properties and so the putative logical techniques I referred to in the last section would seem to lack any point of application. It looks as though one is faced with a dilemma. If one is able to apply logical techniques to it, it is not nonsense. And if it is nonsense, then one will not be able to apply logic to it. If one thinks one has succeeded, one will at best have arbitrarily assigned a sense to it. There is one passage from a Wittgensteinian, Edward Witherspoon, that perhaps suggests a way forward. I have discussed it several times elsewhere26 but I think further consideration of it may still be instructive. After illustrating in some detail how easy it is even for professed Wittgensteinians to find themselves attributing ‘quasi-meanings’ to what they hope to prove is nonsense, to fall into the ‘sense that is senseless’ trap27, he asks how Wittgenstein himself would have proceeded: By contrast, when Wittgenstein is confronted with an utterance that has no clearly discernible place in a language-game, he does not assume he can parse the utterance; rather he invites the speaker to explain how she is using her words, to connect them with other elements of the language-game in a way that displays their meaningfulness. Only if the speaker is unable to do this in a coherent way does Wittgenstein conclude that her utterance is nonsense; ideally, the speaker will reach the same conclusion in the same way and will retract or modify her words accordingly.28 In one respect this does not ring true. Wittgenstein was a notoriously bad listener witness his attitude to visiting speakers29 – and his writings could only provide evidence supporting Witherspoon if somewhere he specifically recommended the approach Witherspoon attributes to him. So let us take Witherspoon’s suggestion as about how the nonsensicalist who has taken to heart the difficulties confronting anyone attempting to diagnose philosophical nonsense ought to proceed. People often fail to get across their meaning to their hearers or readers. There are various reasons why this might happen. Is one possible reason that there is no meaning they are trying to get across, even though they think there is? And is there any way such a predicament might be revealed? Outside philosophy people are often rather relaxed about their failure to communicate. ‘I can’t explain’; ‘You wouldn’t understand’; ‘It has a certain je ne sais quoi.’; ‘Oh, scrub round it!’ – remarks like these are familiar enough. But in philosophy no doubt something better is required. Well, consider this passage from a rather unexpected source, the Wittgensteinian Norman Malcolm: It is a strange contention that people (in conversation, say) always know what they mean, and that what they mean always has a sharp, definite sense. This is far from being true. For example, if I were speaking to you about an acquaintance of mine, I might say, 'He is a peculiar chap'. You might ask, 'Peculiar? In what way?' I might ponder this, and finally answer, 'I can't really explain it, but he certainly is peculiar'. Did I know what I meant? Did I mean something definite? Or consider this actual incident. A radio announcer was giving the weather forecast for the following day. He said, 'The probability of rain is 100 per cent'. He paused to reflect, then said, 'What does that mean? It means that it must rain'. After another brief pause he said, 'No. It doesn't mean that. It just means that the probability of rain is 100 per cent'. The 8 announcer did not know very well what his statement meant. Yet the statement was not entirely meaningless: for someone who planned an outing for the next day might reasonably cancel his plan on the basis of that information. Vague sense can still be sense.30 Malcolm clearly thinks a certain indulgence, latitude, leeway about meaning is appropriate in everyday life. But, it will be objected, there are some areas where this will not do. Science is one; philosophy is another. If someone is unable or unwilling to explain what he means, we will often feel justified in ignoring what he says. But when we are trying to assess the notion of philosophical nonsense this also will not do. Standard philosophical questions and the answers that have been given to them are being dismissed as nonsensical. Nothing much will follow from the fact that a particular sceptic or metaphysician finds himself at a loss for words. Perhaps he is tired, flustered, distracted or generally not at his intellectual best. He may do better tomorrow and, even if he doesn’t, someone else might.31 Nevertheless I cannot imagine that a nonsensicalist – of any sort – will be prepared to give up at this point. Most likely he will stress that philosophical disputes have proved interminable and this shows, or at least strongly suggests, that there is something wrong with them. Logical positivists and Wittgensteinians are at one about this. Here is Wittgenstein: I read ‘… philosophers are no nearer the meaning of “Reality” than Plato got …’. What a strange state of affairs. How strange in that case that Plato could get that far at all! Or, that we were not able to get further! Was it because Plato was so smart?32 But the nonsensicality of philosophical problems, assuming it is a possible explanation for their seeming insolubility, is only one possible explanation. Another is the traditional view that they are just very difficult. Then there is the Chomsky/McGinn suggestion – ‘mysterianism’ or ‘transcendental naturalism’ – that philosophical problems are a kind of residue of problems that the human intellect is not cut out to deal with.33 Let us admit however that nonsensicalism remains a contender. It has not been ruled out. The Motivations of the Nonsensicalist. One worry about dismissing any philosophical problem as a nonsensical pseudoproblem is that it might just be a case of taking the easy way out. This danger is perhaps best illustrated by reference to epistemological scepticism. Many philosophers regard this is simply a nuisance. If one asks what we can know, arguments can easily be produced that seem to show that the answer is ‘Very little’. Epistemological rigour seems to lead straight to epistemological defeat. One thought one was going to put the quest for knowledge on the right track, but one quickly found that there seemed to be no track at all, no way forward. And notoriously the arguments for scepticism are very difficult to refute. Does not this create a danger that if someone goes to the therapeutic nonsensicalist asking to be cured of his sceptical doubts, he will allow himself to be ‘cured’ too easily? That he will accept too readily that he is unable to ‘give sense’ to his doubts and that any difficulties he might have in formulating his doubts are terminal? He wants to get scepticism out of the way so that he can get on with other things. This is just the sort of situation that will encourage the hasty acceptance of pseudo-solutions.34 9 It is worth mentioning that an adherent of the traditional view that philosophical problems are genuine and extremely difficult but not completely beyond our powers might see the nonsensicalist and the transcendental naturalist in the same light: they both give up too easily35 but the nonsensicalist tries to cover this up by claiming that he is dissolving the problems. The desire to get troublesome problems out of the way so that one can turn to other concerns, ones that one may well feel are more pressing, is not itself a disreputable motive. But it is likely to be reinforced by other factors that are less innocent. Let me first mention one that has been important in the past but at the time of writing is probably less so: namely, fashion. There were times during the last century when nonsensicalism in one form or another was all the rage. It would have required some tenacity to insist, against an array of philosophers who dismissed one’s utterances as nonsense, that the onus was on them to show that this was so. Philosophers tended to allow themselves to be manoeuvred into the position of having to ‘give sense’ to what they were saying, i.e. to accept the burden of proof.36 I admit that his was not entirely a bad thing, since it did foster clarity of expression, but it had obvious dangers. Here we need to ask whether these dangers arise, not just with polemical nonsensicalism, but with nonsensicalism that is presented in a therapeutic and co-operative guise. In the Twentieth Century much was heard of ‘pseudo-propositions’ and ‘pseudoproblems’; less about ‘pseudo-dissolutions’ and ‘pseudo-cures’. If someone cannot explain himself to the satisfaction of his audience, he can easily think it is his own fault. And so it may be. But, even if it is, it does not follow that he is talking nonsense, that he means nothing by his words. And it is hard to see how this could be established. But I am running ahead of myself. What I want to stress here is the power of suggestion, especially when it comes from an authority figure, who, our perplexed philosopher might be inclined to think, knows best. We are assuming that he has heard about therapeutic nonsensicalism and is willing to give it a try. Fair enough. But all the problems with psychoanalytic methodology that have been relentlessly catalogued by the ‘Freud bashers’37 will need to be pondered. If a suggested philosophical method is similar to psychoanalytic method, then it would surely be prudent to ask whether it is open to any of the objections that have been lodged against psychoanalytic method and, if it is, whether it is possible to meet them. It is certainly insufficient to say with Hacker: [Wittgenstein] often compared his methods of philosophical clarification with psychoanalysis. [Here there occurs this footnote:] He thought that Freud was an important thinker, that he had created not a new science of the mind but a new mythology of the mind. His pseudo-explanations are, Wittgenstein held, brilliant and dangerous. Wittgenstein’s critical attitude does not affect the analogy in question nor do the criticisms of psychoanalysis apply to Wittgenstein’s own philosophical techniques.38 Hacker’s nonchalance here is truly staggering, yet I would say that it is rather common among followers of Wittgenstein, at least among those who think his references to psychoanalysis important. The victim of philosophical perplexity is coming to a Wittgensteinian nonsensicalist for possible help and is thus adopting a submissive attitude to someone he is almost