The treatment of the objects of thought as shadows and peculiar (simple, indefinable) entities partly stems from the following puzzle:
Our difficulty could be put this way: We think about things,--but how do these things enter into our thoughts? We think about Mr. Smith; but Mr. Smith need
151 Among the later Wittgenstein‘s interpreters, Charles Travis invents the most appealing examples that illustrate the point about interpretability of anything with content.
152 I agree with Travis that one of Wittgenstein's most important later insights is that ―[a] rule, like any other item with content, admits of various interpretations‖ (2008, 283). Hacker‘s rules would lose their sense- determining power if he were to say that they were merely formal. We saw in earlier chapters that these rules are meant to capture the semantics of expressions, their meaning, not merely their formal features.
135 not be present. A picture of him won‘t do; for how are we to know whom it represents? In fact no substitute for him will do. Then how can he himself be an object of our thoughts? (BB 38)
The question ―When I say: ‗I expect Mr. Smith‘ what is the nature of the connection between my words and the man I expect?‖ asks for the connection between our words and things. When the man is present I can point to him and say ―When I say ‗Mr. Smith, I mean him‖, but when he is not there I, obviously, cannot point to anything. On the sublime view, when we say the word ―Mr. Smith‖ and mean Mr. Smith, we perform the act of mental pointing to the man Mr. Smith, despite him not being present. We point to him not with our hand, but with our mind, and, in this way, our mind establishes the peculiar connection between our signs and objects that constitute their meaning. Hence ―we are tempted to think that while my friend said, "Mr. N. will come to see me", and meant what he said, his mind must have made the connection. This is partly what makes us think of meaning or thinking as a peculiar mental activity‖ (BB 39). Wittgenstein notes that what makes it difficult to see that the connection between the word ―Mr. Smith‖ and the man Mr. Smith is nothing ―queer‖ – that it was made when explaining the meaning of the word ―Mr. Smith‖ we pointed to a man saying ―this is Mr. Smith‖ – lies in ―a peculiar form of expression of ordinary language, which makes it appear that the connection between our thought (or the expression of our thought) and the thing we think about must have subsisted during the act of thinking‖ (BB 39). But no such ―queer‖ mental connection needs to be there, if we take into account that we learned how to operate with proper names.
A paradigmatic example of seeing the connection between names and objects as a result of ―queer‖ mental pointing is Russell‘s theory of logically proper names. In PI 38 Wittgenstein treats the Russell-style conception of the connection between simple signs (names) and what they signify as an instance of the subliming of our ordinary practice of naming and using names. According to Wittgenstein, Russell is one of those philosophers who think that the kind of connection between signs, thought and the meaning must subsist during the act of thinking. When a thing is named, the invisible mental connection between the name and the thing named is established, and this connection is mentally re-enacted every single time we think of that thing. He writes,
136 Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object.--And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word "this" innumerable times (PI 38).
Subliming of names and the practice of naming is most prominent in giving names and naming the central role in explaining the possibility of understanding sentences.153 It is a counterpart of the sublime conception of meaning that naming must achieve something important: knowing what a word names (and how it syntactically combines with other words to form sentences) is a necessary and sufficient condition of our understanding any sentence it can occur in. As we saw earlier, on the Tractatus‟s view of linguistic understanding, to know how and what each individual word signifies suffices for understanding the truth-conditions of any proposition in which it can occur. To be a name fulfils the single most important semantic role, because the subsequent meaningful employment of a name presupposes an underlying correlation between words and their meaning established by means of naming: ―Naming here appears as the foundation, the be all and end all of language‖ (PG 56). On the sublime view, once we understand what an expression names and how it combines with other expressions, we are given its whole use: "Once you know what the word stands for, you understand it, you know its whole use" (PI 264). However, the same conflation that the standard view makes between two dimensions of use, also happens here: the broad notion of use, which describes our ability to understand what is said relative to the context of speaking, is assimilated to the narrow notion of use (combining). Thus, an understanding of what is said by any novel proposition is effected solely by knowing what expressions name and how they combine with other expressions in well-formed propositions, without consideration of any particular context in which the speaking takes place. In this way, the standard reading instantiates the sublime view of use, which is, in the same as the Tractatus, the target of Wittgenstein‘s criticism in the Investigations, rather than something he defends there.
