Language Games

FYI: I’m still in Boston looking at apartments, so I’m not at my home computer.  If this alteration at all reflects in my blogging (e.g. more syntatical errors or more typos) then please excuse this.

I was reviewing some notes from my 20th century analytic philosophy course and found some helpful remarks I had jotted down on JJ Smart’s thesis.  Smart was (is?) an identity theorist: all mental events are physical events. 

His theory begins with the folllowing statements:

1. Statements about brain processes are not translateable into statements about sensations
2. the two do not share the same logic (which might be interpretted as “statements about brain processes do not following the same rules as do statements about sensations”)
3. the distinction between these two kinds of statements mirrors (parallels) the distinction between “the things themselves” and “expressing the things”

Smart is careful in his wording though, as analytic philosophers tend to be.  He is an identity theorist in one sense, but not necessarily in another.  Brain processes, he says, are ontologially identical with sensations.  The ontological identity does not carry over into language, however.

Expressions about brain processes are semantically (but not ontologically) identical with expressions about sensations.  This qualification reflects Smart’s methodological consideration of the strict vs. the non-strict.  The former represents ontology in the most robust sense.  The latter represents semantics (meaning, language, signs/symbols) and cannot be assessed via ontological identity relations.

Smart’s use of the term “sensation” is extremely broad and (probably includes) mostly any perceptual/sensory cognitive event having to (immediately) do with use of the senses and/or conscious or attentive processes. 

Smart’s philosophical motive boils down to this: brain processes are essentially identical with sensations just as statements about brain processes are essentially identical with statements about sensations. 

Now, the nature of the identity relation in each set is different.  The identity relation between “sensations and brain processes” is material, whereas the identity relation between “statements about sensations and statements about brain processes” is semantic.  Moreover, the two do not coincide and are quite logically independent of one another.

 OBJECTION:

Of course, there’s a problem here.  It is empirically false that “all brain processes are sensations” in the sense that one’s use of the term “brain process” need not refer or be about “sensations” in the relevant (psychological) use of the term. 

But how or where would this objection be targetted?  My thinking is that it could defeat either the material or the semantic identity relation.  In the first sense, not all brain processes are sensations since certain cognitive processes, such as pre-attentive focal processing, need not be “made out of” the same “physical stuff”. 

One brain process might be “composed of” a certain class of neurotransmitters (chemical), whereas another brain process might be “composed of” IPSP’s (electrical). 

I need not explain how it is that the objection I cited affects the semantic identity.  Assuming that the meaning of a sentence is a function of both its intensions and its extensions, then the meaning between a statement like “S could not remember p” and “S could not see p” need not be semantically identical.  Remembering and seeing might both be “cognitive” processes, or rather be classified as “cognitive”–but remembering p may or may not immediately refer to the sensory modality with which p was captured or mediated by.  Obviously, the use of “failure to see” is intended in the sense of “being blind” or “utmost visual sensory deficit”. 

 Smart would probably reply: yes but in both cases you are expressing a cognitive event.  Because of the fact that you are expressing the same kind of thing (a cognitive event) then it is the case that your expressions are semantically identical.

How would you respond to Smart’s counter (counter)-argument?

The later Wittgenstein is known for his reinforcement of the distinction between explanation and description.  The latter is what philosophers (of language) need to do, w hile it is the former that has caused so many paradoxes and logical inconsistencies.

 He indicates that philosophy is a sort of therapy, one that consists in describing the ways in which it is possible to use this or that word, where this or that word is the cause of some philosophical difficulty; that is, because of two or more seemingly paradoxical meanings associated with it.

 Philosophy is the therapy that gets us out of bewilderment about our linguistic confusions.  Description, not explanation, is the tool with which philosophers can dissolve, rather than solve, epistemological and ontological puzzles.

 That said, what exactly is the difference between an explanation and a description?  Wittgenstein’s use of the term “description” seems to rely on the sense of description as an activity more fluid, less rigid, more observational and more descriptive than explanation.  Whereas explanation might rely on explicit rules, or governed by standards of use, description shows us how the rules can be bent, or how a new use for a concept can express itself. 

