Language Games

The following is an excerpt from my senior thesis on intentionality and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (”A Wittgensteinian Critique of Analytic and Post-Analytic Theories of Intentionality and Mental Content” by David Price, Goucher College philosophy department, 2007).

In this section, I discuss a particular section in The Blue Book where Wittgenstein explicitly critiques Russell’s philosophy of mind. Please excuse any formatting errors. I tried my best to correct them all but it is entirely possible I missed a few.

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In The Blue Book Wittgenstein characterizes Russell’s logical approach to meaning and language in terms of his analysis of predicates that name intentional states like wishing, perceiving, thinking, et cetera. The subsequent rejection of Russell’s analysis involves a sort of litmus test for Russell’s necessary conditions for the proper use of the verb ‘to wish’.[1] The litmus test comes in the form of an introduction of a certain grammatical distinction which, when introduced, shows that the meaning of the word does not play solely by the rules Russell’s analysis provides for, indeed necessitates. Wishing, according to Wittgenstein’s interpretation of Russell’s theory, means something like

…a [sort] of hunger.-It is a hypothesis that a particular feeling of hunter will be relieved by eating a particular thing. In Russell’s way of using the word ‘wishing’ it makes no sense to say ‘I wished for an apple but a pear has satisfied me’. But we do sometimes say this…

Russell’s interpretation of intentional verbs like ‘to wish’ requires that those verbs be used transitively (i.e. the grammatical use of ‘wishing’ presupposes that there is some definite thing that is the object of that state’).[2] Wittgenstein’s example of using ‘wishing’ in a different sense whereby the speaker may say “I wished for an apple but a pear has satisfied me” shows that the grammatical requirement of a direct object of an intentional state can be satisfied in a multitude of ways. We might say that “in order to wish something, there must be something wished” (echoing Socrates, Brentano, and virtually any subsequent account of intentionality), but saying that does not exclude the possibility of constructing expressions that seem to oppose the sense of ‘to wish’ as a sort of hypothesis about the thing that will satisfy that wish. Contrary to Searle’s position that an intentional state is self-referential with respect to its ‘conditions of satisfaction’, the predication of an intentional state like ‘to wish’ may not include its ‘direct object’ in the ideal sense that leads philosophers to say that ‘in order to wish there must be some determinate object of that wish’. In logical accounts of intentionality, what can be said of intentional states like ‘wishing’, ‘perceiving’, ‘thinking’, et cetera is that in every case their use presupposes a direct object which can be thought of as that element in Searle’s theory that is self-referential with respect to its conditions of satisfaction. This way of thinking is susceptible to formal notation:

S wishes that p ↔

(i) there is some definite direct object c that is the condition of satisfaction for that particular state for S

(ii) the meaning of ‘S wishes that p’→ it is not the case that (‘S’s wish that p’) could be satisfied by some other object d

Formally speaking, Wittgenstein’s example of the proposition P₂: ‘S wished for an apple but a pear has satisfied S’ violates the first and the second condition of the definition above. The confusion is this: the phrase ‘wish for an apple’ contains the condition under which S’s wish would be satisfied (namely, obtaining an apple) while the phrase ‘the pear has satisfied that wish’ seems to imply that somehow S did not know what would satisfy S’s wish when S wished it. The dilemma, as Wittgenstein shows, could be solved in two ways. The first is via recourse to intransitivity:

There are certainly cases in which we say, ‘I feel a longing, though I don’t know what I’m longing for’…or ‘I feel fear but I’m not afraid of anything in particular’….we may describe these cases by saying that we have…sensations not referring to objects [think: intentional inexistence]…if in characterizing such sensations we use verbs like ‘fearing’, ‘longing’, etc., these verbs will be intransitive [my italics]; ‘I fear’ will be analogous to ‘I cry’. We may cry about something, but what we cry about is not a constituent of the process of crying; that is we could describe all that happens when we cry without meaning what we are crying about [my italics].[3]

The meaning of the ascribed mental state does not require the presence of a direct object: Notice the similarity between the intransitive sense of mental predicates and Brentano’s notion of intentional inexistence; that is to say, Brentano’s description is not at all accidental, it reflects a way we express thinking, longing, wishing, et cetera in various languages. Notice also that in this sense, a description of the mental state ‘to cry’ does not include what exactly ‘the crying is directed towards’ in Brentano’s sense of the ‘intentional relation’ between thought and what the thought is directed at. Depending on how the process is described, it may or may not strike an accord with a particular characteristic of intentional content in philosophical discourses.

