POZOS DE SONDEO Liticos

It seems that in order for affirmations to have the epistemic character of

analyticity, the “here, now,” cannot reference the intersubjective world. If the claim, “here, now, blue” is interpreted as “somewhere in my presence there is something blue” then there is no guarantee of its truth, given the possibility of being deceived about things which appear to be in our presence. This seems to leave us back where we started. Either affirmations refer to something in the real world, in which case

they’re uncertain, or they refer to private sensations in which case they cannot

found the system of science. How did Schlick think he would be able to bridge this gap?

Schlick cannot have thought that affirmations would be formed in a private protocol language along the lines that Oberdan suggested, because Schlick denied

that anything which could rightly be called “language” would be able to express

content. “Black marks on a white background” doesn’t denote qualia, because nothing does. Rather, it must denote a formal relationship between some marks and their background. In order for experience to tell us how the world is, experience must represent the form of the world in its own material, whatever the material of experience may be said to be. This was the result of our discussion of Form and Content in chapter 3. Our experience is accurate (i.e. not an illusion or a hallucination) if and only if the facts in the world share the logical form of the experience. Importantly, though, this implies that there is some matter of fact about the logical form of our experience, and that form is the part that we want to express when we make statements about our experience.

Schlick wants to make these statements about the facts of experience in such a way as to guarantee their truth – this is what he stated as the goal of true protocol propositions in the opening pages of UFE: “if it is therefore possible to reproduce

the raw facts quite purely in ‘protocol propositions’, the latter seem to be the absolutely indubitable starting-points of all knowledge,” (UFE, p.370). It’s not

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possible to reproduce the facts of the external world infallibly – hallucinations and illusions are always possible – but we might be able to reproduce the facts about the way things appear to be. Thus, when we say “here, now, black marks on a white background” we are saying something about that matter of fact in the world which is our current experience. Affirmations are statements about experience, which makes them statements about something in the world (and this in turn means that they must be related to the system of science, which should aim to describe the world in its totality), but they are not statements about the stuff that we are

experiencing. “Here, now, black marks on white background,” can still be objectively true, even if the thing experiencing the writing is a brain in a vat.

We might now worry that if experience is a matter of fact and affirmations are statements about that fact, affirmations must open themselves up to error because it is always possible that the fact does not obtain. This is the line taken by Neurath in his response to Schlick, where he again points out that it is a feature of any true proposition that it be subject to disconfirmation (Neurath, 1934, [1983, pp.102-105]). This line of reasoning risks failing to make a distinction between two different ways in which we can say something is “possibly false”. Any meaningful proposition of the form “here, now, φ” is possibly false in the sense that there must be possible worlds in which φ does not obtain at the location picked out by “here, now”. But it does not follow that it is epistemically possible that “here, now, φ” is false. It is possible to see this kind of confusion as being behind Schlick and Neurath’s

persistent disagreement, since Neurath was clearly interested in a logical property of propositions while Schlick was trying to argue that there are synthetic truths that could nevertheless be known. Clearly, if synthetic knowledge is at all possible then

it is possible to know something which is possibly false, because if it wasn’t possibly false then the knowledge wouldn’t be synthetic. It would be disingenuous to reply

to this, “but how could you know it if it might be false?”, because that only carries rhetorical weight when the “might” comes with an implicit “for all you know”, and

ex hypothesi it is not the case that the supposed piece of knowledge might be false for all we know.

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If I know P, it is not epistemically possible that P is false. It seems as though I must be able to know that “here, now, φ” is trueif I am currently experiencing φ

(which is a stronger condition than if I am currently having an experience as if of φ)

and I understand the “here, now,” to be pointing to that which I am experiencing.

“φ” here is to describe logical form which, as a matter of fact, is instantiated by the experience of the subject and which may or may not also be instantiated by the external world. The “here, now,” points to a structure of which we are directly aware, because what it points to is that-of-which-we-are-aware. If the structure pointed to by the “here, now,” is the same as the structure of the second half of the sentence

then we know that the affirmation is true in the same way that we know the truth value of an analytic proposition.