bound to consider an authority figure.39 Even if he is only giving therapeutic 10 nonsensicalism a try as a last resort, the very situation is likely to create a presumption that if he cannot explain himself and clearly formulate his problems, the fault lies with him. It is not because of the obtuseness or intransigence of his interlocutor, for example, or the genuine difficulty of a formulating what is a genuine problem, or a simple non-meeting of minds. If he does not succeed in giving what the therapist accepts as a satisfactory explanation of his problems, he might well conclude that this is because ‘he has given no meaning to certain terms in his propositions’. He has acquired the idea that philosophical problems are nonsensical pseudo-problems and, even though he is only accepting this as a possibility, does not the therapeutic setting of the interchange ensure that there will be a strong temptation to accept that possibility as fact?40 One more suspect motive for seeing philosophical problems as nonsensical needs to be mentioned. There can be little doubt that one motive for philosophy is the desire to see through appearances, to discover hidden truths, to gain access to new realms of thought, to penetrate deep into the nature of things. Now there is something of this in nonsensicalism itself, whether polemical or therapeutic. The nonsensicalist is claiming to see through what others have not seen through. It is just that his arcana are negative arcane, his revelations negative revelations. He sees himself as privy to a special knowledge that is not widely shared: that there is nothing where traditional philosophers have thought there was something. Even those who go to the nonsensicalist for help are likely to cherish the hope that someday they will be part of the élite who have seen through what others have not. I suggest that we be a little wary of this negative esotericism. We can thus be pretty certain then that anyone who goes to a therapeutic nonsensicalist thinking that there is at least a possibility of his being relieved of his perplexities is likely to be influenced by motives and considerations that do not make for an objective assessment of his predicament. But, the reader might impatiently exclaim, this is all psychology – psychologism! Either someone means something by what he says or he does not. We need to get to the truth of the matter.41 And then perhaps we can go back and learn from a survey of the prejudices, preconceptions and intellectually disreputable motives that made it so difficult to get at that truth. So how do we get at the truth? We shall find that it is not so easy to avoid the ‘merely psychological’. Explaining One’s Meaning. I said above that if someone fails to explain what he means to someone else, this is not necessarily his fault and that, even if it is, it does not follow that he means nothing. And then I said that it was far from obvious how one could establish that he means nothing. Witherspoon seems to think it is possible. As we have seen, he says that when the Wittgensteinian therapist ‘is confronted with an utterance that has no clearly discernible place in a language-game, he does not assume that he can parse the utterance; rather he invites the speaker to explain how she is using her words, to connect them with other elements of the language-game in a way that displays their meaningfulness’. It is not clear that this ‘invitation’ could issue in anything like a 11 demonstration. Suppose ‘the speaker is unable to [comply with the request] in a coherent way’. Is the therapist justified in ‘conclud[ing] that her utterance is nonsense’ and ought she to ‘reach the same conclusion in the same way, and … retract or modify her words accordingly’? I would say that the answer to both these questions is fairly clearly: No. Indeed, I can think of a number of protests and queries one might make on her behalf: a) What are these ‘other elements of the language-game’ and what sort of connection is being demanded? b) What counts as ‘a coherent way’? c) She might well ‘modify’ her words, but that would surely just lead to another round of the argument/discussion. d) If we are trying to explain something to someone and not getting anywhere, will we not all eventually run out of ideas? e) One cannot define everything, and might wonder whether the therapist is illicitly exploiting this. f) Has the therapist pondered the fact that it is negative existential he is trying to establish, with all the difficulties that this involves? g) It is the absence of meaning that the therapist is trying to establish. Are there recognised ways of doing this?42 It might be objected that some of these protests and queries are themselves polemical and in making them I am not entering into the spirit of therapeutic, i.e. co-operative, nonsensicalism. But they are questions about what the therapist actually has in mind and about what is possible here – about the status of the co-operativist approach – and so I do not see how they can be avoided. If the co-operativist can give satisfactory answers to them, it might then be possible to adopt a completely nonpolemical approach to philosophical problems. In an earlier work I wrote: Few today would accept that Socrates was right to assume that if one cannot define the words one is using, one does not know their meaning. Yet nonsensicalists are apt to assume that, in cases where there is a real possibility that someone is not using words in the normal way, failure to give a precise explanation of how they are being used shows that nothing is meant by them.43 I would like to elaborate upon this. The assumption in question has been labelled ‘the Socratic fallacy’.44 It is in fact controversial whether Socrates is really guilty of it, but there can be little doubt that he often gives the impression of thinking that if you cannot provide a verbal definition of ‘X’, you do not really know the meaning of ‘X’. What is more, his interlocutors generally come across as accepting this assumption. But degree of guilt does not really matter for our purposes, since it is clear that the assumption, if anyone were to make it, would be mistaken. What about philosophical terms and philosophical ‘uses’ of ordinary words?45 Well, technical terms and technical uses will need to be explained to beginners. In the sciences this is not normally thought to involve any difficulty of principle. And on the face of it the same can be said of the terminology of philosophy. New students are successfully inducted into the subject and will soon be happily using its vocabulary.46 Does the vocabulary of philosophy raise problems that that of science does not? Technical terms are usually easier to define than the words of ordinary language; certainly they are easier to define precisely. This is one reason why they are 12 introduced. Why should there be a special problem for philosophy?47 Are there special difficulties in explaining philosophical terms, difficulties so severe that one can say, ‘What has been called “the Socratic fallacy” is not a fallacy when applied to philosophical terms’? Perhaps the systematic discrimination against philosophical utterances could be given a rationale. The trouble is that Wittgenstein’s approach seems to presuppose that there is something suspect about the philosophical deployment of words, specifically their metaphysical and sceptical deployment. Why? I know of nowhere where he (or any of his followers) starts with a neutral definition of metaphysics or scepticism, such as might be given to beginners in philosophy, and tries to show that anyone discussing metaphysical or sceptical problems must meet especially strict conditions when introducing his terminology. One can agree that the seeming interminability of philosophical disputes gives some grounds for viewing the subject with suspicion but, as we have seen, there are explanations of this other than Wittgenstein’s. Moreover, even if there is something wrong with philosophical questions, why assume that what is wrong is that they are meaningless? The irony is that the very similar attitude of the positivists to philosophy is now widely seen as a mere prejudice. The positivists thought they knew in advance that metaphysical and theological claims must be meaningless and strove unsuccessfully to formulate a version of the Verification Principle that would condemn them without also condemning the universal generalisations of science. Their targets were slightly different from those of Wittgenstein, who seems to have had an idiosyncratic and little understood attitude of sympathy towards religious belief (or perhaps one should say ‘religious practices’, since he does not seem to have thought that doctrines were of any importance48), but this can hardly justify seeing the positivists as merely clinging to a prejudice as contrasted with Wittgenstein who was working out the consequences of an insight.49 There is no obvious reason to assume in advance that metaphysical, theological or sceptical utterances are meaningless, though there may be reasons for viewing them with suspicion. Wittgenstein has been allowed to get away with what the positivists were not allowed to get away with – and in the long term did not allow themselves to get away with.50 Or so it seems to me. Presumably Wittgenstein’s followers will want to say that his view of philosophy as largely nonsense, which seems to have come to him at an early stage in his career, was an insight and not a prejudice. The positivists, let us admit, were clearly polemicists; but we are inquiring into the prospects for nonsensicalism in a therapeutic, co-operativist, setting and things might be rather different here. Perhaps we can see the idea that most philosophy is nonsense as something like a hypothesis, one that might be justified by its therapeutic results.51 Witherspoon is suggesting that someone’s failure to explain how she is using her words might license the conclusion that she is talking nonsense and that she herself might come to see this. Well, people often fail to get across what they mean; and I have admitted that there is at least one kind of case, that of the drug-taker who experiences a revelation when on a high, where there seems considerable plausibility in saying that a person (perhaps oneself) who can no longer explain what he meant in fact meant nothing when he thought he meant something. But does this help with the problem of alleged philosophical nonsense? 