Reading Group: Lear's 'Disappearing We'
Jonathan Lear takes a line on the later Wittgenstein (LW) inspired by the Williams' paper we read last week. The paper outlines Wittgenstein's investigation of the way inner episodes of understanding meaning are intrinsically connected to the potentially publicly available outer manifestation of the practical ability to follow a rule. It compares this to Kant's investigation of how intuitive representations are 'saturated' by concepts due to their being instances of the analytic unity of apperception. The quite general point of comparison is that a certain synthetic unity amongst representations is required to make possible inner episodes of understanding/apperception. For LW the synthetic unity in question is constituted by language-games, so that understanding has to be capable of manifesting itself in rule-following which is potentially recognisable as a shared linguistic practice. Lear glosses this in terms of every 'I understand' implying a 'We are so minded'. This is supposed to license the 'we' in the second locution disappearing, so that what makes sense to 'us' shortens to 'what makes sense'. I presume the thought here is that if any case of understanding a word will also be a case of some potentially publicly available linguistic ability manifested in a language-game, then the 'we' who take making sense to consist in such manifestation just is the 'we' of sense-makers simpliciter.
The disappearing 'we' is one leg of Lear's interpretation of LW. The other is that our reflective self-consciousness of the fact that making sense simpliciter is a matter of words being potentially manifested in shared linguistic practices is consciousness of a form of transcendental idealism. The idea here is that the metaphysical articulation of the world is utterly enmeshed with the linguistic articulation of language-games - to individuate an object is always to articulate a view of the world that is part of our linguistically articulated 'form of life'. The thought is that any such individuation will consist in introducing one more possible articulation of the world that the global 'we' finds makes sense as a language-game, and that this means there is no room for articulating how the world is in itself. Or, to put it another way, on this view, the limits of possibilia coincide with the limits of what is linguistically articulable.
There are two obvious questions here. Does the 'we' disappear simply because understanding a word requires potentially publicly available manifestations of rule-following? If so, does this really imply idealism? To the first question, I think the answer is yes. If the global 'we' is defined as those subjects who understand meanings in terms of publicly available rule-following or shared linguistic practices, then any such understanding will be encompassed by some shared linguistic practice. It is then an anayltic truth that understanding will be part of the global 'we'. As for the second question, I'm not sure. I think it will depend on what one understands by 'realism'. If this is understood as our linguistic articulation of the world not falsifying the properties and relations that the world contains , then I don't think anything idealistic follows (some subset of our form of life might be articulated by language-games that precisely 'map' what there is). But if realism is taken as having an epistemic element, so that it requires that what makes our thoughts/sentences true is their correspondence with a world as it is in itself, then I think the position is transcendentally ideal. For it says that no such correspondence is intelligible, for there is now no sense to the idea of the way the world is in itself.
The disappearing 'we' is one leg of Lear's interpretation of LW. The other is that our reflective self-consciousness of the fact that making sense simpliciter is a matter of words being potentially manifested in shared linguistic practices is consciousness of a form of transcendental idealism. The idea here is that the metaphysical articulation of the world is utterly enmeshed with the linguistic articulation of language-games - to individuate an object is always to articulate a view of the world that is part of our linguistically articulated 'form of life'. The thought is that any such individuation will consist in introducing one more possible articulation of the world that the global 'we' finds makes sense as a language-game, and that this means there is no room for articulating how the world is in itself. Or, to put it another way, on this view, the limits of possibilia coincide with the limits of what is linguistically articulable.
There are two obvious questions here. Does the 'we' disappear simply because understanding a word requires potentially publicly available manifestations of rule-following? If so, does this really imply idealism? To the first question, I think the answer is yes. If the global 'we' is defined as those subjects who understand meanings in terms of publicly available rule-following or shared linguistic practices, then any such understanding will be encompassed by some shared linguistic practice. It is then an anayltic truth that understanding will be part of the global 'we'. As for the second question, I'm not sure. I think it will depend on what one understands by 'realism'. If this is understood as our linguistic articulation of the world not falsifying the properties and relations that the world contains , then I don't think anything idealistic follows (some subset of our form of life might be articulated by language-games that precisely 'map' what there is). But if realism is taken as having an epistemic element, so that it requires that what makes our thoughts/sentences true is their correspondence with a world as it is in itself, then I think the position is transcendentally ideal. For it says that no such correspondence is intelligible, for there is now no sense to the idea of the way the world is in itself.
