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.
But the OP of @idley_philosophysing references logic, not empirical doubt, which is where skepticism typically emerges. How can I be skeptical of whether the law against contradiction is valid and maintain coherence?
I will acknowledge large variations could exist over forms of life in terms of what constitutes knowledge and I think those issues emerge particuarly with discussions of religion, but to foundational logic itself?
I’ll also grant we could create an absurd set of rules that defy many of our logical structures, but there would have to be a meta logical structure that permits us to operate under those absurd set of rules.
For example, if the rule in my world is that all blue marbles are round, can I have a blue marble that is not round? If you say it is not possible, are you not presupposing the unstated rule that logic applies? Suppose I then say, “in my world all blue marbles are round, but I have a blue marble that is not round because in my world there is no logic.”
If that’s the case, can it be said I even have rules?
Logical relativism probably doesn’t mean the absence of rules. That would be logical nihilism.
Like I said, in a thread on art, Himalayan logic would have 2 + 2 = 5 and desert logic would have 10 - 5 = 20, while for the rest of the world things are right-side-up. These and many other odd forms of reasoning (from a classical standpoint) demonstrate that logic is relative.
Wittgenstein is not claiming that there is no such thing as pure logic, but he is looking at why we impose that standard on our other practices, when they have their own criteria that work perfectly well, even when knowledge is not the only factor (most notably, in our relation to others). The difference between our desire for a fixed measure and how most of the world actually works (its other criteria) generates a fantasy that they are irreconcilable (for everything) rather than simply categorical (based on each kind of thing).
The confusion of lumping everything together and imposing certain criteria, forces us to imagine other generalized reasons why things fall apart (like different cultures), when actually there are just different ways things work. Wittgenstein actually does address cultural differences when he talks about “strange people” (p232), claiming that there is the possibility to resolve those issues, though not with any guarantee or force, which is what we really want in any moral situation–that something like logic would compel agreement. In requiring certainty, we take failure as impossibility (skeptical “relativity”).
Actually, if you look at, say, Plato or Descartes, they start with wondering how to resolve political or moral disagreements and then they retreat to empirical cases because they consider those to be our best case for something certain (which they carry over from what they wish they could use, which is math). Wittgenstein just shows, for example, that what an object is, is just a different matter (judged by other criteria/works a different way) then what justice is, or what another person is.
So we imagine that language or anything else is based on “rules” because that gives us generalized, fixed force, when following a rule–which Wittgenstein is just looking at as an example, not as an explanation–is just to submit to a certain standard, not that they determine anything or are the basis of judgment for every practice. There is no fact that ensures against failure, mistakes, blame, being duped, responsibility, etc.
Perhaps you underestimate the complexity of the roles these marks and noises can play in our lives. What stops us from enacting “grammar” and “normativity” with worldly objects in general and with “marks and noises” also ?
I suggest the phrase “marks and noises” as a lever that can pry this issue wide open.. I take Sellars’ approach to meaning to be a specification of the otherwise bumpersticker-vague “meaning is use.”
I speculate that the mark “marks and noises” signifies for you differently than it does for me. And that’s why “all reading is misreading.” What this phrase lacks for you, it doesn’t lack for me.
And remembering that signs are perceptual objects — things of this world — helps us remember that we aren’t playing with platonic essences ( doing a pseudo-math with words ) but socializing with other particular organisms.
The “danger” here is a mystification of “grammar.” Foolosophers are constantly tempted to pretend that they are theo-mathematicians of logical-linguistic essences.
Right. And this “claim” is not itself a “fact.” Or it need not be appropriated as the kind of metaphysical claim it warns against in a complicated fashion.
Signs and marks don’t hang out in thin air. These physical things are the technology of utterance.
The thing that is uttered is a sentence. And now we’re already in the land of the abstract. Advance to the content of the uttered sentence and we have a proposition.
We could argue that the above is an ad hoc analysis of human communication but we never finally escape the divisive realm of analysis, do we?
I think Saussure’s concept of the sound-image ( the signifier ) is profound and gives us a plausible platonism that is far from an essentialism with respect to “meaning.”
What is “ideal” in the perceived sign is its “character” as “being a repetition” of a sign. Another pronunciation of the same word. Nelson’s Goodman’s concept of “character” is basically equivalent.
Right. We can think of ourselves as apes making our way together in a world of objects, all of them “significant,” and some of them significant in a sign-like way. We are fundamentally a time-binding species (Korzybski), so it helps IMV to emphasize temporal patterns, like the performance of the institution of selfhood. “Marks and noises” sounds “too weak” perhaps if one considers a mere temporally decontextualized snapshot of human existence.
It’s hard to overstate the possible intensities of significance (“meaning”) in historically charged marks and noises. So there is no “loss of spiritual depth” in this approach.
Right. So we get to the surprisingly rich centrality of equivalence classes in human existence — which we can read Plato as pointing out. An unrepeatable vocalization is automatically “taken as” belonging to an “ideal class” of equivalent-enough unrepeatable vocalizations.
Likewise a fugitive sensory experience is immediately grasped as a “perception” of an enduring object, which is fruitfully analyzed also an open interpersonal possibility for future perceivers — an blurry discordant equivalence class.
I agree also that we never escape. I don’t think anyone can squeeze everything into a final saying. Zeno’s arrow flies because time isn’t captured in terms of snapshots.
I think we agree that we can’t assign a higher reality to the fleeting, unrepeatable vocalization. We only recognize its uniqueness against a backdrop of its status as a repetition (Kierkegaard again).
Yes indeed. The uniqueness and the repetition are interdependent. We can’t divorce quality from ideality or ideality from quality. Neither identity nor difference come first. Two sides of one coin, it seems to me.