13 Most philosophers agree that there are standard philosophical problems and, although they may favour certain proposed solutions to some of them, they will admit that none are universally accepted.52 Could all this be sheer illusion – standard, recognisable, re-identifiable problems and proposed solutions? I confess to not being on the same wavelength as Wittgensteinians (and logical positivists) here. It seems to me that nonsensicalists of any sort are making truly astonishing claims and the onus is on them to give us reason to think that they might even occasionally be right. The occurrence of what one might call ‘the Witherspoonian predicament’ – of not being able to explain what one means to the satisfaction of another or even to oneself – seems, at least to me, a totally inadequate reason. Philosophers no doubt sometimes dry up when attempting to explain their problems and views (though they are often also remarkably fluent). But why should this have greater significance then the fact that non-philosophers also sometimes dry up? If it turned out that all sceptics, say, always dried up when attempting to explain their doubts, and at the same place, this might have some significance. But I see no reason to expect this. The Witherspoonian Predicament. Earlier I mentioned a number of things one might say and ask on behalf of one in the Witherspoonian predicament. Let me now consider each in rather more detail. a) ‘Other elements of the language-game’. It may be significant that Witherspoon here speaks of the, not a, language-game. The later Wittgenstein is notable for his pluralistic vision of the uses to which language can be put. If one looks at the sort of utterances he regards as legitimate53, one is bound to wonder what philosophical ways of deploying words have done to be excluded. Is everything legitimate provided it is not said by a philosopher (or the philosopher in us54)? There is surely no reason to assume that Wittgenstein holds that only one language-game is played with any particular word. But he presumably also thinks that there are no genuine metaphysical or sceptical language-games. Again, why? Witherspoon’s use of ‘the’, rather than ‘a’, might suggest that he is making a questionable assumption about which putative language-games are legitimate. But I admit that this is only a suspicion. Perhaps, if we knew what he has in mind by ‘connect[ing her words] with other elements of the language-game in a way that displays their meaningfulness’, it would be clear that he is not being unfairly restrictive.55 b) (In)coherence. When a philosopher denies that an utterance is coherent and if it is clear how he is using the word, he usually means either that it is ‘nonsensical’ or that it is ‘self-contradictory’ or that it is ‘pragmatically self-defeating’.56 If Witherspoon has in mind the first of these possibilities, then he is saying about an attempted explanation of an utterance what he hopes to establish about the utterance itself. So the question will arise as to how this is established and we are back with our initial problem. If he means either of the other two possibilities, then we can say that showing that an explanation is self-contradictory or self-defeating is certainly to have achieved something. If the utterer has given a correct explanation of her original utterance, then that too will be self-contradictory or self-defeating. But, on the plausible assumption that contradictions and pragmatically self-defeating utterances are not meaningless57, it has not been shown to be nonsense, strictly so-called. We 14 would in effect have been given a bit of (unusually successful) traditional philosophical argumentation. c) She might modify her words. I have little to add to what I said before. This would be just another round: a further attempt to explain or an admission that what she said might have been better put or perhaps a formulation directed specifically at her interlocutor, at his prejudices and idiosyncrasies. d) Running out of ideas. Suppose one is trying to explain something to someone but not getting anywhere. One will eventually run out of ideas. And this will be so, whatever one is trying to explain, not just metaphysical notions or sceptical doubts. And it will be so if one’s interlocutor in the ordinary sense does not understand or if he is just being difficult or if he is adopting the characteristic nonsensicalist stance of rejecting his own apparent understanding as an illusion. No doubt there will be differences between philosophers with respect to their ingenuity and patience in trying to get across what they have in mind. But they will all have their limitations. e) You can’t define everything. It might be wondered whether the therapist, and even more the polemical nonsensicalist, is exploiting this fact. Perhaps he is refusing to allow explanation to come to an end.58 There is a well-know debater’s trick of continually demanding that one’s opponent define her terms, and the terms in her definition, and so on, ad infinitum. Two can play at that game, of course, and one might ask him to define ‘define’ and then get to work on his definition. But, on the whole, this sort of strategy belongs to polemical nonsensicalism, and polemical nonsensicalism at its most unscrupulous.59 It does however suggest that there is a need for some discussion of what counts as an acceptable explanation of what one means and of what participants in a session of therapeutic nonsensicalism can agree is an acceptable explanation. It will be particularly important to try to reach some consensus about when a satisfactory explanation has not been given. f) Negative existentials. It is notoriously difficult to establish with certainty that something does not exist. I am not aware that much attention has been given to this difficulty as it applies to meaning. How does one establish that a locution has no meaning? Or that a particular person on a particular occasion does not mean anything by it?60 This of course is essentially our main question in this paper seen as a special case of the well-known problem about negative existentials. Philosophers are agreed that you can show that X does not exist if the very definition of ‘X’ entails a contradiction. And in daily life there are many situations in which we accept claims of the form ‘There is no …’, e.g. ‘There is no food in the cupboard’. But it is not obvious that these give us much help when it comes to the absence of meaning. There seems no place for the formal proof of inconsistency61 or an analogue of the opening of an empty container. g) The special difficulties raised by meaning. I was once told that I was treating philosophical nonsense as a theoretical construct. There is truth in this but I would prefer: theoretical postulate. We are concerned with a supposed absence of meaning – and so the idea of a construct hardly seems to fit. But there is nothing odd about postulating an absence, though, as I have just been emphasising, absences can be hard to establish. That is perhaps a minor point. More significantly, should we be speaking of the theoretical here? Stephen Mulhall credits us with a pre-philosophical ability to 15 discriminate sense from nonsense.62 Now I have no such ability or, if I have, I am not aware of the fact. I sometimes fail to understand what people say and I can sometimes point out with confidence that what they say is not correct English (and sometimes both). But I am not aware that I have any ability to detect the fact that a speaker means nothing. Indeed I am confident that I have no pre-philosophical ability to do any such thing. But perhaps Wittgenstein or Witherspoon or some other nonsensicalist can equip me with a post-philosophical ability to do it. Objectivity and Subjectivity. I have just confessed that I do not know how to do something. Someone might feel that not much could be concluded from my inability or lack of knowledge. I have also on occasion stressed my own incredulity at nonsensicalist claims, which might provoke the thought. ‘That’s just his opinion; nonsensicalism strikes me as a plausible response to philosophy’s failures’. And indeed, as I have already said, it might be felt that the whole discussion has become too psychological, particularly since we began our consideration of Witherspoon. It seems to have lost its mooring in anything objective, facts about what words are generally accepted as meaning for example. I am well aware of this but it seems inevitable once one has fully appreciated the Problem of Diagnosis. How do you get to work on an utterance without according it a meaning? How do you get, as it were, behind it to show that there is no meaning there? You can (sometimes) say something fairly objective about the status of an utterance as a sentence of the language – particularly about whether it is a grammatical sentence, where ‘grammatical’ is meant in its ordinary, not in any Wittgensteinian depth-grammatical, sense.63 But its being ungrammatical in this sense is quite insufficient to ensure that its utterer means nothing by it. And the later Wittgenstein would insist that its being grammatical in this sense does not ensure that its utterer does mean something by it.64 So it is not really surprising that we seem to be floundering around in the merely psychological – guilty of Frege’s pet hate, psychologism. I have not yet had anything to say about ‘criteria of meaningfulness’. This is because a little thought shows that it is going to be extremely difficult to apply any criterion to an utterance without first assigning a meaning to that utterance (other than, I suppose, by applying aesthetic criteria to the speaker’s voice or calligraphy). This is the fundamental, the really fundamental, problem with verificationism.65 Yet there is one criterion that is worth discussing here: the criterion of use. In the early days of Wittgensteinian exegesis, it was often said that the later Wittgenstein switched from a picture theory of meaning to a use theory. This way of looking at the development of his thought seems to have been widely abandoned or at least de-emphasised.66 But the idea that use or usability can be treated as a criterion of meaningfulness requires separate consideration. ‘No use; therefore no meaning’ – Is there anything in this? The obvious question will be: What counts as a use, a genuine use? In Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? I discussed the possibility that there