The way of thinking about the connection between words and things that one finds in Russell‘s theory of logically proper names arises, Wittgenstein says, ―when language goes on holiday‖ (PI 38). That is, subliming of names and naming is a result of the exclusion of
153
137 the particular environment in which words have their ―life‖ or significance. The life of a sign does not lie in the hidden mental processes that breathe life into it, but only ―in use [a sign] is alive‖ (PI 432). The idea of ―language on holiday‖, as discussed in chapter 3, clearly contrasts with language-in-use broadly understood, and with understanding our concepts, including names and naming, in the context of their application in our life, rather than as something independent from this. The metaphor of ―language on holiday‖ brings out that treating ―propositions‖, ―names‖, or ―thoughts‖ as performing peculiar acts, or as having mysterious functions and properties, happens only because we have abstracted away from practical contexts in which we apply these notions, when we assume that everything essential to our language use can be specified by considering regularities pertaining to surface grammar.
4.6 Summary
My main aim in this chapter has been to develop an interpretation of the later Wittgenstein‘s idea of subliming in order to give more content to the notion that surface grammar is a source of philosophical confusion. I argued that we can see the Tractatus as Wittgenstein‘s main example of the sublimed view of language and psychology. I identified those aspects of the Tractatus that I think Wittgenstein targeted in the Investigations as contributing to the subliming of the logic of our language, and which also determine the way in which the Tractatus can be called ―metaphysical‖. I claimed that, according to the Tractatus, philosophical problems arise because of a failing to recognise symbols in signs, and I drew the connection between, on the one hand, the Tractatus‟s understanding of the wholesale exclusion of nonsense on the basis of rules that describe existing logical forms, and, on the other hand, the standard view‘s interpretation of the distinction between sense and nonsense, the grammar‘s sense determining role and the nature of philosophical problems in Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy. I claimed that the standard interpretation is mistaken inasmuch as there is an important contrast between the Tractatus and the Investigations regarding all these matters, and that the Tractatus itself represents a prime example of the way the logic of our language can be misunderstood. Moreover, the aspect of use I have been calling ―narrow‖ – which the standard interpretation associates with the later Wittgenstein, and which, as I argued in chapter 2, is what Wittgenstein understands as ―surface grammar‖ – is, as a matter of fact, the notion of use as logico-syntactical
138 employment of symbols that Wittgenstein develops in the Tractatus and criticises later. Hence, in this sense too, Hacker‘s interpretation fails to observe the relevant contrast between Wittgenstein early and later philosophy.
Pertinent elements that define the way in which the Tractatus embodies the sublime view include philosophical requirements and ideals Wittgenstein projects onto his object of investigation; i.e., our language use and associated concepts. Some of these are the philosopher‘s craving for generality and hidden essences, the ideals of determinacy and completeness, as well as over-simple ideas concerning the structure of language, meaning, psychology and conceptual unity. I argued that the sublime view of language, seen as encompassing all these aspects, is another formulation of the ―language on holiday‖, that is, a belief that one can fully understand language use and linguistic understanding in isolation from particular contexts of use. To view our language use as ―language on holiday‖ means to see it as a collection of mere signs whose representational powers come from elsewhere, only because we have abstracted away from the use of signs broadly understood. In this way, one fails to take into account our everyday practices of operating with signs, where signs are treated as tools that are integrated with various purposes and activities. The sublime view thus postulates something other than the dead signs whose function is to fulfil the void created by disconnecting our language from occasions of its employment. But what it thus postulates are nothing other but the signs which like anything else with content admit of interpretation. I applied the later Wittgenstein‘s critique of uninterpretable signs to Hacker‘s notion of ―rules‖ suggesting that these tabulated, sense-determining items, whatever they are, would be just another instantiation of sublimed shadows.
Insofar as subliming is essentially connected with the philosopher‘s systematic neglect of the relevant notion of ―depth grammar‖, methods of ―de-sublimation‖ or perspicuous representation will aim to remind the philosopher that in a successful human communication and interaction by means of language ―nothing out of ordinary in involved‖ (PI 94).154
In the next chapter, I discuss and criticise the standard interpretation‘s view of subliming and of Wittgenstein‘s turn. I argue that this interpretation is incorrect because: first, it fails to acknowledge that the sense-determining role of grammar is the object of Wittgenstein‘s
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139 later criticism, rather than something he subscribes to in Philosophical Investigations; and second, it misses some of the critical elements of Wittgenstein‘s turn away from his early philosophy, in particular, the importance of the notion of family resemblances in his new account of language use.
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