I have struggled with this for some time, but that is my current line of thought.  Description seems theoretically innocent, merely observational for the sake of looking…explanation seems rigid, logical, rule-bound and systematic.  The former opens the possibility of examing the meaning of a term in a new way, whereas the latter considers all such instances to be merely anomalous. 

I apologize for taking a few days off.  Actually, I haven’t really been taking days off in the usual sense.  Most of my time has been devoted to searching for an apartment in Boston.   I’m moving there in several weeks and have just now realized how seriously expensive it will be.

I will most likely make another post (the 2nd part of the previous post) either tonight or tomorrow.  Then I’ll be gone for the weekend and won’t be back until monday.

 PART I:

The following post consists in notes I have taken on a section in The Blue Book.  Here, Wittgenstein deals with philosophical confusions regarding the concept of locality as it it used in:

(1) expressing an intended bodily gesture (like pointing with one’s finger)

(2) expressing subjective knowledge about pain

He points out two standard ways in which philosophers understand the role of locality (which typically amounts to form of reference: ‘what is being pointed to’ is another form of ‘what is being referred to’ just as ‘where the pain is being felt’ is another form of ‘the referant of ‘pain’) and shows how easily our grammar misleads us, leading us to perplexities regarding mental-localities and physical-localities.

The view Wittgenstein is attempting to show as problematic (in a nutshell): “I could be pointing or feeling pain, but in either case, my pointing POINTS to a location or my FEELING PAIN causally or psychologically relates to a perceived (real or unreal) damage to an existing (bodily) location!  I’m using location in the same way!”

“I must know where a thing is before I can point to it.”

•  Here, the sense of “to be able to point to something” seems to require that the person also have prior knowledge to what he or she is pointing at.  It is only with intention that one can say “I must know where a thing is before I can point to it”; for how can one point to something he or she clearly does not see as this or that (where ‘this’ or ‘that’) is the thing she is pointing to, or rather, is the act that is captured in the expression “I am pointing to an x.”

“If I feel a pain I must already know where I feel it.  To feel pain means to feel pain in a particular area that I can point to and describe.”

• This kind of characterization of the meaning of “to be in pain” attempts to construct a sense of locality that is analogous to the previous example.  In both cases, a thing’s locality (i.e. where the pointing points to/where the pain is felt in) is a precondition of having that (mental or physical) state in the first place.
• First: a necessary condition of being able to point to a place (intentionally) is knowing where that place is in the sense of knowing the directionality (think: Brentano’s use of intentionality) of the gesture itself.
• Second, a necessary condition of feeling a pain (first-person epistemic access we’re talking about here) is feeling a pain in a specific place that one is familiar with and able to describe or point to.  What kind of a toothache is it if it isn’t felt in your teeth?

Wittgenstein’s reply: I can know a pain without requiring that “I feel pain” guarantee the location of that pain!

But, of course, Wittgenstein doesn’t play by such simple rules.  The uses of “locality/location” are distinct and their functions are different! Thus they have different meanings.  We avoid making bizarre claims about the difference between physical and mental localities by constructing cases in which the definition of locality presupposed in these discussions doesn’t work.

How is this done?  What is Wittgenstein’s reply exactly?  You’re going to have to wait until tomorrow because I haven’t edited and made sense of my notes.  I could ramble on, probably come up with a decent ad hoc interpretation, but what would the USE of it be!

Political language games deserve more attention from Wittgensteinians, I think.
What sort of bridges could be built between the following:
(1) a conception of language games as a philosophical method for dissolving and/or removing absurdities about the meaning of “philosophically loaded” terms like understanding, ‘the mental’, and ‘definition vs. example’ and

(2) a conception of language games as a method for dissolving the politically absurd. What I mean by this latter term is

p: any statement issued by a government official that ought to immediately make questionable their epistemic authority regarding action taken in response to domestic and international crises

Let’s take a look at Dick Cheney’s recent comment about the alleged relationship between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam.

