What, Why & How do we Know ?
Just a post holding a link for a future piece.
Mind, Self and Person. Tweeted by someone a few days ago.
A lot of twaddle being peddled these days about how mind remains some mysteriously mythical intractable problem, so this review of current best thinking may be of some use. (Not had chance to digest yet.)
And this interview with John Searle, with whom I don’t much agree, also on consciousness topic as well as negative views on Wittgenstein, someone with whom I almost entirely agree.
I’d been taking the good sense of Wittgenstein for granted in recent years having read his main works and read a great deal about him in other contexts. The only ongoing task remaining for me has been to put the sense into practical use in everyday life and policy, – what’s it best for me to do next / now? ‘Twas ever thus. [*1]
But recently Wittgenstein keeps cropping-up in other articles and conversations, so I’ve been recapping and filling gaps in my reading. [Ray Monk’s “Duty of Genius” and “How to Read” specifically right now.]
Now, it’s not that I read Wittgenstein and he gave me my worldview. I was 45 before I read any philosophy. My worldview has evolved from life experience. Reading Wittgenstein (and the rest of philosophy) these past 15 years has simply given me some literacy to express it in philosophical terms and to refine it in evolutionary terms. In essence, I already knew what Wittgenstein knew.
Consequently when people – particularly scholars and commentators I admire and respect – express doubts about Wittgenstein’s wisdom and consistency, I react in his defence.
Two examples in recent days:
(1) Ray Monk repeating the myth that, after publishing Tractatus, Wittgenstein retired from philosophy believing he had solved all problems in the field; a meme suggested by Wittgenstein’s own words in his preface to the Tractatus:
I am of the opinion that the problems [of philosophy] have in essentials been finally solved [in Tractatus].
(2) Simon Glendinning – expressing problems struggling with [accepting, interpreting, understanding] this remark by Wittgenstein:
When you can’t unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing is for you to recognise this; and the most honorable thing, to admit it. [Antisemitism.] What you ought to do to remedy the evil is not clear. What you must not do is clear in particular cases.
The latter also prompted a twitter conversation with @JudyStout1 from whom I often pick up relevant shared links.
The two quotes are of course related, but first let’s clear up some possible extraneous issues with the second first: It’s not difficult to see why Wittgenstein would have Anti-Semitism as a topic of personal interest and despite (because of) the conflict in the topic as it relates to himself, there is no conflict in him using it as an example and no conflict or inconsistency in the statement he makes about it. And I KNOW that Ray and Simon have much deeper and subtler understanding of Wittgenstein than their statements on either of these small quotes can convey in isolation, so in unpicking them, I’m not suggesting any general disagreement with either of them. [Aside – Not seen any mention of Gödel by Monk (so far) in either Wittgenstein reference.] [Aside – The idea that when Wittgenstein came back to philosophy Tractatus came “crashing down”.] Back to the issues at hand:
The two quotes are related by a third, and perhaps the most famous, Wittgenstein quote, the final and unqualified assertion in the Tractatus, and the equivalent in his introductory letter to his first prospective publisher:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
My work consists of two parts: of the one that is written here and of everything which I have not written.
Philosophy and Anti-Semitism are both big complex topics full of problems in need of solutions. They are examples of tangles which we cannot unravel and we need to be both sensible and honorable in how we address that.
What is particularly important are the sentences following both the introductory quotes:
I am of the opinion that the problems [of philosophy] have in essentials been finally solved [by my Tractatus].
And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
My work consists of two parts: of the one that is written here and of everything which I have not written.
And precisely this second part is the important one.
It is not possible to solve the problems of a tangle – in any important practical way – by saying / writing the general solution to the whole. Even if the total problem were complex but tractable logically-objectively, Gödel tells us we can never write a complete and consistent solution. Given that these tangles are inevitably also filled with subjective human angles, it is even less possible to document a whole solution. Conversely it is easy to identify specific actions that do not provide a solution and should therefore not be taken, though this doesn’t exclude specific actions that could. There are of course always an infinity of particular “what should I do next” [*1] possible courses of action once you accept there is no one general solution or any specific silver bullet solution.