The second part of the grammatical distinction is via recourse to transitivity:

Suppose now that I suggested we could use the expression ‘I feel fear’, and similar ones, in a transitive way only. Whenever before we said ‘I have a sensation of fear (intransitively) we will now say ‘I am afraid of something, but I don’t know of what’. Is there an objection to this terminology? We may say: ‘there isn’t, except that we are then using the word ‘to know’ in a queer way’.[4]

Wittgenstein is showing here how language and meaning are not bounded to logically perfect (i.e. grammatical) determinations. To characterize the sense of a mental predicate transitively, that is, to signify the meaning of the predicate ‘to feel fear’ in terms of that state’s condition of satisfaction (i.e. the object that satisfies what the mental state calls for), seems to presuppose not only some particular object that stands for the condition of satisfaction for that state, but fixes how other related predicates like ‘to know that’ are used. If someone were to say, “When I use the expression ‘to feel fear’ I mean the verb in a transitive sense, that it is the fear requires a direct object to be grammatical” then it would appear odd to express in conjunction with that definition the phrase ‘…but I don’t know of what’. We think of transitivity as a sort of rule for making sense of a proposition. The law might said like this: ‘to feel fear (transitively) presupposes knowledge of the object to which that fear is directed’. The transitive sense of ‘to feel fear’ requires an object of that fear. The intentional content represents the object that one is fearful with respect to, so fixing the intentional content as representative of a direct object in conjunction with failure to know that direct object seems grammatically confused.

This is precisely Wittgenstein’s point: grammatical distinctions do not resolve difficulties philosophers face when attempting to clarify under what conditions something can be said. There is no necessary determination of the verb ‘to know’ in the transitive characterization of a particular mental predicate like ‘to feel fear’. Wittgenstein’s point is that we tend to think that we are duped into thinking that transitivity within a proposition must be consistent: if one intentional state is defined in a transitive sense, then another intentional state must also be transitive. We think of transitivity as distributable among ‘types of expression’ like ‘expressions containing mental predicates’.

To illuminate this sort of deception, Wittgenstein asks us to consider an instance in which one seems to refer to the same mental state despite changing that state’s transitivity. This case can be signified in the following way:

T₁: S has a general undirected feeling of fear [the sense of fear seems to be intransitive-that is-without an object/condition of satisfaction]

T_2: S has an experience which makes S say, ‘Now I know what I was afraid of.’ [now the sense of fear is described in a transitive way, but with the oddity that S (at T₁) did not know the condition of satisfaction for that fear][5]

Now suppose S forms a conjunction between those two temporally distinct events. S might say: ‘well, earlier on I was afraid of something but I didn’t know what…later on I realized I had been afraid of performing poorly on my upcoming math test.’ That sort of description would seem to mean that the fear appeared intransitive initially but became transitive when S realized what S was afraid of (that is, acknowledge the condition of that that state’s satisfaction). That raises a question though, in what sense exactly does the description in T₁ describe the same sensation of fear that the description in T₂ describes?

S’s revision of the transitivity from one moment to another is problematic for theories of mental content in that it shows that the meaning of a psychological state like ‘to be in fear’ is not strictly determined by its ‘condition of satisfaction’. Since it is often the case that one’s description of an intentional state is revisable in this sense, it is possible to (in a sense) refer to the same intentional content despite fluctuations in what that content is intentionally related to! Fregean and post-Fregean accounts of intentional content require that the determination of a particular mental state (i.e. how that content is meant for the individual that experiences that state) is identified with what that state represents as being the case, that is, what the content of that state is intentionally related to. That sort of identification is a grammatical one, as Wittgenstein points out. However it does not accurately provide ‘what it makes sense to say’ about intentional states since it cannot block instances in which we refer to one and the same ‘mental state’ (after all, S is ‘talking about’ the meaning of to be in fear throughout) despite changing the transitivity of that state over time (what the content of that state represents/what that state is intentionally related to/what the satisfaction condition is).

The upshot of all of this is that the meaning of predicates we think of as somehow ‘mental’ is not logically determined. Some commentators refer to this idea as the ‘indeterminacy of psychological concepts’ but that sort of description is misleading. It is akin to the distinction between ‘what is thought’ and ‘what is said’ expressed in instances in which someone might say, “I know what I’m thinking of but I just can’t say”. The view that psychological concepts are indeterminate is misleading in the sense that it makes it seem as if ‘physical concepts’ for instance, are determinate. The sort of thinking that leads to a fundamental dualism between ‘mental’ predicates and ‘physical’ predicates is exactly the root of the problem, according to Wittgenstein.

[2] Russell’s definition of ‘wishing’ can be depicted in the following way: Russell’s view: if S wishes that p then there is some direct object R which is the condition of satisfaction for that state

[3] Wittgenstein, Blue Book, 22
[4] Wittgenstein, Blue Book, 22

[5] I have taken some liberty in presenting this case. For instance, Wittgenstein’s description involves the first-person, not the third-person. For the actual description see p. 22 of the Blue Book. Wittgenstein, Blue Book, 22

Well, I’ve taken awhile to look over and review another Wittgenstein-related blog: methods of projection.   It’s got helpful information regarding upcoming conferences, lists of professors speaking at those conferences, and misc. interpretations and critiques of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and those who have somehow made a career out of reading it!

