I read Peter Winch’s “The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy” for an undergrad class, this book uses some of Wittgenstein’s concepts and takes them to their extreme. And a conclusion I arrived at from the points made is that logic under his reasoning is culturally relative.
If you’ve read the book or know Wittgenstein’s work on rules and such, what do you guys think about this conclusion?
Do you agree, disagree? Do you think if we accept it that it delegitimises logic to some extent, or is it still valuable even accepting his argument?
“Delegitimizes” is a strong word, but yeah. What happens if you start to think of language as noises and marks in the world ? Of humans as animals who use these marks and noises to cooperate with one another ? to humiliate one another ? To win friends and mates and elections and tenure ? You might say that we tend to have “superstitions” about language and thinking and logic that mostly don’t interfere with our pre-theoretical skill with marks and noises.
We can “afford” to give a bad account of this skill, because we rely not on our bad accounts but on that skill. Philosophers like Wittgenstein can be seen as trying a give a less bad account of this skill, by trying to “look around” the taken-for-granted accounts at what we in fact do — which is messy and fuzzy and hairy.
I think many studying Wittgenstein and other thinkers will come away with a suspicion toward thinkers who claim to speak from a position above it all. Marks and noises as perceptual objects are experienced by the sense organs of individuals. I can expect this or prefer that, but I am on one side of the sign while others are on the other side.
It seems it needs more elaboration on the point. In what sense is it culturally relative? What do you think logic should be? What is definition of logic under Wittgenstein?
What is the nature and foundation of his reasoning? What do you mean by culturally relative?
Now this was our paradox. No course of action could be determined by a rule because every course of action could be made out to accord with the rule.
Well, there’s Chinese logic, which is typified by
Alignment with ancestors
Practicality
Agreement with the senses
These simple principles took Chinese philosophy to great heights e.g. the Dao De Jing, Chan Buddhism. The latter of course was a meld with Indian logic.
Indian logic was characterized by
Sandhya/positum (There is fire)
Vyapti (Where there is smoke there is fire)
Hetu (There is smoke)
I suppose what I said above illustrates logical relativism. However, at present almost all countries have migrated to classical western logic.
If truth-preserving arguments are relative does this mean that truth is relative? So what is actually the case varies by culture?
To use an example, can it be that this Earth is 6,000 years old and 4.5 billion, or both, depending on where you are?
One thing to explain here is that, while Navya-Nyaya, Stoic logic, Aristotleian logic, classical logic, and later innovations are all different in their epistemic, linguistic, and metaphysical assumptions, and differ in their forms, they do not seem to do so without rhyme or reason, such that they are incomensurable. When Indian and Hellenistic logic came into contact, translation was possible because there is plenty of agreement on principles, whereas an arbitrary system of inference or an absurd one will be accepted by no one.
The later Wittgenstein certainly deconstructs the logic assumed in his early philosophy. But I think he is already taking the ideas to their extreme. Just like he did in his early philosophy. What he aims at is not located further away.
I think he would say we don’t actually have a vantage point from which to examine that question.
Is logic cultural? Maybe, but it’s a moot point considering that we don’t choose the outcomes of logical arguments. We’re bound to follow logic, so reality, as far as we’re concerned, is logical. Or logic reflects reality, reality reflects logic, you get the idea.
The implication of saying that logic is secondary to culture is that there is some underlying reality that could potentially contradict our logic. If so, how could we come to be assured of that?
I think if you treat language as noises and marks that we use for our purposes you’re missing something important about normativity and grammar in the later Wittgenstein. That is, however, consistent with how Rorty talks about language. Joseph Rouse offers what I think is a good critique of Rorty here. He argues that ‘noises and marks’ are not just meaningless or arbitrary events but are already part of a relevant interpretive discursive context.
Rorty says non-linguistic objects like “[Platypuses and pulsars] do not (literally) tell us anything, but they do make us notice things and start looking around for analogies and similarities. They do not have cognitive content, but they are responsible for a lot of cognitions. For if they had not turned up, we should not have been moved to formulate and deploy certain sentences which do have such content. As with platypuses, so with metaphors.”
Rorty thereby maintains a sharp distinction between contentful language and the world, at the cost of relocating novel (“metaphorical”) utterances from the former to the latter. I urge a different conclusion: neither meaningful sentences or theories, nor articulated objects, can be manifest except through their ongoing mutual interrelations. Contra Rorty, both newly manifest phenomena, and new ways of talking, can be telling, but only because even in their novelty, they already belong to larger patterns of material and discursive practices. Practical interactions with our material surroundings are not external to our discursive practices, but indispensable components of them.
The point of my criticisms is that these marks and noises do not form a coherent pattern by themselves, but only as part of that larger pattern of practical engagement with the surrounding world. Rorty has already argued forcefully that scientific understanding cannot be disaggregated into distinct components of meaning and fact, fact and value, or linguistic scheme and experiential content.
My arguments suggest that we also cannot usefully divide human interaction with the environing world into distinct components of social solidarity and material practice, unforced agreement and prediction and control, inferential norms and causal effects, or (familiar) meanings and (unfamiliar) noises.
Welcome; it’s always interesting to have someone bring a new reading to a classic text. It would help if you would quote some of the book that is interpreting Wittgenstein, but I would offer that concluding he is a relativist is still seeing the Investigations through the eyes of someone that desires the same standard of “crystalline purity” or logic as certainty that he is trying to show is not required, by providing all the examples he goes through of ordinary practices that work perfectly well without it (have their own “logic”), and, in the process, understand why we want/need that “objectivity” that he was fixated on in the Tractatus. Another way to put this is that he is not fixing or dismissing skepticism.