Some Thoughts on Transcendental Idealism and the Later Wittgenstein

Here are some thoughts that might be relevant to the discussion that followed Stephen Mulhall’s paper at the recent Wittgenstein workshop.

One of the charges made against transcendental idealism (TI) by the early Witgenstein is that transcendental claims are at best senseless and at worst false. For example, Wittgenstein asserts that the transcendental self as the linguistic subject is supposed to set the limits to the world. But he also asserts that this statement lacks sense because the limits in question restrict sense to factual statements about possible combinations of simple objects, yet the statement is not a factual one.

Now, the idea of a referential isomorphism between elementary propositions and simple objects falls apart with the colour exclusion problem. This leads Wittgenstein eventually to a language game based theory of meaning, where reference is still set by the possible combinations of objects, but where these combinations do not have a general form reflected in the general form of the proposition as factual assertion. We also get allowed into our theory of meaning non-referential forms of discourse such as giving orders. Obviously some of the senses employed in the latter linguistic practice are not meaningful in virtue of being true or false (by referring or not).

The kind of TI advocated by Lear and others (apparently inspired by Williams) is one where we test the limits of intelligibility (sense) through noting where our understanding runs out. The first thing to say is that this kind of ‘testing’ discourse cannot be ruled out as lacking sense simply because it is non-factual. If that was the case then giving orders wouldn’t make sense either. This leaves it open for the later Wittgenstein to countenance the activity of ‘showing’ the limits of sense via a specific family of non-factual second-order language games. If you like, talking about the limits of language ― doing philosophy ― is just another sui generis human language game, like that of giving orders, that reflects ‘our way of being minded’. So one cannot appeal to the early Wittgenstein’s charge of incoherence against transcendental claims when denying he is espousing a first-person plural TI of some form in his later work.

Stephen makes a case for reading the ‘limits of my language…’ comment, with regard to the later Wittgenstein, trivially ― as stating the truism that what someone can’t bring to language she can’t include in a linguistically constructed view of the world. Some of the motivation for this trivial reading of the comment comes from the incoherence charge which I have just said doesn’t hold for the later Wittgenstein. The rest of the motivation comes from Wittgenstein’s ‘quietism’ ― his railing against ‘constructive philosophy’ that advances ‘theses in philosophy’. I take the target of Wittgenstein’s quietism to be philosophical outlooks that lead us into making a problem out of aspects of our ‘mindedness’ that seem unproblematic before we do philosophy ― such as following rules, being aware of other’s mental states, perceiving that something is red. But Lear’s Williams-inspired view that the later Wittgenstein is a kind of transcendental idealist does not present him as engaged in advancing philosophical theses that make a problem of what common sense takes in its stride. The term ‘our mindedness’ is supposed to capture the characteristic ease with which our minds engage the world, of how ‘we go on’. Mapping out the limits of that mindedness is mapping out where that characteristic ease begins to fall away, causing the ‘we’ to disappear by showing that the idea that things could be different loses its force ― where understanding goes dark limits show up that dissolve the need for constructive philosophy to reassure us our mindedness isn’t caught up in some kind of Whorfian relativism.

So if reading the comment trivially is motivated by the thought that countenancing some form of substantive (transcendental) conception of limits to intelligibility leads to constructive theses in philosophy, then this motivation gains no succour from Lear’s understanding of the later Wittgenstein’s TI. But there might still be the worry that understanding these limits reassures us of the ‘transcendental’ fit between mind and world, when really all it does is make plain that we need seek no such transcendental guarantee, because the question over such fit is cognitively empty. McDowell makes this distinction in an afterword to Mind and World (pp. 158-9 of the 1996 paperback). Yet even if we rein in Lear’s TI to this minimal point about rendering Whorfian relativism senseless, there is still an issue about the modal status of the cognitive structures we are investigating. Even if those structures are just our way of being minded, surely some of the structures in question can be necessary for that mindedness ― contingent as it is ― to be what it is? The image of a cognitive terrain preexisting our linguistic practices upon which we gradually fill out possibilities is the image that Lear and others are invoking when they talk about first-person plural TI as mapping out such necessary cognitive structures.

Stephen questioned the need for such an image. To that end he attempted to rebut the charge of relativism laid at the later Wittgenstein’s door ― the charge of adhering to a constructivist theory of meaning. This rebuttal is necessary to neutralise the desire to appeal to the image as a bulwark against such constructivism. Stephen did this by showing that the later Wittgenstein has no room for a realism/idealism distinction, so no room for being a ‘constructivist’ about meaning. I was quite convinced by this at the time, but now I am not so sure (and I see now the force of Michael Morris’s comment).

The thing is, I can’t see how we can deny sense to the realism/idealism debate without appealing to the image of a preexisting cognitive terrain. We refuse idealism by denying sense to the claim that things could be otherwise for us. But that seems to involve the idea that there is a way things make sense to us ― precisely the preexisting cognitive terrain that is our way of being minded. We refuse realism by denying that we could hook ourselves up to the world in a way that was independent of our mindedness ― that is, by denying we could take some God’s-eye-view of reality. But this too seems to entail that there is a definite way we are minded. Thus anything less than the image seems to push us into one or the other of idealism and realism. If the instances where understanding goes dark are not taken as instances of our mindedness reaching its limits, then this is tantamount to the belief that there are no limits and we could take another viewpoint on reality (idealism). With such idealism in mind, we get the vertigo that generates the need for a constructive philosophy that reintroduces a distinction between our access to the world and how it is in-itself (realism).

This seems to me to leave us in the apparently odd position of asserting that escaping the realism/idealism debate requires adopting TI. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that all that is being asserted by such ‘TI’ is that because our way of being minded has a necessary structure, certain philosophical questions are in principle cognitively empty for us. This only seems like idealism when we compare it to classical realism. But then what this version of ‘TI’ shows us is that such realism can have no sense for us.