Wittgensteinian analysis of language games

Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’).  To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet others: nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.  And often one is left guessing.

Thomas Nagel in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ suggests that we don’t yet have much idea of how mental entities could be identical with physical ones (though he wisely stops short of accusing physicalists of not meaning ANYTHING WHATSOEVER by their identity-claims).  Colin McGinn goes further by suggesting that we may forever remain in this state of ignorance and incomprehension because of the inherent limitations of the human intellect.  I argue that the mere possibility that McGinn is right shows that it is over-hasty to conclude from philosophy’s failure to solve its problems that there must be something wrong with the problems themselves.  I also try to relate Nagel’s and McGinn’s view to David Stove’s response to philosophy’s apparent failure to make much progress.  He seems pessimistic about whether we will ever fully understand what is wrong with some philosophical claims.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

.Taking as my starting-point Cora Diamond’s paper ‘What nonsense might be’, I extend her ‘austere’ conception of nonsense to encompass the talking of nonsense.  We need to focus on the utterer as well as the utterance.  This brings out how difficult it is going to be to DIAGNOSE the talking of (philosophical) nonsense, without falling into the ‘sense that is senseless’ trap (PI, I, 500).  It is not clear to what extent Diamond sees the problem here.  I suggest that if there is a way round the difficulty, it will involve adopting a therapeutic approach.

Unanimidade entre os estudiosos, a classificação Wittgenstein Icorrespondente ao Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, cuja filosofia encontra-se calcada no assim chamado atomismo lógicoe Wittgenstein IIremissiva às Investigações Filosóficas, com o abandono definitivo de quaisquer resquícios ontologizantes ou metafísicoscompreende, entre outros, o entendimento de que teria havido, por parte do filósofo, o abandono da perspectiva de base de sua primeira obra, cabendo à segunda a apresentação de sua filosofia acabada e revisada. Dado que o Tractatus ostenta, em sua feitura final, manifesta tendência mística, a conclusão soa como dedução: o segundo período significou rejeição aos elementos místicos do início. Porém, se por um lado tal visualização da constituição do pensamento wittgensteiniano mantém-se praticamente inatacável, por outro sua simplificação contribui para uma visão por vezes empobrecedora das relações entre os diversos períodos de sua produção, sobretudo com relação à presença da mística em sua filosofia.

Cook’s paper ‘Wittgenstein on privacy’, though published over fifty years ago, is still one of the most impressive attempts to take seriously what philosophical nonsense would have to be.  Cook argues that someone who says, ‘It is not even logically possible to feel another’s pain’ is experiencing ‘a queer sort of illusion, produced by seeing one pattern of grammar on analogy with another and quite different pattern of grammar’.  I argue that he has identified a genuine philosophical illusion, indeed a grammatical illusion, that is quite close to what nonsensicalists are postulating – but I am not sure that it is IDENTICAL with it.

The four strands are (a) the ‘austere’ conception of nonsense; (b) the view that a perfectly acceptable sentence of the language can be nonsense if it is uttered in unsuitable circumstances; (c) the view that rules of grammar are nonsense if construed as universal truths about the world; (d) the view that one cannot ‘mean a nonsense’.  (I think that this last has to be ascribed to Wittgenstein, though it is surprisingly difficult to find knock-down textual evidence for it.)  I argue that (c) is the odd man out and is not easily reconciled with the others.

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.

Asked to edit and critically review the exchange between philosopher Rafael Capurro and Linda Treude on the concept of information, the below linked document presents the final version of the exchange, including my contributions to copy and content editing as well as bibliographic suggestions from my review. The final version of the document can be accessed at http://www.capurro.de/moraes.html

- Jared Bielby


"The term information is omnipresent in academic research as well as in everyday life. Buzz words such as information society, information age or information overload are floating around everywhere. But what do we mean exactly with 'information' in different contexts?

The philosopher Rafael Capurro dealt with this question in the late 1970's in his PhD thesis on the concept of information. Especially the philosophical community was suffering at that time from a lack of reflection thereupon. Capurro tried to fill this gap. The following remark by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007) had a particular impact on him.

"Today we are getting accustomed [...] to understand information as something different from matter and consciousness. What we have discovered is an old truth in a new place. It is the Platonic eidos, the Aristotelian form, expressed in words such that also a human being in the 20th century can learn about them."

Weizsäcker’s step back to the history of ideas motivated Capurro also to deal with ethical issues of the information society particularly since the rise of the internet. The handling of digital information requires new cultural skills that are addressed with the term 'information literacy.' In the last ten years many projects in the Library and Information Science field (LIS) include or are even focused on information literacy (IL). In many of these projects there is a pre-understanding that IL has to do with the ability to find, filter, and process digital information. At the same time, there is a gap between this pre-understanding and an the ongoing academic discussion on the concept of information. The following dialogue deals particularly with this gap."

~ Linda Treude

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.