48 ideas
| 18730 | The history of philosophy only matters if the subject is a choice between rival theories [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: If philosophy were a matter of choice between rival theories, then it would be sound to teach it historically. But if it is not, then it is a fault to teach it historically, because it is quite unnecessary; we can tackle the subject direct. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C V A) | |
| A reaction: Wittgenstein was a bit notorious for not knowing the history of the subject terribly well, and this explains why. Presumably our tackling the subject direct will not have the dreadful consequence of producing yet another theory. |
| 18704 | Philosophy tries to be rid of certain intellectual puzzles, irrelevant to daily life [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is the attempt to be rid of a particular kind of puzzlement. This 'philosophical' puzzlement is one of the intellect and not of instinct. Philosophical puzzles are irrelevant to our every-day life. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A I.1) | |
| A reaction: All enquiry begins with puzzles, and they are cured by explanations, which result in understanding. In that sense he is right. I entirely disagree that the puzzles are irrelevant to daily life. |
| 18710 | Philosophers express puzzlement, but don't clearly state the puzzle [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers as 'Why?' and 'What?' without knowing clearly what their questions are. They are expressing a feeling of mental uneasiness. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B I.1) | |
| A reaction: He suggests it is childish to express puzzlement, instead of asking for precise information. How odd. All enquiries start with vague puzzlement, which gradually comes into focus, or else is abandoned. |
| 18732 | We don't need a theory of truth, because we use the word perfectly well [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: It is nonsense to try to find a theory of truth, because we can see that in everyday life we use the word quite clearly and definitely in various different senses. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C V B) | |
| A reaction: This was a year before Tarski published his famous theory of truth for formal languages. Prior to that, most philosophers were giving up on truth. Would he say the same about 'gravity' or 'inflation'? |
| 18714 | We already know what we want to know, and analysis gives us no new facts [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: In philosophy we know already all that we want to know; philosophical analysis does not give us any new facts. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B V.1) |
| 18706 | Words of the same kind can be substituted in a proposition without producing nonsense [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: 'Blue' and 'brown' are of the same kind, for the substitution of one for the other, though it may falsify the proposition, does not make nonsense of it. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A I.4) | |
| A reaction: He chooses an easy example, because they are determinates of the determinable 'coloured'. What if I say 'the sky is blue', and then substitute 'frightening' for 'blue'? |
| 18735 | Talking nonsense is not following the rules [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Talking nonsense is not following the rules. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C X) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't seem to distinguish between syntax and semantics, and makes it sound as if all nonsense is syntactic, which it isn't. |
| 18719 | Grammar says that saying 'sound is red' is not false, but nonsense [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: If grammar says that you cannot say that a sound is red, it means not that it is false to say so but that it is nonsense - i.e. not a language at all. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B IX.6) | |
| A reaction: I am baffled as to why he thinks 'grammar' is what prohibits such a statement. Surely the world, the nature of sound and colour, is what makes the application of the predicate wrong. Sounds aren't coloured, so they can't be red. False, not nonsense. |
| 18731 | There is no theory of truth, because it isn't a concept [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: It is wrong to say that there is any one theory of truth, for truth is not a concept. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C V B) | |
| A reaction: This makes you wonder how he understood the word 'concept'. In most modern discussions truth seems to be a concept, and in Frege it can be an unsaturated predicate which is satisfied by sentences or thoughts. |
| 18707 | All thought has the logical form of reality [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Thought must have the logical form of reality if it is to be thought at all. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A V.1) | |
| A reaction: This links nicely the idea that true thoughts somehow share the structure of what they refer to, with the idea of logical form in logic. But maybe logical form is a fiction we offer in order to obtain a spurious map of reality. |
| 18724 | In logic nothing is hidden [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: In logic nothing is hidden. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B XII.3) | |
| A reaction: If so, then the essence of logic must be there for all to see. The rules of natural deduction are a good shot at showing this. |
| 18709 | Laws of logic are like laws of chess - if you change them, it's just a different game [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: I might as well question the laws of logic as the laws of chess. If I change the rules it is a different game and there is an end of it. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A XI.3) | |
| A reaction: No, that isn't the end of it, because there are meta-criteria for preferring one game to another. Why don't we just give up classical logic? It would be such fun to have a wild wacky logic. We can start with 'tonk'. |