might be illusions of use: that someone might be under the illusion that he was actually using the words 16 he uttered. After mentioning certain passages from Wittgenstein that seem to suggest something like this, I wrote: The idea behind these passages seems to be that philosophical utterances do not achieve anything: they are in some way empty, pointless or idle. But it is not obvious how to formulate any such claim in a way that is not patently question-begging. The claim that philosophical problems arise when language ‘idles’ or ‘goes on holiday’ has always seemed to me to rule out philosophical problems as not really problems, philosophical contexts as not really contexts, by thinly (very thinly) disguised linguistic legislation and I have never seen an account that does much to dispel this impression.67 Is there some way that the Wittgensteinian (and I think that only Wittgenstein and his followers take this line) can show that he is not arbitrarily assuming that putative philosophical uses of words are not genuine uses? Can he counter the charge that he is arguing in the following ‘heads I win; tails you lose’ fashion? If there is no non-philosophical use for an expression, then it is nonsense; but even if there is a non-philosophical use for it, this still does legitimate the philosophical ‘use’ as genuine.68 Kafka’s Joseph K. did not know what he had been accused of. The Wittgensteinian’s sceptics and metaphysicians are, on the face of it, a little better off: they know they are being accused of talking nonsense. But only a little: they do not know what would count as proving themselves innocent, other than showing that they were wrongly suspected of being sceptics or metaphysicians. Of course I have slipped back into talking about polemical nonsensicalism. But the same problem arises with therapeutic, co-operativist nonsensicalism. How do you show that a putative sceptical or metaphysical use of words is not a real use? I cannot see that appealing to use gets one onto firm, objective ground. If someone is genuinely concerned about an epistemological or metaphysical problem, why should the contention that sceptical or metaphysical uses of words are not real uses impress him, unless it is supported by something better than the begging of the question? There is perhaps one possibility that, if it really is a possibility, would deserve a paper of its own. I am not sure whether it has been seriously suggested, either in itself or as an interpretation of Wittgenstein. Suppose it were accepted that we are no longer in the realm of the objective here. Someone might say that you can’t prove that the sceptic and the metaphysician do not mean anything by their utterances; but they cannot prove that they do either. So, if you so desire, you can rationally dismiss their problems and turn to other things. This may be James C. Edwards’s view.69 Self-Diagnosis. I have suggested that, if a co-operative diagnosis of the production of philosophical nonsense is possible, then self-diagnosis ought also to be possible. And I have tried to take account of the emphasis that Wittgenstein sometimes places on acknowledgment. To clinch a diagnosis one must get the acknowledgment of the supposed nonsensetalker that he has indeed been talking nonsense. There is thus a sense, if we take this seriously, in which he has the last word, the final say. But it might be thought that I have still not done justice to the idea of self-diagnosis. Perhaps the nonsense-talker must be more actively involved. Perhaps he must somehow, not only confess to talking nonsense, but convict himself of talking nonsense.70 Is there some way in 17 which someone can stand back from his own utterances and probe them, not for truth, but for sense? But then the Problem of Diagnosis returns in full force. One can take a sentence one believes is true and ask: Is it really true? But suppose one asks of a sentence: I believe I mean (or understand) something by this, but do I? Can one bracket one’s own apparent understanding and treat it as mere sounds or marks on paper and yet still work on it? If it is something someone else has said, one can of course ask oneself whether one has correctly understood what was meant. But it is not clear that there is any self-directed analogue of this (‘Do I mean what I think I mean?’) or that it would help if there were.71 ‘Do I really mean anything by this?’ ‘Do I really understand anything by this?’ It is hard to get one’s mind round these questions and to think of any procedure for suspending and investigating one’s conviction that one does mean/understand something. Indeed I can imagine someone accusing me of trying to use nonsensicalist arguments against nonsensicalism. And it would be truly self-defeating to cite nonsensicalism as an example of philosophical nonsense.72 But, whatever paradoxes it might lead to, there is clearly a problem about first trying to suspend one’s own impression, belief, conviction that there is something one means by an utterance and then trying to find out whether there really is. Does any way of doing this suggest itself? Earlier I invited the reader to consider a deliberately provocative comparison of the nonsensicalist to a Capgras patient. Now it would presumably be possible to pretend to be a Capgras patient – to pretend that one thought that one’s friends and relatives were really impostors. It is hard not to feel that someone who tried to bracket his own apparent understanding of an utterance would be trying to pretend to himself that he did not understand – a bizarre form of self-deception or attempted self-deception.73 Paradox seems to greet one at every turn. But I hope I have said enough to persuade the reader that the idea of diagnosing one’s own philosophical nonsense is as problematic as anything else in this area. Appendix: In Search Of Wittgenstein’s Co-operativism. I have suggested that the co-operativist passages in Wittgenstein are not numerous and that they do not occur in the writings that he regarded as suitable for publication. Let me first say a little more about what it is that I am looking for. I am looking for remarks that definitely suggest a co-operativist approach, not ones that are just compatible with such a reading. It might be possible to take Tractatus 6.53 as envisaging a tentative philosopher who wants an utterance to be vetted by a Wittgensteinian. But one doesn’t have to take it that way and I doubt whether many people do. Doesn’t it suggest a brusque, polemical dismissal of the ‘something metaphysical’? – ‘Look, Sunshine, you’ve given no meaning to certain terms in your propositions!’. The medical analogy occurs frequently in the Investigations74 but, as I have explained, this is insufficient for present purposes. What I am interested in is finding a way of getting round the Problem of Diagnosis by engaging with the utterer of the supposed nonsense in a way that is non-aggressive, non-polemical and, to borrow the name of a school of psychotherapy, ‘client-centred’. 18 On the other hand, an affable, tolerant, easy-going attitude on the part of a nonsensicalist is not on its own enough. The Blue Book in many ways comes across as Wittgenstein’s most moderate work. The magisterial tone of the Tractatus and the hectoring tone of the much of the later philosophy are largely absent. Here if anywhere one feels that Wittgenstein is someone one could argue or, more generally, converse with, someone who would actually listen to what one said.75 But it is universally regarded as Wittgenstein’s clearest work and I suspect that this may be partly responsible for the general impression of user-friendliness that it conveys. At any rate, I haven’t found a great deal in it that sheds light on what a therapeutic, cooperative nonsensicalism is going to be like. I said at the beginning of this paper that I wanted to separate the question of whether Wittgenstein in his philosophy actually uses from that of the merits of such a methodology. More needs to be said about this. Even if the idea that in order to expose philosophical nonsense one must secure the co-operation of the supposed nonsense-talker were totally at variance with Wittgenstein’s actual philosophical practice, it would still be necessary to consider it. For it is obscure how otherwise one could get behind someone’s utterance and show that there was no meaning there. I can imagine that some philosophers who have never had much sympathy with Wittgenstein (who perhaps think that his philosophy should have gone down with logical positivism) will find it difficult to consider the idea on its own merits. For them it might be psychologically necessary to imagine that it had been put forward by someone else. The logician W. E. Johnson might have been such a one. Recall his famous or infamous remark: I consider it a disaster for Cambridge that Wittgenstein has returned. A man incapable of carrying on a discussion. If I say a sentence has meaning for me no one has the right to say it is senseless.76 Johnson was apparently on good terms with Wittgenstein but, if he had ever encountered the co-operativist Wittgenstein, the experience must have made little impression on him. Wittgenstein does indeed seem an unlikely practitioner of any kind of co-operative approach to philosophical therapy. He so often comes across as a didactic Dr. Johnson-like figure with an instant dogmatic opinion on every subject under the sun – Nineteenth Century opera, Mahler, Kafka, C. D. Broad’s interest in psychical research, Russell’s non-logical writings, Moore’s intellect, pacifism. And he seems to have been encouraged in this by the attitude of those who surrounded him, which it would not be too harsh to call sycophantic.77 There is a curious absence from the published reminiscences of those who knew him of any suggestion of the ordinary give-and-take of argument.78 If you have friends with whom you regularly discuss philosophy, don’t your conversations contain plenty of remarks of the following form? – ‘I don’t follow’; ‘I don’t understand what you mean by …’79; ‘What makes you say that?’; ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said about … I don’t see why..’; ‘I agree with that, but …’; ‘Could you be more specific?’; ‘I wonder if we are talking at cross purposes’. These seem missing from conversations with Wittgenstein. He dispenses wisdom and members of his entourage accept it as such. Does anyone come across as having worked with Wittgenstein? Nevertheless, his gestures in the direction of therapy need to be considered. 