Cheney: “We’ve never made the case or argued the case that somehow Osama Bin Laden was directly involved in 9-11. That evidence has never been forthcoming.”

What exactly could he mean by “we’ve never made the case”? We have to construct cases in which it would be intelligible to say “we never made the case that x” despite our knowledge of the fact that the Bush administration very quickly ran with an idea of

read more | digg story

Please do yourself a favor and watch Monty Python’s “International Philosophy”.

You really have to listen to what the commentators say, because every one of their comments is related to the professed ideas of the philosophers they are commenting on. It’s absolutely hilarious.

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein isn’t in much of it. And the reference the commentators make (I believe) are strictly related to the Logico-Tractatacus. Nevertheless, god this clip is hilarious (for a philosophy major)

read more | digg story

Richard Miller’s “Wittgenstein in Transition: A Review of the Philosophical Grammar” represents one of the few commentaries I’m familiar with that explicitly deals with the notion of philosophical grammar.

In assessing this notion quite central to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, Miller conveniently breaks up the manuscript of the same name, Philosophical Grammar. The manuscript is composed of two parts. “Part I: The Proposition and It’s Sense” deals with some of the central pillars of epistemology and the philosophy of language. This is the part where Wittgenstein first explicitly rejects many facets of his former view on language and meaning, a view that his mentors Russell, Moore, and Frege shared.

Miller’s describes the view that Wittgenstein attacks as the mental episodes theory. This is certainly an insightful way of describing the view that in all cases of understanding the meaning or truth of a statement, there must accompany a mental episode which re-presents (represents) what the object of the understanding is. We still tend to take this stance towards our sense of what it means to understand something.

We speak of “having a mental image” or “seeing it in our heads” when we’re trying to describe something we think of as “something I understand.” Wittgenstein attacks this in virtue not taking the “in our head” literally. Or rather, he does not take it as indicative of the sense of “location” when we think of the location of a building or the location of our house on a map. When we speak of “meaning in the head” what are using a conventional form of a expression that has many uses.

Similarly, when we ascribe to ourselves a sense of pain–”ouch, my arm really hurts”–the “my arm”, usually taken to be a location in the strict sense, could have been someone else’s arm. Pain is not a function of a location + the feeling of being hurt. Pain, as it is expressed in a grammar, must already be understood to be apart of the grammar in which it appears, in which it makes sense.

The mental episodes theory also presupposes that it is the sign that determines the meaning of itself in a proposition. We tend to think of propositions as combined from simpler atomic linguistic units. We tend to think that the sign for “tree” works in a particular way when it is combined with other atomic linguistic units like “color” and “tall”. “I saw the color of the tall tree”–we think of the meaning of that statement as the resultant of a precise linguistic formula, one that means something in virtue of the parts coming together in some special combination–the workings of this combination is something fully determined in advance via the inherent properties of the linguistic unit we’re talking about.

Wittgenstein rejects this idea in his critique of the mental episodes theory. He points out that the meaning of a word and how it is expressed is a function of use, not of semantic properties. We can use the word tree however we like, it is our use of the expression that goes towards its meaning. When we speak of understanding in terms of mental location, that “I understand this” can imply “the meaning is in my head” is not necessary at all–it simply makes sense to say because of the comfort level we have built up for ourselves in using it in the way we have.

I’ll finish the mental episodes theory later, so stay tuned.

My experience reading Wittgenstein’s various descriptions of the significance of “language games” with respect to meaning can be summed up as…well….confused.

On one level, the connection between a game and meaning can be made painlessly.  We don’t know what a game is in the sense that we don’t know what exactly makes something a game.  Our definition can’t do the work we’d like us to.  What is a game?  Obviously, we can try to give sense to it.  The following are quick examples of “attempts to make sense of the meaning of ‘to game’ or ‘to be a game’” (no dictionaries to be used for our purposes here):

“Well, it’s something–a sort of an activity, conditioned by explicit rules, and those rules have implications that may or may not effectively resolve possible discrepancies between what occurs in the game and what the rules make possible”

• “A game is a set of rules that determine how the activity that instantiates the game is expressed in a particular context.”