| 18736 | Contradiction is between two rules, not between rule and reality [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Contradiction is between one rule and another, not between rule and reality. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C XIII) | |
| A reaction: If I say 'he is sitting' and 'he is standing', it seems to be reality which produces the contradiction. What 'rule' could possibly do it? The rule which says sitting and standing are incompatible? But what makes that so? |
| 18723 | We may correctly use 'not' without making the rule explicit [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Correct use does not imply the ability to make the rules explicit. Understanding 'not' is like understanding a move in chess. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B XII.1) |
| 18718 | Saying 'and' has meaning is just saying it works in a sentence [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: When we say that the word 'and' has meaning what we mean is that it works in a sentence and is not just a flourish. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B VIII.2) |
| 18727 | A person's name doesn't mean their body; bodies don't sit down, and their existence can be denied [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The meaning of the words 'Professor Moore' is not a certain human body, because we do not say that the meaning sits on the sofa, and the words occur in the proposition 'Professor Moore does not exist'. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B Easter) | |
| A reaction: Brilliant. Love it. Kripke ending up denying the existence of 'meanings'. |
| 18738 | We don't get 'nearer' to something by adding decimals to 1.1412... (root-2) [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: We say we get nearer to root-2 by adding further figures after the decimal point: 1.1412.... This suggests there is something we can get nearer to, but the analogy is a false one. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], Notes) |
| 18708 | Infinity is not a number, so doesn't say how many; it is the property of a law [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: 'Infinite' is not an answer to the question 'How many?', since the infinite is not a number. ...Infinity is the property of a law, not of an extension. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A VII.2) |
| 18737 | There are no positive or negative facts; these are just the forms of propositions [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: There are no positive or negative facts. 'Positive' and 'negative' refer to the form of propositions, and not to the facts which verify or falsify them. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C XIII) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think if we are going to allow the world to be full of 'facts', then there are negative, conjunctive, disjunctive and hypothetical facts. |
| 13076 | Scholastics treat relations as two separate predicates of the relata [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The scholastics treated it as a step in the right explanatory direction to analyze a relational statement of the form 'aRb' into two subject-predicate statements, attributing different relational predicates to a and to b. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2.1) | |
| A reaction: The only alternative seems to be Russell's view of relations as pure universals, having a life of their own, quite apart from their relata. Or you could take them as properties of space, time (and powers?), external to the relata? |
| 18715 | Using 'green' is a commitment to future usage of 'green' [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: If I say this is green, I must say that other things are green too. I am committed to a future usage. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B VI.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to suggest that the eternal verity of a universal concept is just a convention of stability in a language. |
| 13102 | If you individuate things by their origin, you still have to individuate the origins themselves [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If we go for the necessity-of-origins view, A and B are different if the origin of A is different from the origin of B. But one is left with the further question 'When is the origin of A distinct from the origin of B?' | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: There may be an answer to this, in a regress of origins that support one another, but in the end the objection is obviously good. You can't begin to refer to an 'origin' if you can't identify anything in the first place. |
| 13103 | Numerical difference is a symmetrical notion, unlike proper individuation [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Scholastics distinguished criteria of numerical difference from questions of individuation proper, since numerical difference is a symmetrical notion. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This apparently old-fashioned point appears to be conclusively correct. Modern thinkers, though, aren't comfortable with proper individuation, because they don't believe in concepts like 'essence' and 'substance' that are needed for the job. |
| 13104 | Haecceity as property, or as colourless thisness, or as singleton set [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: There is a contemporary property construal of haecceities, ...and a Scotistic construal as primitive, 'colourless' thisnesses which, unlike singleton-set haecceities, are aimed to do some explanatory work. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.4) | |
| A reaction: [He associates the contemporary account with David Kaplan] I suppose I would say that individuation is done by properties, but not by some single property, so I take it that I don't believe in haecceities at all. What individuates a haecceity? |
| 13100 | Maybe 'substance' is more of a mass-noun than a count-noun [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: We could think of 'substance' on the model of a mass noun, rather than a count noun. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.3) | |