19 Here then are the passages I find suggestive. There aren’t many80 and I would be grateful for the ideas of others. It will be noticed that the list illustrates my tentative claim that the co-operativist strand is largely absent from the works he regarded as suitable for publication. But then it is my list and readers will have to ask themselves what list they would have compiled. A question one might ask oneself about anything proposed for inclusion is this: If I myself were suspected of talking nonsense, would this passage help to promote a constructive discussion of the matter? First, three that draw a parallel with psychoanalysis: a) One of the most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the reader says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it’. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error. Indeed we can only convict someone else of a mistake if he acknowledges that this really is the expression of his feeling/if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling. For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis.) What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought.81 b) Our method resembles psychoanalysis in a certain sense. To use its way of putting things, we could say that a simile operating in the unconscious can be made harmless by being articulated. And the comparison with psychoanalysis can be developed further. (And this analogy is certainly no accident.)82 c) A mathematician is bound to be horrified by my mathematical comments, since he has always been trained to avoid indulging in thoughts and doubts of the kind I develop. He has learned to regard them as something contemptible and, to use an analogy from psycho-analysis (this paragraph is reminiscent of Freud), he has acquired a revulsion from them as infantile. That is to say, I trot out all the problems that a child learning arithmetic, etc., finds difficult, the problems that education represses without solving. I say to those repressed doubts: you are quite correct, go on asking, demand clarification!83 Next, one on fending for oneself: d) In giving all these examples I am not aiming at some kind of completeness, some classification of psychological concepts. They are only meant to enable the reader to shift for himself when he encounters conceptual difficulties.84 And one on working on oneself, resisting the temptation to see things wrongly: e) As I have often said, philosophy does not lead me to any renunciation, since I do not abstain from saying something, but rather abandon a certain combination of words as senseless. In another sense, however, philosophy requires a resignation, but one of feeling and not of intellect. And maybe that is what makes it so difficult for many. It can be difficult not to use an 20 expression, just as it is difficult to hold back tears, or an outburst of anger //rage//. /(Tolstoy: the meaning (meaningfulness) of a subject lies in its being generally understandable. – That is true and false. What makes a subject difficult to understand – if it is significant, important – is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the intellect, but of the will.)/ Work on philosophy is – as work in architecture frequently is – actually more of a //kind of// work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On the way one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)85 One on taking philosophical problems, including those of others, seriously: f) You must not try to avoid a philosophical problem by appealing to common sense; instead, present it as it arises with most power. You must allow yourself to be dragged into the mire, and get out of it. Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer. But the commonsense answer is itself no solution; everyone knows it. One must not in philosophy attempt to short-circuit problems.86 With this, I suggest, belong the following quotation and anecdote. g) Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense. But you must pay attention to your nonsense. (Wittgenstein)87 h) Wittgenstein interrupted a speaker who had realized that he was about to say something that, although it seemed compelling, was clearly ridiculous, and was trying (as we all do in such circumstances) to say something sensible instead. ‘No’, said Wittgenstein, ‘Say what you want to say. Be crude and then we shall get on’.88 Perhaps this last one also belongs here, since it concerns not allowing any doubts or difficulties or unclarities to remain: i) [To Waismann] As regards your Theses, I once wrote, If there were theses in philosophy, they would have to be such that they do not give rise to disputes. For they would have to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. As long as there is any possibility of having different opinions and disputing about a question, this indicates that things have not yet been expressed clearly enough. Once a perfectly clear formulation – ultimate clarity – has been reached, there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these always arise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do not yet know whether I should admit it or not. If, however, you make the grammar clear to yourself, if you proceed by very small steps in such a way that every single step becomes perfectly obvious and natural, no 21 dispute whatever can arise. Controversy always arises from leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I once wrote: The only correct method of doing philosophy consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to.89 And that’s about it. I could perhaps, under ‘fending for oneself’, have included passages about what to look out for in the search for philosophical nonsense. I’ll give one: j) To get clear about philosophical problems, it is useful to become conscious of the apparently unimportant details of the particular situation in which we are inclined to make a certain metaphysical assertion. Thus we may be tempted to say ‘Only this is really seen’ when we stare at unchanging surroundings, whereas we may not at all be tempted to say this when we look about us while walking.90 I have a vague feeling that somewhere Wittgenstein says something to this effect: You have got to look at a metaphysical utterance and examine it carefully to see whether it has any use. Eventually you will see that it has none and then you must be ready to give it up. I have not found such a passage and have begun to wonder whether I may have been thinking of the last sentence of the following from Baker and Hacker: Sometimes, especially in philosophy, we need to distinguish a proposition from a sentence which lacks a sense. This can be done, but often only with difficulty, for it requires a careful examination of analogies and disanalogies of precisely the kind Wittgenstein engages in so frequently. Moreover, one cannot prove that a metaphysical sentence is only a pseudo-proposition; one can only persuade its proponent to examine the ordinary use of that sentence or its constituents to the point at which he is willing to give it up.91 I am by no means certain of this. Can anyone help? Let me conclude by reminding the reader that what really matters about the therapeutic/co-operativist/psychoanalytic/client-centred approach is, not how much Wittgenstein makes of it, but what can be made of it – whether it could successfully expose philosophical nonsense. Notes. 1. I wonder if any mathematicians have, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, been cured. D. Z. Phillips (in Wittgensteinian Fideism?, Kai Nielsen and D. Z. Phillips, London: S. C. M. Press, 2005, p. 282) quotes Rush Rhees on someone, very probably a mathematician, who came to accept Wittgenstein’s strictures on Cantor’s transfinite arithmetic. But then it is fairly easy to think of transfinite arithmetic as a bit weird. Has any mathematician come to see talk of the objectivity of (presumably the whole of) mathematics as something in need of treatment? 22 2. If there should be any doubt that it is the treatment of an illness to which the philosophical treatment in question is being compared, they should be resolved by the passage immediately following, PI, I, 255. 3. Second (revised) edition, London: Gollancz, 1946, Chapter VIII particularly. 4. Some readers of Wittgenstein, the ‘resolute readers’, see the whole of the Tractatus as designed to give the insightful reader a therapeutic experience. I cannot go into that here. 5. Big Typescript, p. 410, excerpted in J. Klagge and A. Nordmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Occasions1912-1951, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993 (p. 165). Note that the passage from the Investigations that I quoted at the beginning talks about giving ‘a psychologically exact account of the temptation to use a particular kind of expression’. 6. This problem may be an artefact of the translation. ‘Mean’ is not the most usual translation of ‘meinen’ and ‘falsch’ can mean ‘wrong’ or ‘incorrect’ as well as ‘false’. Be that as it may, I shall shortly propose a slight modification of the wording of this section that I think better expresses Wittgenstein’s thought. 7. Freud did not adhere to this strict methodological rule and was willing to offer psychoanalytic accounts of people, such as Leonardo, whom he could not have met. This laxity has been characteristic of much subsequent psychoanalytic speculation. It would be no exaggeration to say that almost the whole of psychoanalytic literary criticism depends upon it. 8. As we shall soon be seeing, Edward Witherspoon, expounding his version of Wittgensteinian therapy, says that ideally the nonsense-talker will come to realise that she has been talking nonsense. 9. For fuller discussions see Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? – An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning*, New Romney: Teller Press, 2005 (revised edition, Rellet Press, 2013), The Problem of Philosophical Nonsense: A Short Introduction, Rellet Press, 2015, and ‘Have Wittgensteinians found a way of diagnosing nonsense?’ on academia.edu. * Henceforth DPTN? 10. Well, there are things one can do. One can repeat it, for example, but that won’t help. One can ask its utterer for further explanation. We shall be considering this shortly. 