Now is the appropriate point to introduce concerns about private languages. There are a couple of different worries that we might have about the grammar of φ

in the above examples. Firstly, if we’re assigning a meaning to φ that makes it true that we’re currently experiencing whatever φ denotes, then we’re not assigning a

meaning to φ based on what other people take φ to mean, or on what we ourselves might have taken φ to mean at another time. The immediate upshot of this is that φ

cannot reliably be used for communication. When meaning depends upon features of the world not accessible to the listener, the meaning of a sentence is inaccessible to the listener and the notion of communication breaks down, and a language which

can’t be used for communication is not much of a language. Secondly, if φ means something like “whatever I’m currently experiencing” then it’s not at all clear that it’s logically possible for “here now φ” to be false. As Wittgenstein put it in the Philosophical Investigations (henceforth “PI”), “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘correct,” (1953, [2009, §258]). That is, when the meaning of a term is whatever it needs to mean to make true the statement in which it occurs, it doesn’t

make sense to ask whether the statement in which it occurs is true, which is another

way of saying that it isn’t really a statement and the term in question is meaningless. The first worry, if it applies to affirmations, would make it obviously difficult to link them to an intersubjective system of science, but it at least allows that they could be

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false in the logical sense just highlighted. The second worry is that affirmations

formed in a private language aren’t really formed in any language at all, for exactly the reasons Neurath is pointing to –if they can’t logicallybe false then they can’t be

meaningful.

Wittgenstein’s PI was, of course, much later than Schlick’s UFE, but Schlick

should have been sensitive to similar concerns from the earlier “Diktat für Schlick” (“Dictation for Schlick”), which Wittgenstein dictated to Waismann (presumably for Schlick) shortly after the Form and Content lectures of 1932.29 _{Schlick’s claim}

“immediate data ‘have no owner’,” (1936, p.472) referenced above in our discussion of Oberdan, appears here by Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein & Waismann, 2003, p.27). In investigating the meaning of the word “understanding”, Wittgenstein asks

whether we can make sense of the idea that a proposition is accompanied by a thought, and says: “For us, there is nothing essentially private about thinking,” (ibid, p.27). While he does not explicitly say at this point that we can’t make sense of the

idea of a private language, the thrust of the piece is that understanding a proposition is a public matter. The same considerations are the topic of the first chapter of Philosophical Grammar (1974, §1-§13). Wittgenstein endorses a strongly- behaviourist view of mental processes – “Every so-called inner process is replaceable for us by an outer one, a memory image by a painted picture, conviction by a gesture of conviction, etc.,” (2003, p.27) – which seems like it would rule out an appeal to private sensations as either the meaning of a proposition or the foundations of the system of science. There is, however, a strong similarity between

29 _{There is some recent debate about the precise dating of “Diktat für Schlick”, with}

Manninen (undated) suggesting it could have been as late as 1935, after UFE was published, and even that it might have been dictated by Waismann rather than Wittgenstein. I think that the parallels discussed above between Schlick’s writing and the Diktat are too close for Schlick not to have been inspired by the new Wittgensteinian ideas, but we don’t need to assume that Schlick had a copy of

the work in his hands while he was writing. Whatever the date of the Diktat itself, Schlick was in such frequent contact with Wittgenstein (and Waismann) over this period that we may assume ideas were

shared earlier than they were put to paper. We can also find evidence of Wittgenstein’s position in

Philosophical Grammar, which is generally dated to before 1934 (Rhees, 1969, [1974 pp.487-488]), and where appropriate I will draw attention to this as we proceed.

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Schlick’s assertions about the grammar of affirmations and Wittgenstein’s

discussion of expectation and reason for action. Wittgenstein writes: How does an agent himself know what he expects? Does he observe his own behaviour and conjecture from it that he really expects Mr N for dinner? If we say that he must surely know whether he expects this person, then this proposition resembles the proposition that he must surely know the reason for his own act. Someone asks me: ‘Why are you turning out the light in your room?’ I say: ‘Because I want to go to sleep’. He asks: ‘Are you sure?’ And I

reply: “I must surely know why I am doing it’. This certainty

indicates that specifying a reason is the criterion for having this reason.

- Wittgenstein & Waismann, 2003, p.31

What Wittgenstein is saying here is that it is a feature of the grammar of sincerely-asserted reasons that it doesn’t make sense to question whether the

speaker has correctly identified their own reasons for doing something.30

Wittgenstein’s notion of “criterion” is one of justification for assertions. Why do we

use the term “X” for this object? Because it meets the criteria of X. Why do we say

that it meets the criteria of X? This latter question is simply misconceived (Wellman, 1962). This is the same feature of grammar that Schlick says accompanies an affirmation –that there is some use of “here, now, blue,” for which it just doesn’t

make sense to ask, “are you sure?”– suggesting that Schlick had a Wittgensteinian conception of language in mind when he was describing them. Wittgenstein’s idea

of a criterial relationship seems like it might go some way towards explaining what Schlick thought the relationship of affirmations to the system of science might be.

30 _{The situation is complicated by the possibility of someone lying about their reasons –}

Wittgenstein puts this down to language not behaving according to strict rules, and begins making use of the concept of family resemblance to deal with the various different ways people might have reasons for their actions (pp.35-37), although the term “family resemblance” doesn’t appear until his

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