Neither philosophy nor antisemitism are sciences, amenable to the logical objective methods of science. In all cases Wittgenstein was pointing out that solving a tangle in an expressable logical technical sense is …. no useful solution at all.
Far from believing Tractatus had solved the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein knew he had merely pointed out the one big problem for philosophy. Without all the stuff he hadn’t said (knew he couldn’t say in any formal way) he knew what he had written was of minimal value. So there was nothing more to say, nothing more he could say even though what he couldn’t say was much more important than what he had said [*3]. It would be a waste of time to say more to the analytic and logical-positivist types – they and their methods were the problem. When it was obvious they didn’t get it, which he knew before it was actually published, he went off to pastures new, knowing there was nothing more he could say to them. He came back to philosophy only when the conversation had moved on and his audence had had time to think about the things he couldn’t say. When he did, Tractatus didn’t come crashing down. All that crashed was the misunderstanding (or maybe denial) of it by those that didn’t get it. He then tried a more poetic tack to address the problem with philosophy.
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Recently on Psybertron:
The Simon Glendinning AntiSemitism Example:
In the antisemitism example, I suggested an example of a particular identifiable action that should not be taken would be accusing an individual of being antisemitic. Does that mean you should never accuse anyone of antisemitism? No. But it’s no solution.
Case A, – the person isn’t & doesn’t consider themselves anti-semitic, so you’ve either offended them or used the rhetoric to start a constructive conversation.
Case B, – the person is and admits it, and your rhetoric has imparted no new knowledge for either of you. The “so what” rhetoric may then initiate a more constructive conversation.
Case C – the person is, but denies it, and depending on circumstances a more constructive conversation will follow, though 99% of the time the topic will be about defining what was meant by antisemitic.
Case D – the situation is the person screaming antisemitic abuse to a stranger on a bus. We’re already in an irrational & inhuman situation. Accusing them of antisemtitism is unlikley to be more immediately useful than restoring civility and getting to a constructive conversation.
In no case does the accusation solve anything. Any solutions depend on the possible conversations and actions. The accusation may have rhetorical value in starting the conversation, and in virtue-signalling, but if the conversation doesn’t ensue, then there has been no progress to any solution to any part of the tangle. In each case there are many other possible statements or courses of action that might better lead to the right conversation and actions, to solve the antisemitism itself.
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[Post Notes:
*1 – See “Tabletop” for generic “what should I do next” scenario.Â
*2 – Meta. The only sayable solution is meta, about the nature or direction of the way towards solutions. Consequently any possible action can only ever be assessed positively or negatively against this meta property but can never actually be seen to be a solution.Â
*3 – This is the recurring “Catch-22”. How to describe a new solution in existing terms of accepted discourse. All accepted discourse can do is destructively criticise the new solution. The “burden of proof” is impossibly biased against progress.]
Massive number of hits on the blog yesterday when Chris Packham publicly announced his problems with Apserger’s. Good for him to acknowledge however obvious it had become to the rest of us, and sad for him to suffer the problems. Seems he suffered from it earlier in life and sees his “all consuming interest in wildlife” as helping him deal with it. I wish him well.
As therapy it may be good for the patient, but it’s bad for the rest of us.
My interest isn’t specifically with the “disease” of the individual on the Asperger’s / Autism disorder spectrum, though obviously they’re connected naturally with my main interest; the general human psychological error / fetish / addiction of scientism. That is, humanity actually believing that the objective / logical / scientific end of the rationality spectrum is to be valued over all others that contain any hint of subjectivity (for want of better terminology).