The author has a command of the relevant passages when discussing an issue or critiquing an interpretation.  Several of the references he has made seem to be coming from the earlier works (not all, but some).  Hopefully I’ll be able to chime in, mostly coming from the middle and/or transition works (e.g. Philosophical Grammar and The Blue and Brown Books).

Next up: a tutorial on Wittgenstein’s rejection of Russell’s philosophy of mind, as explicated in The Blue Book.

At 2.012 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein posits,

In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of the atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing. http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t2012en.html

What would a modal interpretation of that proposition look like? On one reading it could look like:

“If p is possible (where ‘p’ means ‘a thing that occurs in an atomic fact), then p must have been possible.”

• That is to say, if p is possible then p is necessarily possible.
• In symbols: *p –> #*p

Of course in modal logic, that implication doesn’t always hold, and certainly one could construct a model whereby it was only contingent that p is possible. For instance, if W=w1, w2 and R=w1Rw1, w1Rw2, w2Rw1 and v(*p) at w1=1 but 0 at w2 then comment 2.012 would not hold (’p is possible’ is true at the world it is uttered, and w1Rw1, but false at one if its accesible worlds, w2. Thus, p’s being possible is not a necessary possibility!)

Anyway, this sort of interpretative exercise is nothing more but a puzzle for me. I certainly would not make the argument that Wittgenstein’s comment is invalid; it is simply entertaining to compare a given interpretation of a text with a logical system that may or may not conform with it.

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I need to get this out there: I’m quite sick of a particular trend I’m noticing in various academic and social circles. The trend is this (and I myself am quite guilty of it): we seem to be in the habit of discussing neurotransmitters and the various neural systems they inhabit in terms of the sorts of mental tendencies they are associated with.

So, for instance, someone will talk about dopamine in terms of dopamine’s effect on concentration. I’ll frequently see something of the following sort in forums dedicated to discussing nootropics, for instance:

“I’m having difficulty concentrating, am I low on dopamine?”

First off, there are not many ways in which to know whether or not someone is “low on dopamine” absent significant cognitive and psychological deficits (think Alzheimers or Parkinson’s). That is, we have good evidence for characterizing Parkinsonian-like symptoms in terms of dopamine deficiency in the basal ganglia, for instance. That sort of talk is fine. But in everyday contexts, we really ought to NOT think about neurotransmitters in terms of mental states like concentrating, remembering, intending, et cetera. That is very dangerous if only because it masks a complex issue in overly reductive terms.

My take on the matter is this: a large portion of our “knowledge” concerning psychological effects of particular neurotransmitters comes from case studies of individuals with very debilitating cognitive deficits like Alzheimers and Parkinsons. These deficits form a sharp boundary around which theorists can characterize the neural systems relevant to the onset of the disease. That is, we’re understanding the function of a neural system only in virtue of its relevance to very significant but also very GENERAL deficits. It does not necessarily indicate something about the regular function of the neural system in and of itself: we can’t, so to speak, separate the neural system and ascribe a function to it absent this particular persons diagnosis.

So a person who is NOT presenting with these debilitating conditions but using similar language to describe his or her psychological difficulties may or may not be explainable in virtue of the same neural systems. Someone who says in an everyday context “Hey I can’t concentrate, why is that” may be intending that he cannot concentrate on certain sorts of tasks, like reading a philosophy book or doing math problems. And because the tasks are different, it is completely possible that the neural systems involved are different. The interplay between neural transmitters is EXTRMELY intricate and the exact function of an NT is also structurally differentiated (meaning that an NT may be relevant to function A in brain area X but may be relevant to function B in brain area Y).

Lastly, and I really want to stress this: we need to be externalists about mental states in the sense that we need to look to environment more to discuss various cognitive problems like attention deficit and/or memory issues and so forth. When someone says they are depressed, it cannot be evaluated at some level which is independent of the social contexts they tend to use that description within.