11. He seems to have opted for a nonsensicalist solution to the problem posed by his paradox because it was the only one he could think of and he was not happy with it since it introduced unwelcome complications into his logicism. For more on this see my ‘The importance of Russell’s Theory of Types for the emergence of TwentiethCentury nonsensicalism’ and ‘Bertrand Russell versus Arthur Prior on meaningfulness’, both on academia.edu. 12. It might perhaps be argued that there is really only one possibility here: pushing an analogy too far. So-called ‘false analogies’ would be one in which exceedingly superficial resemblances had been seized upon. I doubt whether much turns on this taxonomic point. 13.) For example, if Smith visualises Jones whenever someone mentions Jones, no harm is done, whatever errors philosophers may have made about the role of mental imagery in thinking. This passage from Wittgenstein does not suggest he thinks he is making an error: If I say ‘I meant him’ very likely a picture comes to my mind, perhaps of how I looked at him, etc.; but the picture is only like an illustration to a story. From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all; only 23 when one knows the story does one know the significance of the picture. (PI, I, 663) 14.) ‘Co-operativist’ and ‘co-operativism’ are not the barbarous neologisms they may appear to be. They have been used in connexion with the British Co-operative Movement, for example. 15.) Actually I do know of one passage that might be seen as a rival, but I am not sure how it relates to the question of philosophical nonsense, though the penultimate sentence clearly alludes to Tractatus 6.53: [To Waismann] As regards your Theses, I once wrote, If there were theses in philosophy, they would have to be such that they do not give rise to disputes. For they would have to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. As long as there is any possibility of having different opinions and disputing about a question, this indicates that things have not yet been expressed clearly enough. Once a perfectly clear formulation – ultimate clarity – has been reached, there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these always arise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do not yet know whether I should admit it or not. If, however, you make the grammar clear to yourself, if you proceed by very small steps in such a way that every single step becomes perfectly obvious and natural, no dispute whatever can arise. Controversy always arises from leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I once wrote: The only correct method of doing philosophy consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to. (Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle – Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, tr. Joachim Schulte and McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, p. 183) I suspect that the philosophically knowledgeable reader who was presented with it without being told its source would be reminded of Descartes: one can avoid error by not accepting anything that is not ‘clear and distinct’ and to do this one needs to break one’s reasoning down into the smallest identifiable steps. 16.) It is not conclusive. There is such a thing as forgetting what one meant. (See DPTN?, pp. 74-75) 17.) And I mean ‘incredible’. This word is often loosely used of what is being presented as true and which one is being invited to believe. This misuse is, when you think about it, as absurd as the misuse of ‘literally’ as an intensifier that is so often pilloried. 18.) I am not of course talking of such things as brain-damage and I admit that the utterances of some of the more obscure philosophers raise special problems. 19.) Charles Pigden sees Russell with his Theory of Types as making the decisive move here (though he did not himself often accuse other philosophers of talking nonsense). For some time it probably seemed as though Russell’s Paradox could be cited as a standing example – a museum exhibit – of philosophical nonsense that could be used to silence doubters. See ‘Coercive theories of meaning or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ in Logique et Analyse, 210, 2010, pp. 164-65 and on academia.edu (pp. 14-15). 20.) I deal with the phenomenon of ‘staying power’ and a comparison to visual illusion as the nonsensicalist’s best response to it in DPTN?, pp. 60-61. I doubt whether this comparison will completely domesticate illusions of meaning and show them to be no more peculiar than perceptual illusions. Consider a philosopher who 24 says, ‘I know that this seems to make sense – it seems to make sense to me too – but I believe that this is an illusion’. One can ask, ‘What would show him to be right?’ and ‘What would show him to be wrong?’. Let us set aside the first question, since most of this paper is concerned with it, and consider the second. The situation is one that only occurs in philosophy. Outside philosophy it would be unprecedented and one would not know how to deal with it. At On Certainty, 257, Wittgenstein remarks: If someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a half-wit. But I shouldn’t know what it would mean to try to convince him that he had one. And if I had said something that removed his doubt, I should not know how or why. If someone doubted whether he himself meant anything by what he said and one said something that removed his doubt, would one have any idea how it had achieved this? The question deserves further investigation. 21.) PI, I, 466. I argue in DPTN?, pp. 62-65, that philosophical nonsense, if there is such a thing, is not directly exhibitable. One cannot take some standard philosophical question or thesis and demonstrate its nonsensicality – on demand and to all comers. I am here trying to imagine that at some future date this disability has been overcome. 22.) I have difficulty getting this to work whereas Wittgenstein seems to find only a few repetitions sufficient: What would you be missing, for instance, if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word ‘till’ and to mean it as a verb or, - if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if it was repeated ten time over? (PI, II, p. 182) I have no difficulty with the first disjunct but the second makes me wonder whether philosophers’ disagreements about the concept of meaning might in part derive from differences in the way they experience meaning. 23.) If a song keeps running through one’s mind, one soon ceases to attend to the words, but this is not the same as their ceasing to seem meaningful. Again though, perhaps I ought to speak for myself. Others may experience things differently. 24.) See the entry for Capgras’ Syndrome in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard L. Gregory, Oxford: O. U.P., 1987. 25.) It seems that it is possible to overlook this: If ‘I am dreaming’ could express a judgment, it would imply the judgment ‘I am asleep’ and therefore the absurdity of the latter proves the absurdity of the former. (Norman Malcolm, Dreaming, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959, p. 109) Someone might object on Malcolm’s behalf that absurdity is not necessarily nonsensicality, but in fact Malcolm repeatedly claims that both ‘I am asleep’ and ‘I am dreaming’ are nonsensical. 26.) In DPTN?, 108-109, and in ‘Have Wittgensteinians found a way of diagnosing nonsense?’ and ‘All the hallmarks of genuine meaning’, both on academia.edu. 27.) PI, I, 500: ‘When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless.’ 28.) Edward Witherspoon, ‘Conceptions of nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein’ in The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Read, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 345. To parse an utterance is in this context is to show how the meanings of the various words contribute to the meaning of the whole. 29.) Recall the anecdote that is the subject of Wittgenstein’s Poker, ed. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, London, Faber and Faber, 2001. On the whole the evidence does not seem to support Popper’s version of events. But that version seems 25 thoroughly believable and entirely characteristic of Wittgenstein. As the Italians say, ‘Si non è vero, è ben’ trovato’ – ‘If it is not true, it is well conceived’ or ‘If it is not true, it ought to be’. 30.) Norman Malcolm, Nothing Is Hidden, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 38-39. I am not disputing the point Malcolm is making here, which concerns a difference between the early and the later Wittgenstein. I am simply calling attention to Malcolm’s (and Wittgenstein’s) indulgence towards language as it used outside philosophy. 31.) Not much attention has been paid by nonsensicalists to the problem of the apparent existence of standard philosophical issues? How is it that we seem to be able to identify, and re-identify, a problem as, say, the mind-body problem and distinguish it from that of, say, the objectivity of mathematics, if all metaphysics is nonsense? We seem to be able to say such things as, ‘This is indeed a problem but it is not the same problem as that’, ‘X’s view is essentially the same as Y’s but it is totally opposed to Z’s’, ‘Even if your solution to problem P is correct, you will still face problem Q’ and ‘There seem to be three possible answers to this question’. This is hard to explain if most philosophy is nonsense and says the same thing, i.e. nothing. I should imagine that some Wittgensteinians will say that grammar sets the same traps for everyone and try to individuate philosophical problems and supposed answers by individuating these traps. 32.) Big Typescript, p. 425, in Klagge and Nordmann, op. cit., p. 187. Hacker and Baker mention a passage in which Wittgenstein suggests that one way to see the bogus nature of philosophical problems is to tell oneself that, if they had been genuine, they would have been solved long ago (Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Oxford: Blackwell, Vol. I, 1980, p. 486). 33.) Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy – The Limits of Inquiry, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993; Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures are We?, New York: Columbia U. P., 2016, Chapter Two. 34. To be fair to Wittgenstein, he does at one point warn against opting for quick, easy and superficial solutions: You must not try to avoid a philosophical problem by appealing to common sense; instead, present it as it arises with most power. You must allow yourself to be dragged into the mire, and get out of it. Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer. But the commonsense answer is itself no solution; everyone knows it. One must not in philosophy attempt to short-circuit problems. (Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-35, from the notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, ed. Alice Ambrose, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, p. 109) I do not however know that he ever asks whether there is a similar danger of shortcircuiting philosophical problems by dismissing them as nonsense. 35. McGinn at least is fairly tentative. His idea is that we might eventually have to resign ourselves to the insolubility of certain problems by us. See in particular the final chapter of McGinn, op. cit. 36. The opposition to positivism was somewhat more robust than that to Wittgenstein but, so far as I am aware, most analytical philosophers went along with the idea that philosophers sometimes talk nonsense. 37. See, for example, Frederick C. Crews (ed.), Unauthorized Freud – Doubters Confront a Legend, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. I am not as hostile to psychoanalysis as many of the ‘Freud-bashers’, but I do not doubt that the 26 psychoanalytic setting, indeed probably any psychotherapeutic setting, has numerous features that are not conducive to objectivity. Those who are interested in the relationship between Freud and Wittgenstein seem to have concentrated on either the similarity that Wittgenstein saw between his method and psychoanalysis or his criticisms of what he considered to be Freud’s ‘mythology’. The likelihood that Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy will face some of the same problems as psychoanalytic methodology also needs to be considered. Nowhere is the controversy over psychoanalytic methodology more heated than in connexion with ‘the recovered memory syndrome’ and the power of suggestion to elicit pseudomemories. I should perhaps say that, although I stress the dangers of suggestion in connexion with therapeutic nonsensicalism, I cannot see how that particular problem with Freud’s (early) work could have any close analogue here. 38. Insight and Illusion, revised edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 154. 39. I develop this point further in The Problem of Philosophical Nonsense, op. cit., pp. 92-93. 40. Wittgenstein often talks about ‘temptations’ in philosophy but are there no temptations to which sympathy with his approach leaves one open, temptations to think in a way that is less than rigorous? In the present context we need to consider temptations both for the therapist and for the patient. A full treatment of the psychological factors militating against objectivity would need to tackle several (overlapping) problems. In addition to deference to authority and the insidious implantation of ideas by suggestion, I can think of the following: a) The placebo effect. This can be very marked even with well-defined physical illnesses. It is likely to be even more so with psychological problems, especially – or so I would have thought – those whose manifestations are intellectual. Is it likely that it will be easy to tell whether a mental ‘cramp’ (BB, pp. 1, 61) has been successfully and permanently removed? b) Self-deception and wishful thinking. Wittgenstein thinks that bad philosophy often involves self-deception or something very like it (‘seeing what one wants to see’, Big Typescript, op. cit., p. 406 (161) – I discuss this in ‘Nonsense and the will: Wittgenstein on self-deception in philosophy’ on academia.edu). I do not know whether he ever worries about the possibility that his own method might expose one to the temptation to deceive oneself. c) I do not know of any general name for this but will not the therapist be able, consciously or unconsciously, to direct the thoughts of the patient simply by what he chooses to question and what he chooses to let pass – the utterances he thinks require further explanation and the ones he does not? The term often used in connexion with stage conjuring – ‘misdirection’ – will perhaps serve, provided it is clearly understood that it might be unconscious. d) Rhetoric. It is well nigh impossible to cleanse polemical philosophy of all rhetoric. Would it not be somewhat naïve to expect it to be easy when it comes to therapeutic, co-operativist philosophy? When the terms ‘authority figure’, ‘the power of suggestion’, ‘the placebo effect’, ‘self-deception’, ‘misdirection’, and ‘rhetoric’ begin to appear regularly in discussions of therapeutic nonsensicalism I shall think we are making progress. 41. There may of course be a the problem about borderline cases but I take it that someone who voices this complaint is insisting that there must be some cases where it is a matter of objective fact whether a person means anything or not. 42. In addition to these there is a general query, which I shall not pursue here. When one does not understand someone in the ordinary sense, one often says (a) things like, 27 ‘I follow you up to … and then you lose me’, ‘I don’t see why you think …’ and ‘I don’t see how you get from … to …’, which manifest some understanding, or something like (b) ‘That’s just gibberish to me’, which doesn’t. But recall what I said about ‘staying power’. Our nonsensicalist is rejecting his own apparent understanding of what the ‘patient’ is saying. So neither (a) nor (b) fit his position. I would be interested to know more about what it is like to be in his position and how he orients himself to something he seems to understand while rejecting that seeming understanding. The problem is less obvious with the polemical nonsensicalist who simply dismisses something as nonsense and perhaps makes no claim to empathy with the supposed talker of nonsense but it comes to the fore with the nonsensicalist who sees himself as trying to help. 43. DPTN?, p. 108. 44. By P. T, Geach in ‘Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary’, Monist, 50, 1966, p. 371. 45. Of course Wittgenstein does not think philosophical ‘uses’ of words are real uses. What word should we substitute? ‘The philosophical employment of words’ raises precisely the same problem. Without being entirely satisfied with the choice, I shall speak of ‘the philosophical deployment of words’. When philosophers deploy words they are often, in Wittgenstein’s view, not really using them. 46. Consider the following passage: [T]here is the threat to the whole notion of nonsense posed by what has been dubbed the ‘conference theory of meaning’ by those who take it to be itself a piece of nonsense. That theory takes its stand on Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘the game is played’, a phrase meant to indicate the place where explanations come to an end. One can’t ask for explanations of all the rules. The gloss put upon that by the ‘conference theory’ is that the most one can ask of an expression is that it be used in a uniform way by some group. In the particular case that earned it that title, it was suggested that because certain expressions were used regularly and in a regular way at philosophical conferences, that was enough to give them a meaning. The notion of nonsense seems to have no place in that theory. (Guy Robinson, Philosophy and Mystification – A Reflection on Nonsense and Clarity, New York: Fordham U. P., 2003, p. 19) I haven’t been able to discover much about this term ‘conference theory’ and wonder who uses it. Perhaps it refers to something that was once briefly in the air and is now forgotten. But such a theory surely has this much to be said for it. If people seem to agree in the ways they use words, and seem to recognise the same problems, and seem to recognise the same suggested solutions as at least relevant, then there is a prima facie case for saying that they mean something by their words and are not subject to some sort of collective delusion. Is it not reasonable to place the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of anyone who thinks they are all talking nonsense? 47. Of course, as Pigden points out, Wittgenstein thought that ‘quite ordinary words could get you into trouble if you misused them in a philosophical way’ and so ‘Russell did not quite hit the mark when he insisted … that philosophy like other subjects is entitled to its own terminology’. (Pigden, op. cit. p. 166 (16)) 48. I cannot think of any better illustration of the mysteriousness of Wittgenstein’s view on religion than the following: Is talking essential to religion? I can well imagine a religion in which there are no doctrinal propositions, in which there is thus no talking. Obviously the essence of religion cannot have anything to do with the fact that there is talking, or rather: when people talk, then this itself is part of a religious act and 28 not a theory. Thus it also does not matter at all if the words used are true or false or nonsense. In religion talking is not metaphorical either; for otherwise it would be possible to say the same things in prose. Running against the limits of language? Language is, after all, not a cage. (Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, op. cit., p. 117) 49. As regards the Verification Principle itself, let us not forget that Wittgenstein, if only for a short while, accepted it and indeed seems to have been its inventor. On this see Hacker, Insight and Illusion, op. cit., pp. 134-35. 50. It should be remembered that some of the positivists were among their own most severe critics, as has been brought out by Scott Soames in Analytic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vol. I, Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2003. 51. I shall not try here to decide whether this goes against: ‘And we must not advance any kind of theory. There must be nothing hypothetical in our considerations’ (PI, I, 109). 52. I speak several times about there being standard philosophical problems. I would accept that, to a certain extent at least, this shows that I am looking at things from the perspective of Anglophone analytical philosophy. 53. PI, I, 23. I admit that he does not explicitly say that these are all genuine, legitimate uses but the passage would be highly misleading if he thought that some of them weren’t. 54. ‘Philosophy is a tool which is useful only against philosophers and the philosopher in us’, quoted in Anthony Kenny, The Legacy of Wittgenstein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984, p. 48. 