I’d held-up Packham three years ago as an archetypal scientistic public scientist based on his wildlife media appearances, and the motivations and attitudes he spoke about on Desert Island Discs. I knew nothing of his Asperger’s history until a commentor on that thread mentioned person-to-person experience of his autistic behaviour. It came as no surprise to me (see the comment thread) – and indeed I’ve had hundreds of Packham / Autism / Asperger’s search hits on the post since 2013 before being inundated with hundreds more yesterday.
Hearing the public announcement of his suffering from, and dealing with, his spectrum disorder yesterday on BBC Radio 4 Today [41:28] Chris Packham’s Asperger’s story was followed by two wonderfully counterbalancing items of historicity and poetry. War and the beautiful game.
Jim Naughtie Meets the Author [43:25] had Pat Barker talking about the predicted historical perspective looking back 500 years hence on the 20th Century seeing WWI & WWII as a single war. Like many other historical wars – the hundred years war, the wars of the xxxx, etc – labelled historically as a single war even if there were lulls in the belligerence and multiple triggers to action, there were common underlying issues being worked-out. (I’m sure the ongoing Middle-East / Islamic problems of today are still a part of that same war too – the increasing speed of our media perversely, but predictably, slowing down our human chances of achieving solutions.)
The caterpillar on the leaf,
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
“Blake’s words can’t be translated into any terms other than itself.
We have no idea what that means, but we know it’s true.”
Immediately after that was Martin Rome’s Thought for the Day [49:13] – Sport is more than the sum of its parts – [Shankly / Hillsborough / Leicester City / Ranieri / Wenger] – It’s about us. It’s about our character in cooperative competition.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Rage,
…. rage against the dying of the light.
Like the poetry of Dylan Thomas, “sport says the unsayable”.
Science [objective logic] says only the sayable, as Wittgenstein tried to warn us.
As several have noted today on social media, the loss of Jenny Diski will probably not make the waves other celebrity deaths have done in recent months, but she will nevertheless be a loss to us.
Thanks to @trillingual for this link to her list of LRB writings.
I wrote a general piece on identity politics last year when the then current topic was “Islam is not a race“.
The whole nation / race / culture / religion subject is fraught with definitional problems, that really only resolve in self-identity. The fact that Semite has nothing to do with being a Jew in the first place, is only one of many nuanced issues in the Labour Antisemitism row. Of all the many nuances defining the antisemitism row, the distinguishing issue is the relationship to Jews of opinions on Zionism and Israel. Opinions about people and individuals (ie humans) are simply those of human rights and freedoms of thought and expression. End of.
Currently “Antisemitism” is really a question of Zionism. It’s all very well to hold opinions about “the idea of” an Israel – should it / shouldn’t it exist – but it does. We might not want to start from here, but we must deal with reality.
The specific parties in the current politics and enforcement through power vary from state to state, and will require their own specific resolution and mediation, but the idea that Zionism makes Israel any different is plain wrong.
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[Post Note : There are of course plenty of other reasons why the “Israel” issue remains perhaps the knottiest issue of our times, not least because the oppressed group really are largely Semitic, Arabic, Muslims, a subject with it’s own share of topical issues, to say the least.]
[Post Note : And absolute chaos on Twitter – so many witty responses to #KenGate and #JohnMannGate ( all on #EdBallsDay) but this sums up the underlying point:
I suspect Ken meant to say anti-Zionsim wasn’t the same thing as racism. But he subconsciously let the cat out of the bag.
— Dan Hodges (@DPJHodges) April 28, 2016
Ken’s just said it again. To be anti-semitic you have to hate Jews in Golder’s Green, not just Jews in Israel.
— Dan Hodges (@DPJHodges) April 28, 2016
Sure – but hating (not-liking) “Jews being in Israel” is a million miles from “hating Jews” in Israel, or Golders Green, or anywhere else. No-one “likes” Israel being what it is, but 4/5 generations after its founding, Israel and its current population have the same human rights and freedoms as the rest of us, Palestinians included. Sorry, our fore-fathers made a mistake so you lot are fucked – is no solution. Jeez. Reparations can be retrospective, reversable even, within a generation or two, but need to be proportional and humane for individual citizens recognised as a whole nation state.
