Wittgenstein Workshop: Mulhall
Stephen Mulhall gave a paper entitled "'Hopelessly Strange': Bernard Williams' Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Transcendental Idealist". In it he argued, well, that Bernard Williams' portrait of Wittgenstein as a transcendental idealist is hopelessly strange. Taking Williams to view transcendental idealism as incoherent, Stephen argued that the early Wittgenstein does not so much endorse TI as provide a devestating critique of it. Furthermore, the passages on which Williams convicts the later Wittgenstein of first-person plural TI - passages along the lines of 'the limits of our language are the limits of our world' - can be read trivially as stating a tautology, and not as sketching out 'from the inside' the limits of intelligibility. Stephen then went on to argue that Williams' charge of first-person plural TI is premised on the idea that the later Wittgenstin is forced to stave off a relativism brought on by his hatred of natural science, a constructivist theory of meaning, and an unhealthy obsession with the contingent diversity of human life. Stephen rebutted all three of these characterisations and argued that rather than endorsing such TI, the later Wittgenstein carefully avoids admitting sense to the terms of the idealism/realism debate. Stephen finished by arguing that the truth in Williams' essay is his recognition of the later Wittgenstein's philosophical method as experimental, urging that the right way to understand first-person plural grammatical remarks is not as mapping out some transcendental idealist domain of possibility, but rather as explorations of the genuinely open question of who 'we' are.
posted by matt at 12:06 pm
3 Comments:
The following two points came up in discussion.
1) It was suggested that Bernard Williams is not providing a reductio of Wittgenstein's later philosophy by arguing it is committed to a first-person plural TI. Rather, Williams thinks that although there are difficulties with such a variety of TI, there is still something to it. Specifically, something credible in the idea that we are drawn to saying things we can only show, and in the conception of objecitivity that first-person plural TI invokes, i.e. that it is a conception that survives criticisms of other versions of TI. I don't know my Williams as well as I should, so I won't comment on this issue!
2) It was suggested that even if Wittgenstein thinks by denying sense to the realism/idealism debate he has avoided relativism, this is not the case. For denying realism seems like relativism to many people's ears. I think this is confused. Wittgenstein does not deny that certain (perhaps many) practices quantify over a domain of independent objects and are thus 'realistic' (hence PI 98: 'When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we - and our meaning - do not stop anywhere short of the fact: but we mean this-is-so'). What he denies is sense to some kind of second-order discourse about how any such practice can be 'realistic'.
Just a quick one on 2), which I think is meant to be a report of a worry I raised. I wasn't actually talking about Wittgenstein, but about the kind of view attributed to Wittgenstein by Stephen. And my worry was about a particular piece of reasoning I thought I found in Stephen's presentation. The position was claimed not to be relativist, because it did not allow relativism to be coherently stated within it, or a form of transcendental idealism, because it did not allow idealism to be stated coherently within it. I doubted whether these were reasons enough to claim decisively that the position was not relativist or idealist. For it might be that the reasons for insisting that relativism or idealism could not coherently be stated within a position depended on that position's being relativist or idealist. And, with specific reference to the reason Stephen offered in the relativism case, I wondered whether that was, in fact, a relativist reason.
Following up on what I said at the event:
(a) It seems to me uncharitable to claim that Williams's "attempts to saddle the later Wittgenstein with a commitment to transcendental idealism are in the service of constructing an objection to those who might wish to take Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophy with any seriousness." (p. 1)
Surely, on the contrary, Williams is trying to tease out something that he takes to be of interest, and well-worth engaging with, in PI;
(b) Wittgenstein had a long-standing engagement with TI, and whether he was espousing or rejecting it in the PI, it is difficult to read that text without an awareness that it is still on his horizon. Inattention to the thread indicative of this engagement yields a philosophical reading of PI that is perhaps more coherent, but at a cost?
(c) Witt exegesis aside: It is as well to have that form of TI, gleaned (tentatively) from the later Wittgenstein's remarks, properly articulated - it is a position that differs from standard forms of TI.
(d) A more specific point (don't know why I have chosen this one): Stephen says (p. 10) "And if the relevant fact is that certain things are nonsensical, what things? If they were specific thoughts or propositions, then they surely can't be nonsensical; but if they truly are nonsensical, how can we talk of them as specific 'things' at all?" -- This is too quick. For example, why could the 'things' in question not be syntactic strings, which turn out to be nonsensical, but interstingly so? (This is a nod to Adrian Moore, of course.)
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