Yes, my thesis is done (at least for all intents and purposes) Here are the relevant ‘conclusions’ I feel comfortable in asserting:

1) language is neither intelligible nor unified in the strict logical sense. This basically means: sure, you can go ahead and carve out a nice logical system with which to interpret various kinds of linguistic expressions, but realize when you do that you are ‘creating another language’ and not providing a ‘more primitive form of Language’–there is no Language of languages, just as there is no language of thought: all we have are different languages, different grammars, which we tend to think of as somehow ‘in the background’ when we make assertions

2) because of that, a theory of meaning is impossible if by ‘theory of meaning’ we mean: a theory able to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘what it makes sense to say’ or ‘what is meaningful’

3) the introduction of grammatical distinctions does little to resolve paradoxes we tend to face in philosophizing about language and meaning: (e.g. introducing the grammatical concept of transitivity does not stop one from saying: “When I said I was scared, I mean it in the transitive sense even though I wasn’t, at the time, aware of what I was scared of”)

4) Grammitcal operators like the so-called ‘d-that’ operator introduced by Kaplan and used by David Chalmers, among others, NEED NOT specify intentional content. In fact the very distinction between ‘intentional content’ and ‘intentional state’ (e.g. the distinction between the propositional attitude ‘thinking that…’ vs. ‘what the thought is about/what is ‘being thought of’) is problematic once we realize that we do not usually express our beliefs via that-clauses!

We can just as easily express the intentional state of ‘wanting to buy a lunch’ with an act of pointing, nodding our head when going up to the cashier, saying merely “meal!” to the cashier (and not ‘I want that meal’ or ‘I intend to buy that meal’)

The upshot is this: language and meaning are not reducible to grammatical forms, we can signify ’something as something else’ independent of saying or thinking something in its ‘correct grammatical form’. Think: when YOU are entertaining a belief about unicorns, do you THINK to yourself: “I believe that unicorns do not exist”—isn’t it possible to describe the meaning of ‘entertaining a belief about unicorns’ by describing an experience you had of ’seeing a unicorn in my mind’s eye’ without also claiming that ‘the picture in my head of a unicorn corresponded to the linguistic expression: “I believe that unicorns do not exist”

In what sense can the meaning of ‘thinking about unicorns’ also mean something like “imagining a unicorn”–also, isn’t the description “I was thinking about unicorns” incomplete in the following sense: that my picturing of the unicorn did not consist in some sort of void/blackness, that “my thinking about the unicorn really consisted in picturing the unicorn flying around a castle”

Don’t we also say that there is a difference between ‘picturing something’ and ‘thinking something’? Of course we do, but the difference can be explained in a different social context, whereas in the above, the meaning of ‘to think’ was expressed in virtue of the explanation of its use as ‘the imagining of a unicorn’

Recently, I have devoted a lot of attention to the notion of virtual game economies. I am fascinated by some of the recent transactions that have solely involved virtual property. (e.g. the virtual mall or whatever that was sold in the virtual world known as Second Life for millions of dollars). Most intriguing to me is the debate going on between lawmakers on whether or not these economies are taxable in the same way typical (i.e. involving the physical or real transaction of goods or services) transactions are taxed.

On the one hand, taxing virtual game economies can be seen as perverse: these markets don’t ‘exist’ in the way we tend to think of live, active markets. On the other hand, these economies certainly are not insignificant, and notions such as scarcity and supply and demand play a real role in their development.

But ignoring for the moment the question of whether these economies should be taxed, there still exists the question of what sort of tax(es) could be levied. I presume that if these economies are taxed, the form the tax would take would be something akin to a flat state sales tax. On average, a user of the game world Second Life has made something like $38.00 this year. Others make several thousand a month. Does it make sense to implement the same tax rate on significant transactions (i.e. to the tune of >$1 million) versus insignificant transactions (i.e. to the tune of $1.00-$200.00)?

Of further interest in this development is the variable responses of the developers of these games/worlds. The company responsible for World of Warcraft, Blizzard Inc, has taken measures that oppose the possibility of exploiting the game’s economy for real financial transactions. Of course, there are only so many measures that can be taken, and gold farming, for instance, is extremely difficult to oppose (after all, Blizzard does not have access to paypal transactions). Other MMO developers explicitly welcome financial transactions involving their virtual property, and some have gone so far as to create forums where players can sell gold or other items they have come across via PayPal or E-Gold.

Second Life goes a step beyond that by issuing an explicit exchange rate for the in-game currency (right now its something like 270 lindens=1 US dollar). To call Second Life a game would be slightly reductive: the developers leave a significant portion of the content of the world in the creative hands of subscribers. The users are limited by imagination and knowledge of the various functions of the world itself, but it is the users which create most of the actual content. Because of this, there is little in the way of universal rules. The rules are what the users provide in various locations within the world of Second Life. In terms of economy, the notion of scarcity here takes a more fluid role, one that cannot be elucidated easily. Hell, at least with World of Warcraft the presence of raw materials is somewhat determined by the developers.

These are interesting developments, and I think they only complicate the question of “in what sense are these virtual economies real economies?” If we say that they are real, in what sense do we mean that, and whom is responsible for governing their development–national governments, the developers, or the users themselves?