| A reaction: They offer this to help Leibniz out of a mess, but I think he would be appalled. The proposal seems close to 'prime matter' in Aristotle, which never quite does the job required of it. The idea is nice, though, and should be taken seriously. |
| 13068 | We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: In the 'blueprint' approach to substance, we confront at least three questions: What is it for a thing to be an individual substance? What is it for a thing to be the kind of substance that it is? What is it to be that very individual substance? | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: My working view is that the answer to the first question is that substance is essence, that the second question is overrated and parasitic on the third, and that the third is the key question, and also reduces to essence. |
| 13069 | The general assumption is that substances cannot possibly be non-substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: There is a widespread assumption, now and in the past, that substances are essentially substances: nothing is actually a substance but possibly a non-substance. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that they clearly mean, in this context, that substances are 'necessarily' substances, not that they are 'essentially' substances. I would just say that substances are essences, and leave the necessity question open. |
| 13072 | Modern essences are sets of essential predicate-functions [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The modern view of essence is that the essence of a particular thing is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to it, and the essence of any kind is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to every possible member of that kind. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.2.2) | |
| A reaction: Thus the modern view has elided the meanings of 'essential' and 'necessary' when talking of properties. They are said to be 'functions' from possible worlds to individuals. The old view (and mine) demands real essences, not necessary properties. |
| 17080 | Modern essentialists express essence as functions from worlds to extensions for predicates [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The modern essentialist gives the same metaphysical treatment to every grammatical predicate - by associating a function from worlds to extensions for each. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to mean that essentialism is the view that if some predicate attaches to an object then that predicate is essential if there is an extension of that predicate in all possible worlds. In English, essential predicates are necessary predicates. |
| 13101 | Necessity-of-origin won't distinguish ex nihilo creations, or things sharing an origin [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: A necessity-of-origins approach cannot work to distinguish things that come into being genuinely ex nihilo, and cannot work to distinguish things sharing a single origin. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: Since I am deeply suspicious of essentiality or necessity of origin (and they are not, I presume, the same thing) I like these two. Twins have always bothered me with the second case (where order of birth seems irrelevant). |
| 18726 | For each necessity in the world there is an arbitrary rule of language [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: To a necessity in the world there corresponds an arbitrary rule in language. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B XIV.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be hardcore logical positivism, making all necessities arbitrary. Compare Quine on the number of planets. |
| 13081 | Even extreme modal realists might allow transworld identity for abstract objects [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: It might be suggested that even the extreme modal realist can countenance transworld identity for abstract objects. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 3.2.2 n46) | |
| A reaction: This may sound right for uncontroversial or well-defined abstracta such as numbers and circles, but even 'or' is ambiguous, and heaven knows what the transworld identity of 'democracy' is! |
| 18712 | Understanding is translation, into action or into other symbols [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Understanding is really translation, whether into other symbols or into action. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B I.5) | |
| A reaction: The second part of this sounds like pure pragmatism. To do is to understand? I doubt it. Do animals understand anything? |
| 18280 | We live in sense-data, but talk about physical objects [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The world we live in is the world of sense-data, but the world we talk about is the world of physical objects. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], p.82), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 13 'Verif' | |
| A reaction: I really like that one. Even animals, I surmise, think of objects quite differently from the way they immediately experience them. |
| 18729 | Part of what we mean by stating the facts is the way we tend to experience them [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: There is no need of a theory to reconcile what we know about sense data and what we believe about physical objects, because part of what we mean by saying that a penny is round is that we see it as elliptical in such and such conditions. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C III) | |
| A reaction: This is an interesting and cunning move to bridge the gap between our representations and reallity. We may surmise how a thing really is, but then be surprised by the sense-data we get from it. |
| 18734 | If you remember wrongly, then there must be some other criterion than your remembering [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: If you remember wrongly, then there must be some other criterion than your remembering. If you admit another test, then your memory itself is not the test. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C VII) | |
