PHIL 415 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Archimedean Point, Game Players, Pragmatics
12 Jun 2018
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What does it mean that something has gone wrong?
At every step do we need to make a new decision?
Wittgenstein doesn’t argue against this
He says, what if this was the case – does this make sense?
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He asks, what does it mean that we know what comes after the next?
What does it mean that we know?
When you know how to ride a bike, when are you knowing this?
It’s not an action that we’re actively taking
“Know” has a lot of grammatical possibilities
It’s not that you know an infinitely numerous members of a series, since this is
impossible – this is not what is meant by “know” here
The meaning is already ahead of us – all the way to infinity
The steps are already taken before us
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We’re imagining the rules for the series like the rails of a train
The rails, unlike a car or a bike, a train is supposed to follow its rails and only its rails
We might imagine rails like a rule
He’s not encouraging us to see it this way
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We’re talking about rule following, but we’re really interested in: what is it to know the
meaning of a concept?
The meaning comes to us in a flash – “grasped at a stroke”
There are many uses of a word
Any normal language you can use potentially has infinitely number grammatical
conceptions
There’s a sense in which we do “grasp is at a stroke”
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We take perfectly ordinary things
We’re shown the first numbers in the series, and we know how to go on…
We extrapolate it all the way out there, and in a flash have we grasped all the possible
instances? No, we just know how to go on given any possible number in the series
Wittgenstein keeps saying: we are bewitched by language
He’s saying that what all philosophers should do is to put to rest metaphysical aspects
(that seduce us)
Many of these questions are not questions at all – a false picture has taken us captive
The sirens’ call
Wittgenstein wants us to see why we don’t need a theory or a picture
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
It’s not a matter of stopping philosophy – it’s a matter of convincing us to let go of a false
picture
It’s a certain antidote to certain philosophical expressions
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We can pretend that this is the other person challenging Wittgenstein
Key statements of the problem of rule following
This was a fashionable topic in the 1980s
How does the magic happen, that by understanding a rule I can keep going?
On what grounds can I never say that someone is wrong?
Wittgenstein says that we cannot say that ‘anything we are doing is following the rule
under some interpretation’…
Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning
We want the chain of justifications to end
There has to be an Archimedean point, at which all questions cease – something that is
self-justifying, self-evident, something that requires no further justification
If everything that happens is a result of some cause, but that cause is as a result of another
cause, where does it ever end (rather, when did it every begin?)
There must be an unmoved-moved (Aristotle)
It must have begun somewhere
Kant’s solution is to say: if you try to justify one side or the other, we will always be in a
vicious circle. The only way to get out of it is to reject the question. Although, he didn’t
do this with language
The thought was: let’s find a way to eliminate the first principle questions, and doing
metaphysics with a method
To ask whether the chain of causes has a first cause is a confusing question. It is
meaningless to ask whether there’s a first cause.
Wittgenstein is here to lead us out of a swamp, to show us that we don’t need to be stuck
Truth cannot be yours or mine
Truth must not be yours or mine
There’s only the truth
Wittgenstein answers with questions
He takes the problem and makes it simplified through an example – sign post
Theory of Action – branch of moral psychology (the philosophical branch of psychology)
What goes into action? We get agent (Agir = to act in French)
We have here the question of reasons vs. causes
If you’re morally accountable for an action, it’s not an action that you were forced to do
Here, an action is something that you do out of choice or reasons – not because it’s
determined by physical or natural causes
‘I don’t want causes. I want reasons…’
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A large part of our difficulty is that we consider things from the subject’s point of view
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
It"s not an action that we"re actively taking. It"s not that you know an infinitely numerous members of a series, since this is impossible this is not what is meant by know here. The meaning is already ahead of us all the way to infinity. We"re imagining the rules for the series like the rails of a train. The rails, unlike a car or a bike, a train is supposed to follow its rails and only its rails. He"s not encouraging us to see it this way. The meaning comes to us in a flash grasped at a stroke . Any normal language you can use potentially has infinitely number grammatical conceptions. There"s a sense in which we do grasp is at a stroke . We"re shown the first numbers in the series, and we know how to go on . No, we just know how to go on given any possible number in the series.
