It’s important to understand what Wittgenstein was trying to do in philosophy. Some people think that philosophy should be more like science, and because it’s confused, it doesn’t pay enough attention to the facts about reality, it needs to be reformed. They think that Wittgenstein was such a reformer of philosophy. He wanted to clear up its confusions, have it be more empirical, so it would be more useful like science.
Luke Muehlhauser writes at his blog, Common Sense Atheism, and made comments about a paper he read, How to do Philosophy, by Paul Graham. Here’s a quote from Luke’s piece, writing about Graham’s argument,
After admitting that formal logic, at least, might be useful, he concludes:
Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by “free.” Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by “exist.”
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? …The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong.
What went wrong? After a short history lesson, Graham writes:
If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it’s hard to distinguish something that’s hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that’s hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand.
But then came Wittgenstein:
I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging from the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart person who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it further, but for how he acted in response. Instead of quietly switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside. He was Gorbachev.
I want to say this assessment of Wittgenstein is wrong. It’s wrong about the project of philosophy. It’s wrong about Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein didn’t go into philosophy because he wanted to be a house cleaner, sweeping up and carrying out the trash, buffing here, and removing confusing clutter there. He came to it because he was concerned about the fact that there was conflict in the world about all kinds of issues, including what to do in politics, what to believe about God and how to treat other people, about whether or not there was enough meaning in life not to commit suicide, and so forth, and he thought, for various reasons, the resolution of these conflicts in the world around him was to be found in philosophy.
The fact that the study of philosophy seems overgrown with seemingly petty arguments about the meanings of words, or that one cannot tell wheat from chaff, is a result of the fact that everyone has a stake in these arguments. Everyone wants their say. And sometimes people argue on before they completely understand the points they want to make or the points that have gone before.
So, first, this writer misunderstands the importance of philosophy …thinking it’s not about what everyone in the newspapers is talking about.
Second, the writer thinks that because philosophy seems not to be relevant to real world non-academic concerns, but it still must be important because of its longevity, it must be about object lessons for people who want to study reasoning gone wrong. We study philosophy, goes this thinking, because it teaches us about all the ways our minds can get screwed up. Again, this fails to take into consideration the fact that philosophy is about problems that we have in the real world, and too, Wittgenstein was not the kind to give up on practical affairs just so he could study how thinking divorced from those affairs could go awry.
Third, the writer seems to think that philosophy would only be worth studying if it were successful in solving real world problems. People who write about science are only worth reading if what they write is useful to understand current problems. So, at one time Einstein wrote papers on relativity, but because of the advances in our scientific understanding, we accept what he had to say, but, we don’t have to read what he did say. With philosophy, the writer noted, we still read and try to evaluate even very old dead guys on their topics. This practice, supposedly, shows that philosophy does not progress from one discovery to another, and so, it is likely only about one confusion or another.
The problem here is that philosophy is not science. Whereas, scientists want to understand what’s going on in the world and have various explanations available, they look at what’s really going on to determine which of their available explanations fits best. We have reasons to think that philosophers, by and large, aren’t engaged in the same project. So, it begs the question about what there project entails to say they should emulate what the scientists are doing.
Say philosophers are struck by the thought that our understanding of reality, something that includes everything, is based on the way we argue, and that we argue logically. Given this first thought, philosophers try to explain what our understanding of reality might be. Then, I suspect, confusions and contradictions begin. Scientists, on the other hand, want to understand reality, and often they have different and often competing accounts of what to say about things. In order to resolve these conflicts they believe the best way to proceed is to look at the relevant facts about reality to determine which proposed explanation is supported by the evidence best. These two projects are not the same and should not involve the same procedures and concerns.
So, yes, if people come to philosophy expecting to find science, they might become turned off and go elsewhere. Wittgenstein, however, did not go to philosophy expecting to find something like engineering or physics, and so he was not turned off. Nor did he think that he needed to clean up philosophy, eliminating the confusions about language and meaning, by looking at what language and meaning are like in the real world, so that it would be more useful like science.
He went into philosophy thinking that the conflicts going on in the world were the result of people not understanding the implications of the logical thinking that is the basis of our understanding of the world. If people understood more about how language and meaning worked, they would not use certain demonstrably nonsensical ideas in their thinking.
Wittgenstein’s project was to make those demonstrations that showed the ideas nonsensical. A further project, which he was in no position to carry out, would have been to go about forcing people to admit that the ideas they use or rely on in their arguments are not meaningful enough to hold onto.
Wittgenstein went about cleaning up language and meaning and our confusions about these issues because he was impressed by the importance of logical thinking as the basis of our understanding, not because, like scientists, he thought that looking at facts of the world clears up these and all other questions.
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