Could I be any more vague–yes, but for your sake (and mine), I won’t.

• “A game is anything that involves input and output from users that understand the rules of its play.”

Here are two of my favorites…senseless in a way that the above definitions are, but so seductively simple!

• “A game is anything that we identify as a game.”
• “A game is anything that counts as an example of a game–that we would call an example of a game, or just “a game”, for short.

For Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the notion of a game, and in particular our difficulty in making sense out “what does it mean for something to be a game”, are metaphors, signs, expressions, of the kind of difficult one gets into when one tries to define or condition language.

Like the question “what does it mean for something to be a game” the question “what does it mean for something to be a language (or Language)” creates in us a a philosophical cramp.  The question appears to ask us for a definition, but our definitions are only as good as the uses they are put to, and in the case of games and languages, we can’t separate the use from the definition (that is to say, I’m already using language anytime I ask a question about the definition of something-including language, games, hats, or meaning).

Language is not any one thing, it is a plurality of games we play to use and reuse (find new uses) for anything that can be said to have a use or a function for a community.  When we talk about language, we have in mind a language game– (rule defined but essentially under-determined, intensional, and not definable in the usual way we think of ‘to define’)–at the same time, and quite confusingly, we are always within language as the only means we have of conveying, pointing to, referring, and making sense of, just about anything we can and cannot speak or think of.  Language is not the spoken word, the written word, or merely “what allows communication”.  Language is the language games that make it possible for us to have a use for  “communication” or “the written word”.

Now, I’m ok this point.  What I don’t understand, or cannot wrap my head around, is the function of the notion of language games in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical thrust–how should one describe its role?  Is it more appropriate to describe the notion of “language games” as  a metaphor (thus, the notion of language game is just the kinship and/or likeness between questions regarding the meaning of the to be a game with the meaning of to be a language) or would it be more appropriate to call the relationship one of analogy?

I’m not really sure, but I think the enterprise of language as language games runs deeper than the level of metaphor or analogy.  An analogy is the relationship between two sets of pairs (or more): it is the relationship between two sets (or more) sets of related things.  A metaphor is a likeness between things.  Somehow, I don’t think either of these does enough work for Wittgenstein.

There is  a story I read while researching Wittgenstein for my senior thesis.  The whole thing was about how excited Wittgenstein was he realized that “we play games with language”.  For several weeks, all he could think about (apparently) was how “language is always an activity, a game, providing feedback and directing players to implicit and explicit rules” but we need not think of it as merely a naming game (i.e. we don’t learn lanuage, we don’t go about feeling at home in language) in the Augustian way of learning the names of objects and building up fancier cases from there.

I realize at this point I’m rambling.  Nevertheless, I’m still struggling with what role, if any role can be described, does the idea of language games play in his overall attitudes regarding language and meaning?  The notion of language games certainly isn’t more essential than the notion of “meaning as use” and “the meaning of a word is how you explain its meaning”–to ask what the meaning of a word is is to ask how it is that the word is used.

Is there a real difference between the expression of a belief (that is, expressing the belief that you want to go outside) vs. the belief itself? (that is, independent of its expression, the belief that you want to go outside)

Many philosophers maintain that there is a real difference.  It is sometimes characterized in the following way:

1. Occurent beliefs: the belief S has at the time of utterance of proposition P

2. Dispositional beliefs: the belief or beliefs that S disposed to express at times other than the present moment, if given the right opportunity