Labels: Kant, Transcendental Idealism, Williams, Wittgenstein
posted by matt at 11:21 am
2 Comments:
I think Matt’s summary of this difficult material tends to omit a quite important notion. That notion is Lear’s idea that the ‘we’ does not disappear. That idea is, as it were, a third leg - to add to the two Matt discerned - to Lear’s piece. Some definitions, albeit rather rough ones, will aid my presentation of that third element.
Let mindedness consist of ‘perceptions of salience, routes of interest, feelings of naturalness in following a rule that constitute being part of a form of life’ (Lear, p. 229). Let We / Us (capitalised) name the global sense of ‘we’: that is, the set of everyone both actual, past and possible. Let Our Mindedness be the way that We (that is, the global We) are minded. Since mindedness does exhibit variations across cultures and even individuals, Our Mindedness consists in the (any) overlap. One might identify that overlap with what we take the laws of logic and basic arithmetic to be, and how we associate some types of behaviour with mental states (such as wincing and being in pain).
There is no alternative to Our Mindedness, Lear proposes. He invokes what I shall call the Bounds of Sense thesis: viz., our Mindedness defines what makes sense for Us (see p. 238). On that thesis, there is only one way of making sense – one way of being (fundamentally) minded. Consequently the Our Mindedness collapses into a ‘Mindedness’, simpliciter. Thus the sense in which ‘the “we” disappears’. (Lear provides a gloss of the idea of the disappearing we. We cannot ‘look down upon’ ‘our representations’, he says [p. 241]. I take this to mean the following. We cannot relative Our Mindedness, that is, index it to a group of people, because the very notion of Our Mindedness removes the idea of such a group. It does so not just in that the extension of the group is meant to be utterly universal, but more especially because of the Bounds of Sense claim. Lear relates this idea about relativisation to Hegel and Davidson. See p. 242. It reminds me vaguely of Derrida, too; perhaps this relates to a parallel in Derrida to the Davidsonian rejection of conceptual schemes.)
Now to the sense in which the ‘we’ does not disappear. We (anyone) can always append a ‘we are so minded’ to any of our conceptions (p. 241). That thought is senseless in that, when taken with a global We, the ‘we’ disappears. Yet the thought might have the following sense. It reminds us that realism, understood as the claim that reality is conceivable independently of mindedness, is incoherent (pp. 241-2). The idea would seem to be this. The Bounds of Sense thesis is not just that only Our form of global mindedness is intelligible, but also includes or implies that there is no access to reality independently of some – and it is going to have to be Our - mindedness. The world and how we take it are not separable. (Hegel! And McDowell?) But why grant that additional idea, call it the Inseparability Idea?
The Inseparability Idea corresponds to what Matt calls the second leg of Lear’s paper, or interpretation of Wittgenstein. Matt suggests what I would put as follows – and I think we both draw on what Mark said in the group. Individuation, in what we called the metaphysical sense (a construal of what there is) is ineliminably linked to some form of mindedness. I am unsure that this argument – itself compressed – is in the Lear article. However, argumentation I have reconstructed from Lear does, if accepted, already foreclose one way out of the Inseparability Idea. To wit: we cannot triangulate between different forms of mindedness, so to speak, identifying what is common to them with an independent world. Clearly though all this is difficult stuff. (But – one more parenthesis! - the point of the blog is, at least partly, to allow us to thrash out ideas rather than present finished work.)
Hi, Im from Melbourne Australia.
Please check out the Radical Transcendental Philosophy on these related references. The author/artist knows exactly what He is saying---He writes from the radical "point of view" of Conscious Light
1. www.dabase.org/broken.htm
2. www.dabase.org/dht6.htm
3. www.adidabiennale.org
4. www.kneeoflistening.com
5. www.dabase.org/dualsens.htm
http://global.adidam.org/books/eleutherios.html
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