And the whole comparison of Zionism with Hitler was well-meant (see this old example from Jared Diamond) but crassly stated for a professional politician. And John Mann MP losing his cool. Labour in meltdown on #EdBallsDay and all a week before local elections. Man!]
[Post Note – And, the morning after, those defending Ken are using accusations of PC-taboo topics and anti-intellectualism. Well sure Ken’s opinions have valid points – that was my point above. And as the tweets above show Ken probably made an intellectual error in one of his remarks but he didn’t correct it and he kept digging, defending himself and Naz. To be clear. Israel is a brutal regime, the Palestinians are oppressed, the whole situation is surrounded by Islamist states and factions, Israel’s brutality extends to attacks being their best form of defence, and yes the whole “Middle-East Problem” situation has a recent history of imperial responsibility. It’s a mess, I’ve written about before in more detail and we’re all, Ken & Naz & Jezza included, entitled to robust opinions for and/or against any & all of the parties and behaviours involved. Nothing is taboo, not even bigotry. Yes you can even hold the opinion that the problem is the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and the solution is to remove it / them. However, since we’re talking about members of the government and opposition in one UN state, their opinions about dealing with another UN state matter – we’ve all got present-day situations resulting from historical mistakes (see above). Proposing a policy that the state shouldn’t exist and that it’s population should be deported (somewhere) against their wishes – many generations after the original mistake – is not acceptable. It’s plain crass. That is against the human rights of the existing population – that’s what’s rightly being branded “antisemitism” (even though the word technically means something else), it’s  a label for that crass inhuman bigotry.]
One way or another “scientism” is at the core of many of my conversations in recent years, and in fact several in recent days too. In the last decade and a half I’ve also become quite a fan of Wittgenstein; initially suggested by Sam Norton a theologian-philosopher on a discussion-board we both frequented in the early 2000’s. As well as reading his Tractatus and Investigations, obviously Wittgenstein – the person and his writings – turned up in many other philosophical readings too, particularly in Vienna-Circle, Gödel & Einstein contexts but that’s another story.
The only book I’d read specifically about Wittgenstein was Edmonds & Eidinow Wittgenstein’s Poker. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein scholar and author of The Duty of Genius (which I’ve not read, yet!) is a considerable source and reference in the Edmonds & Eidinow work. So much so that I’d mentally pigeonholed Wittgenstein’s Poker as Ray’s work – until I pulled it off the shelf this morning.
Yesterday, or maybe the day before, someone tweeted a link to Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lesson written by Ray as a piece in Prospect Magazine back in 1999. Tweets being the ephemeral things that they are, I can no longer easily see that tweet or its context, but I had opened the link and it sat on my desktop. When I read it this morning, I remembered having read it before, but relatively recently, back in 2014, though the link I blogged then is only a brief holding reference for future follow-up.
The reason I read the Forgotten Lesson, and picked the Poker off the bookshelf when I did this morning was a little synchronicity that Ray and I both tweeted positively on Frankie Boyle’s latest Grauniad piece (on the UK junior doctors’ strike) and in a self-admitted kill-joy way, so did the excellent Tom Chivers – pointing out mis-represented “facts” in Frankie’s piece.
Now, I’m a serious fan of Frankie, our best and archetypal “Court Jester”. In a world where there are so many “bad things” to speak-freely about, limits to free-speech generally and limits to mockery specifically matter a great deal. The recognised court-jester(s) have the greatest license to mock – and even mis-represent to the point of being false, irrational, politically incorrect, disrespectfully ironic and downright offensively sarcastic – that’s the point of The Fool. We may all have the same “right” but that doesn’t mean we should all do it. As Stephen Fry reminds us, we can ruthlessly mock any problematic aspect of British freedom and democracy in practice, provided we love British freedom and democracy. We just can’t all be as good as Frankie at doing it.