| A reaction: If I fear that I am remembering some private solitary event wrongly, there is no other criterion to turn to, so I'm stuck. Sometimes dubious memories are all we have. |
| 18721 | Explanation and understanding are the same [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: For us explanation and understanding are the same, understanding being the correlate of explanation. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B XI.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that they are 'the same', but they are almost interdependent ideas. Strevens has a nice paper on this. |
| 18720 | Explanation gives understanding by revealing the full multiplicity of the thing [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: An explanation gives understanding, ...but it cannot teach you understanding, it cannot create understanding. It makes further distinctions i.e. it increases multiplicity. When multiplicity is complete, then there is no further misunderstanding. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B X.3) | |
| A reaction: The thought seems to resemble Aristotle's idea of definition as gradual division of the subject. To understand is the dismantle the parts and lay them out before us. Wittgenstein was very interested in explanation at this time. |
| 13071 | We can go beyond mere causal explanations if we believe in an 'order of being' [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher comfortable with an 'order of being' has richer resources to make sense of the 'in virtue of' relation than that provided only by causal relations between states of affairs, positing in addition other sorts of explanatory relationships. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This might best be characterised as 'ontological dependence', and could be seen as a non-causal but fundamental explanatory relationship, and not one that has to depend on a theistic world view. |
| 18716 | A machine strikes us as being a rule of movement [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: We are accustomed to look on a machine as the expression of a rule of movement. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B VII.2) | |
| A reaction: What a beautiful definition of a machine! I like this because it connects the two halves of my view of the 'essence' of a thing, as derived from Aristotle, as both a causal mechanism and an underlying principle. Cf Turing machines. |
| 18713 | If an explanation is good, the symbol is used properly in the future [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The criterion of an explanation is whether the symbol explained is used properly in the future. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B II.4) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be a pragmatic criterion for the best explanation. It presumably rests on his doctrine that meaning is use, so good explanation is understanding meanings. |
| 18717 | Thought is an activity which we perform by the expression of it [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Thought is an activity which we perform by the expression of it, and lasts as long as the expression. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B VIII) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an outmoded view of thought, which modern cognitive science has undermined, by showing how little of our thinking is actually conscious. |
| 18725 | A proposition draws a line around the facts which agree with it [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: A proposition gives reality a degree of freedom; it draws a line round the facts which agree with it, and distinguishes them from those which do not. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B XIII.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the idea of meaning as the range of truth conditions. Propositions as sets of possible worlds extends this into possible facts which agree with the proposition. Most facts neither agree nor disagree with some proposition. |
| 18728 | The meaning of a proposition is the mode of its verification [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The meaning of a proposition is the mode of its verification (and two propositions cannot have the same verification). | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C I) | |
| A reaction: Does this mean that if two sentences have the same mode of verification, then they must be expressing the same proposition? I guess so. |
| 18705 | Words function only in propositions, like levers in a machine [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Words function only in propositions, like the levers in a machine. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], A I.4) | |
| A reaction: Hm. Consider the word 'tree'. Did you manage to do it? Was it just a noise? |
| 18711 | A proposition is any expression which can be significantly negated [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Any affirmation can be negated: if it has sense to say p it also has sense to say ¬p. ...A proposition therefore is any expression which can be significantly negated. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B I.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'therefore'. I'm thinking you would have to already grasp the proposition in order to apply his negation test. |
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 18733 | Laws of nature are an aspect of the phenomena, and are just our mode of description [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are not outside phenomena. They are part of language and of our way of describing things; you cannot discuss them apart from their physical manifestation. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], C V C) | |
| A reaction: I suppose this amounts to a Humean regularity theory - that the descriptions pick out patterns in the manifestations. I like the initial claim that they are not external to phenomena. |