Conversation with Lois Shawver

You also said, " Do you think his talking of language 'games' undermines the seriousness of certain types of discourse, such as talk about religion, or beauty for example? It does seem to me that saying discourse about religion or ethics is somehow unmappable onto other forms of discourse, is to say that they cannot be criticised from outside their own terms of reference.And that way lies relativism!! "

I think that is a very apt question. However, the answer is not a simple "yes" or "no". There are many kinds of relativism, going back to Protagoras in ancient Greece, at least. Wittgenstein's version (if you want to call it that) is unprecedented and, in my opinion, does not challenge any religious belief. But it does challenge the idea that any way of phrasing religious beliefs is perfect in an objective sense.

How can that be? Think of translation. When one translates there can be times that there is no exact word for an idea. And many words we use to say things because we recognize our audience would not understand our preferred vocabulary, and they may do the same with us.

At any rate, in religious, ethical, aesthetic, and even social language there are many words that communicate clear ideas indirectly through metaphor. This means that the power and inspiration of the text is suggested by the use of a word that one learned in a different context. Take the word "clear" in the first sentence of this paragraph. Imagine a child learning original language in English and learning the word "clear" for the first time by someone explaining that a window pane was made of "clear glass". Somehow most humans (not all) have the ability to use that understanding to understand immediately when one hears the word in a more abstract context such as "That was a clear explanation". One doesn't need to look up the word. The right understanding simply pops in one's head -- although it could be the wrong understanding, too. Take the phrase "look up there". That phrase means one thing in a the "language game" of showing someone something overhead and something very differently in the context "I will look up the word tomorrow".

Take this little paragraph as an introduction to Wittgensteinian thinking about metaphors and language games.





Mark Heyne 24.2.07
Hi Lois, and thanks for your time...

I teach English for academic purposes in the foundation program at Qatar national university. I am following the Pathways program in Philosophy of language out of my own interest...I studied English Literature at Wadham Oxford, but seem to have become interested in language per se recently. As my tutor at Oxford was the Irish Catholic Marxist Terry Eagleton, I had to suspend my disbelief every time he opened his mouth, so yes, I am quite familiar with that concept. Coleridge is undervalued in England as he is virtually the only writer of his generation to pick up on German philosophy, which is rubbished as "Continental" in the UK, rather like we say "Those people 'over there'! How could they possibly eat snails and horses!"

I came at philosophy via writers like Nietzsche and some popular philosophy books like Bryan Magee's 'Great Philosophers'.
While studying Literature I did get to read some philosophical background for each period, so got acquainted with Locke and Hume.
I also read Boethius in Chaucer's translation, and did some Plato in a Greek Lit course. I was infatuated with Schopenhauer for a long while.

In English language teaching, there is a lot of underlying theory assumed that doesn't get discussed much, like Speech Acts, Functional approaches and Chomsky's innatism. I tend more towards a behavioural attitude, and frankly have to ask you if basically Wittgenstein isn't some sort of behaviorist too?

Anyway, I am now trying to get some grounding in Philosophy of Language, and have been thrown in the deep end with Wittgenstein.
I find this the most interesting and demanding subject around.
I appreciate you taking the time to chat, and I value your suggestions. Thanks.

Lois writes:
Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI. Remember as I say in my website, The first comment in an aphorism is an imagined critic, or at least someone he is imagining and wants to respond to. So it is in this aphorism, too:

About Wittgenstein and behaviorism. Many people think he sounds like a behaviorist to them, so Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI, aphorism #307.

307 "Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise?
Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything
except human behaviour is a fiction?"-If I do speak
of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.

Remember as I say in my website at:
http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lwtocc.htm
that the first remark in an aphorism, which is often in quotes, is Wittgenstein's imagined audience. He addresses this imagined concern after the little "-".

So, the question is, what is a "grammatical fiction". Here is a brief article of mine online that addresses that question:
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm0601.htm
Page down. On the right hand side there is an article called "The Self as a Grammatical Fiction". See if that makes any sense to you and get back to me.



Hi Lois...I don't want to seem to denigrate behaviorism...I don't think behaviorists deny the actuality of inner mental processes, they only say that they are not communicable or 'translatable'. If I can give an example from my own field, we talk of measuring 'competencies' in language, but in effect what we do is measure performance. There is no way we can directly measure the learning of vocabulary or structures, we can only see how the student performs in a given situation. So we infer from their performance whether they have 'learned' the structures. I think it is comparable to talk of inner states while only actually observing behavior.
Lois Replies:

That's an excellent point, Mark. Neither John Watson, nor B.F. Skinner, for example, rejected the reality of mental processes. They were just trying to confine the field of experimental psychology to areas of animal and human functioning that psychologists could conceivably measure. However, the term "behaviorism", as you probably recognize, has often been used by critics to mean that humans are robots, with no mental life, just behaviors. And, as you can see from #307, that is the way in which LW understood what his critics were saying about him. I urge you to stick with that meaning in studying Wittgenstein in order to make the most sense of him.

Was Wittgenstein a behaviorist in the more accurate sense of the term? I would say "not" because he was not concerned with measuring behavior, and he was concerned with what you would call "mental processes". He was concerned with making sense of this dualism.

http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm040101.htm