Now Tom’s kill-joy pointing out that the “facts” about the weekend working issue in the NHS dispute (*), he justified because the Grauniad’s Comment is Free columns are generally seen as a politically editorial part of the Grauniad’s output – and should meet those standards of responsible journalism, when it comes to representing facts. I begged to differ where it’s clear the writer holds our official court-jester license. For the fool, this is a free-pass, a license who’s only rule is there are no rules – strictly only the kinds of rules that wise-men and fools can interpret. Of course gratuitous offence and not being funny can lose you your free-pass license, but until then Frankie’s doing fine.
Good satirical writing is more an art than a science. The same way a natural language sentence is more like a piece of music than an logical assertion. It is scientism to expect the rules of logic to apply to factual objects anywhere other than science. Man! Wittgenstein had that one nailed, even if Russell and the logical positivists never got the jokes in Tractatus.
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(*) PS – To be clear on the subject of the dispute itself. It’s complicated and needs proper, mediated negotiation, like any real dispute. Hunt’s track record means his motives are rightly suspect, but whatever the 24/7 shift-working contractual rates and terms, (a) the mythical “weekend effect” is irrelevant, weekend days should carry no special premium in the 21st century, and (b) employees can take or leave any contract offered. End of. Now, go negotiate and take a Parker-Follett-ian mediator with you.
I’ve been using fetishisation and addiction as characterisation of the roots of PC attachment to accepted modes of thinking. (Frankie Boyle calls it “Weary Rationale”.)
Competition is one of those accepted (PC) modes.
Critical thinking seen as the ability to undermine interlocutors as if they were opponents. After all, the ultimate test of science is falsification and science is good, right? Well no, it may be the ultimate test of science fact, but it’s not the point or purpose of good “rational” endeavours. It’s become PC to value arguing against something – using peerless objective logic – above all else. It’s the “winning” form of rhetoric.
Most recently here, we noted Stephen Fry linking Political Correctness to acceptance of poor rationality, to the point of rejecting “rationalism”.
Today this link to The Conversation piece by Rajani Naidoo “Competition as a fetish: why universities need to escape the trap.”
I’m reading Self by Barry Dainton, recommended to me by David Morey, a friend who I consider has a well informed take on current philosophy, right up to and including “New Realism”.
So far I’ve read the prologue and started on the first chapter. From the blurb, I was expecting an original philosophical novel, but in fact it’s a normal philosophical text describing and referencing the thought experiments of others as far as I can tell, so I guess I’m already disappointed. But it’s worse than that.
There are two glaring errors so far:
Firstly, using Dennett & Hofstadter’s Brain in a Vat, he seems to suggest that it’s a widely held belief that we, our selves, our minds, our souls, reside in our brains! Huh? Does anyone think that? The very opposite is surely the point of the referenced thought experiment?
Secondly, this:
[When you think “What am I?”, what’s actually doing the thinking? Is it a soul, some other kind of mental entity separate from your body, or are “you” just a collection of nerve-endings and narratives? …]
We will be looking at why the problem of consciousness is so uniquely difficult – much of the answer lies in the conception of the physical world that emerged during the Scientific Revolution (and is still with us today).
No way. Jose.
Me, my mind, I am doing the thinking. There is no problem of consciousness. I know it. You know it. We have no problem.
It’s science that has the problem, basing itself on a dualism that keeps the subjective separate from its objective model (for its own convenience). The problem, rather than the answer, lies in science’s conception of the physical. It is science that cannot explain, and therefore must deny as illusory, the consciousness and free-will we well know from our own empirical experience.
Hopefully by setting up such straw-men, Dainton is heading to the same conclusions, but why start with such clearly wrong premises. Where’s the suspense?
Reading on, with hopes diminished.