This distinction doesn’t necessarily amount to the mere difference between a belief’s expression and merely its existence (remember that often we tend to think of our beliefs in two ways, both those that we express currently and those that we have or might express, given the right sort of opportunity).  One could argue that the distinction between occurent and dispositional is merely (somewhat) analogous to the distinction between an expression of a belief and a belief independent of its expression (a belief per se).  One might argue that both occurent and dispositional beliefs could be categorized within “the expression of a belief (or beliefs)” but not in “a belief per se”.  The reason is simple: dispositional beliefs may or may not have been expressed at a certain time, T1, but it is always possible for them to be expressed (at earlier times or at later times), and in that sense, since it is always necessary that a dispositional belief be expressible, one must count dispositional beliefs in general in the category of “a belief’s expression” and not “the belief itself”

But let’s consult Mr. Wittgenstein on this matter.  I refer now to page 144 of The Brown Book.  Consider the following:

We speak of a tone of conviction.  And yet it is clear that this tone of conviction isn’t always present whenever we rightly speak of conviction. “Just so”, you might say, “this shows that there is something else, something behind these gestures, etc. which is the real belief as opposed to mere expressions of belief. [my emphasis]” -Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, p.144

Clearly, this is an argument one could make: we do make the distinction between beliefs that have the “ummph” of conviction vs beliefs that are automatic, involtunary, or non-intentional (in the sense of failing to have any particular direction–I’m using ‘intentional’ here in a way similar to Franz Brentano)  This line of thought carries one to the philosophical conclusion that there indeed exists a difference between a belief itself and it’s mere expression (think: a belief with conviction vs. a mere belief, a mere expression)

Wittgenstein, however, continues:

Not at all, I should say, “many different criteria distinguish, under different circumstances, cases of believing what you say from those of not believing what you say.” [Here he seems to equivocate between the distinction of a belief and its expression and believing what one says vs. merely saying it--my feeling is that he does this intentionally to make manifest the variety of sensory modalities that this kind of thing can occur in] There may be cases where the presence of a sensation other than those bound up with gestures, tone of voice, etc. distinguishes meaning what you say from not meaning it.  But sometimes what distinguishes these two is nothing that happens while we speak, but a variety of actions and experiences of different kinds before and after. Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, 145

Wittgenstein is saying here that the family of differences that we tend to have in mind when we utter distinctions like:

• what one actually beliefs vs. what one merely expresses as a belief

or

• saying what you believe vs. saying something (that is, merely saying something without conviction)

Are needless and certainly not necessary for one to understand the use of the expression “I really did believe what I just said.”  The conclusion I drew from this conversation was the following: conviction is not a necessary condition for authentic belief!

There are many cases in which the expression “I belief what I say” or “Did you really just mean what you said?” are not predicated on the simultaneous or occurent state of “being in the state of conviction” More precisely, I doubt Wittgenstein maintains that we do know what we mean when we say “well, surely that man believes what he says, for his expressions are with conviction”–at least not in every case.  And who knows what alternative conditions, whether in the past or the future, go towards determining the sense of that kind of proposition.  For instance, consider the following:

“If you really mean it, then you will stop talking and just leave me be”

That kind of expression has a certain use for particular people in various roles.  Consider that expression as it might be used in a scenario involving a recent quarrel between lovers.  The man says, “Sweetie, I love you….don’t shut me out, I can borrow some money from my parents and we can float this.”  The woman responds, “if you really mean that, then you will stop talking me out of it and just leave me be.”

That is, if the man truly has conviction about his love, then he must silence the expression of his beliefs.  We tend not to think of conviction as a silent activity, or rather as no activity at all!  How different a sense of “he believed it with conviction” this example showcases.

It turns out that Wittgenstein is kinda popular.

According to a keyword research tool I used earlier today, the term “wittgenstein” had the following (impressive) stats:

6.38 people are searching for Wittgenstein hourly!

155 people per day

4, 600 a month

56,000 yearly

Of course, when I say “people searching for” I only refer to “searches made”. That’s still pretty darn good-and get this-the term “Wittgenstein” outperformed “making money online” and “rogue pvp”

I think that’s fairly impressive. It certainly gives me hope that some people know who he is, or are at least curious enough about his philosophy to inquire about it, let alone spell his name correctly when doing so!