55. It is obvious from this passage that Wittgensteinians can be as guilty as anyone else of not properly explaining what they mean. Now I would not dream of accusing Witherspoon of not meaning anything by his words, but I do wonder whether he really knows of a way of diagnosing philosophical nonsense. 56. Note: if it is clear. For a discussion of the way philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ and its cognates see my ‘What do philosophers mean by “incoherent”?’ on academia.edu. 57. There is supposed to be a view that contradictions are nonsense, but I do not know of anyone who comes nearer to taking such a view than the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. I assume that, if contradictions are not regarded as simply meaningless, then pragmatically self-defeating utterances will not be either, since they are so closely related to contradictions. (They are in fact sometimes called ‘pragmatic contradictions’.) 58. On this see for example PI, I, 87 where Wittgenstein stresses that in practice explanations come to an end. Might not the Wittgensteinian therapist be tempted to forget this? 59. There are, I suspect, many other ways in which, even in a supposedly therapeutic exchange, the interrogation of the ‘patient’ by the therapist might be unduly aggressive. One can’t just assume that all aggression has been left behind, however much lip-service is paid to the therapeutic/co-operative ideal. This has been recognised for some time in psychotherapy itself. For example, the psychiatrist R. D. Laing writes of a patient who suffered from severe ‘ontological insecurity’ but whom he regarded as sane: It is, however, important to know that if you were to subject this patient to a type of psychiatric interrogation recommended in many psychiatric textbooks, within ten minutes his behaviour and speech would be revealing ‘signs’ of 29 psychosis. It is quite easy to evoke such ‘signs’ from such a person … (The Divided Self, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965, pp. 43-44) Perhaps this brief quotation does not make it clear why one should think of such psychiatric interrogation as aggressive. If so, I can only suggest that anyone who is puzzled should read Laing’s book. 60. Remember that the later Wittgenstein thought a perfectly acceptable sentence of the language can be nonsense if it is deployed in unsuitable circumstances. This view is pervasive in On Certainty. 61. Obviously, what someone means can be shown to be inconsistent. But how could it be shown that the very supposition that someone meant anything at all on a particular occasion was inconsistent. 62. Wittgenstein’s Private Language, Oxford: O.U.P., 2007, pp. 7, 9, 10. 63. See the entry under ‘grammar’ in Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, for a survey of Wittgenstein’s use of this term. 64. For example, PI, I, 348. See also n. 59 above. 65. My fullest discussion of this difficulty as it applies to verificationism is in DPTN?, pp. 18-33, 36-38, 109-12. Other criteria of meaningfulness that have been proposed from time to time would include: Russell’s Theory of Types; that (or those) implicit in the Tractatus on the traditional reading; and the Rylean notion of a category mistake, according to which the demarcation of categories provides criteria for distinguishing sense from nonsense. 66. I am not sure whether many of today’s interpreters of the later Wittgenstein attribute a theory of meaning as use to him. The ‘resolute readers’ of the Tractatus seem wary of attributing a theory of meaning to him at any stage in his career. At the other extreme consider this: All this should not, of course, be taken as reflecting on the philosophical greatness of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is the author of three wholly differing accounts of meaning, all of which merit entire rejection: meaning is not reduplication of structure, it is not verification or verifiability, it is plainly not what he meant by use. (J. N. Findlay, ‘Use, usage and meaning’, symposium with Gilbert Ryle, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 35 (1965), pp. 241-42.) 67. DPTN?, p. 92. 68. A question I shall not pursue here is: How do you go about trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to think of a use for an expression, a situation in which it might be used? It is natural to reply: Well, you first have to grasp its meaning (or a meaning, if it is ambiguous). Is there any alternative to this – any way of avoiding having to say that the attribution of meaning is prior to using or thinking of a use? 69. James C. Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy – Wittgenstein and the Moral Life, Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1982. He writes on p. 109: [J]udging some utterance to be nonsense is much like saying, ‘I cannot go along with you there’. It is to heed or erect a boundary; and, as [Wittgenstein] reminds us, boundaries are drawn by us, and for quite different reasons. To see judgments of sense and nonsense in this light tends to diminish their apparent ‘objectivity’ and to make philosophical criticism that depends upon such judgments seem much less ‘scientific’, since to make such a judgment is just to call attention to a boundary that someone, perhaps oneself, has drawn in language for a particular purpose. It is a grammatical remark: ‘We don’t talk like that’. We don’t cross that boundary. 30 Edwards supports this view by appealing to PI, I, 499 and 500. I can see how the former supports it, but not the latter. There are, it should be noted, other passages in Edwards’s book that seem less relativist. 70. I can’t really cite anything much in support of this suggestion but Wittgenstein does say that his examples are ‘meant to enable the reader to shift for himself when he encounters conceptual difficulties’ (PI, II, p. 175, 2001 edition). 71. There are difficult issues here. Wittgenstein seems to have thought that nonsense can be produced by presenting grammatical rules as though they were universal, necessary truths about the world. If this mistake is possible, it is not clear whether someone making it would be wrong about whether he meant anything or wrong about what he meant. I try to make a start on this problem in DPTN?, pp. 53-56, and in ‘Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism’ (particularly Part One) on academia.edu. 72. On this see Hugo Meynell, ‘Understanding the unintelligible’, Analysis, 34, 1974, final paragraph. The author is concerned with philosophical accusations of ‘unintelligibility’. As far as I can see, everything he says applies also to philosophical accusations of nonsensicality, senselessness, meaninglessness and making no sense, yet he never explicitly points this out. 73. On any showing one is likely to encounter bizarre states of mind here. See my ‘Nonsense and the will: Wittgenstein on self-deception in philosophy’ on academia.edu. 74. PI, I, 119, 133, 254, 255, 593. 75. Consider, for example, what he says about the water-diviner on pp. 9-11. 76. Quoted in Pigden, op. cit., pp. 165-66 (15-16). 77. I suppose we all need to ask ourselves whether we would have behaved any better, had we been surrounded by admirers hanging on to our every word. 78. G. E. M. Anscombe was known in the philosophical world as a rather formidable personality, yet even she seems to have been as easily overawed as the rest. A particularly regrettable example of this is to found in her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’: I once had occasion to remark to Wittgenstein that he was supposed to have a mystical streak. ‘Like a yellow streak’, he replied; and that is pretty well how the Vienna Circle felt about certain things in the Tractatus. (London: Hutchinson, 1959, p.82fn.) If she had been able to get Wittgenstein to elaborate on his supposed mysticism, we might know for certain whether the Tractatus was intended somehow to convey what was in some sense ineffable (the traditional reading) or that it was not (the ‘resolute’ reading). Instead we have to be satisfied with a mere quip. 79. The straight ‘I don’t understand what you mean by …’, where one assumes that one’s interlocutor does mean something and simply wants to know what. 80. It is always difficult to know how much weight to place on remarks that seem to be one-offs. Two that have always puzzled me are the one reported by Moore (Klagge and Nordmann, op. cit., p. 113) that it did not matter whether the results so far obtained by his method were correct or not but only that a method had been found (How does he know that the method works?) and this: In a certain sense one cannot take too much care in handling philosophical mistakes, they contain so much truth. (Zettel, 460) (What is this ‘certain sense’ and how does it fit with his view that philosophy is largely nonsense?) 81. Big Typescript, p. 410, and in Klagge and Nordmann, op cit., p. 165. 82. From The Voices of Wittgenstein, ed. G. Baker, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 69. 31 83. Philosophical Grammar, pp. 381-82. Going back to my remarks above about those who surrounded Wittgenstein, I can’t resist adding that I wish they had spent rather more of their time with him demanding clarification. 84. PI, II, p. 175. The puzzling remark mentioned in n. 80 about a method having been found is preceded by some reflexions on its now being possible for there to be skilful philosophers. Clearly, fending for oneself in philosophy must be something that can be taught. 85. Big Typescript, p. 406, and in Klagge and Nordmann, op. cit., p. 161-63. 86. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-35, from the notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, ed. Alice Ambrose, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, p. 109. Compare the discussion of the commonsense attitude to solipsism in the Blue Book, pp. 48, 58-59. 87. Culture and Value, p. 56. 88. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford: O. U. P., 2001, p. 1. 89. Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle – Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, tr. Joachim Schulte and McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, p. 183. 90. BB, p. 66. 91. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Analytical Commentary on ‘The Philosophical Investigations’, Vol. I, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, p. 568.