Essay 09

This essay is due Thursday, 11/01. Instructions are as before.

For this essay I begin with what may come as a rather startling claim: No one can refute a position they themselves do not understand. As with Hume's skeptical argument about causation before it, Wittgenstein's skeptical argument about language may strike us as appalling and absurd.

"Of course there are cause and effect relationships in the world, objectively, which are instances of laws of nature (some, perhaps, as yet undiscovered) whose nomological necessity is unassailable, securing both prediction and explanation," we say to ourselves in utter disbelief. "The idea that there is at most constant conjunction of events we mistakenly call 'causes' and 'effects', that the world need not be tomorrow--nor, even, in the very next instant--much like it has been today, is, well, deranged!"

[And, likewise,

"Of course we can read! And write! And understand our language! Of course we can follow a rule and surely there is something we mean making it objectively possible to get the rule wrong--or right, as the case may be."]

Hume, Kant reports, "woke me from my dogmatic slumber." Kant read Hume carefully and recognized the stunning import of humean skepticism about causation. He got Hume. He knew he could not meet Hume's skeptical challenge head-on. He had work to do, and thus began work late in life on The Critique of Pure Reason. Whether Kant succeeded in responding to Hume remains an open question in philosophy. One thing we can say for certain: Kant got Hume.

Why does this matter for us? Quite simply, I want you to get Wittgenstein this semester, so far as what little time we have permits. Why, though?

Here's another claim, a flag I'm planting, if you will: Starting with Socrates, we owe vastly more to our skeptics, more to our critics, than we can ever repay with the monumental shifts we make in our understanding responding to them. They are at once our gadflies, stinging us to rouse from our complacency, and our midwives, helping us to plot a new course and a new grasp of ourselves and the world around us.

Sure, we remember the grand system-builders--Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Pierce, to name but a few--who have so captivated generations of philosophers. Indeed, there are philosophers who identify with the systems builders, calling themselves aristotelians, say, insisting their philosopher solved all the puzzles--and any new ones that come along are really just old problems, long solved, in new dress--all while mocking philosophers who beg to differ as untutored in the proper philosophy. Yet it is to the skeptics we owe our real debt.

Humean skepticism drove at the scientific presupposition of a mechanical universe, and our world pivoted about us as we were forced to confront our deepest assumptions about it.

Wittgensteinian skepticism drives at the philosophical presupposition that language is more than a game, which is foundational in the sense that it also calls into question any of our domains of inquiry--mathematical, scientific, social, you name it.

So before rejecting Wittgenstein, let us understand him. Without criticism, snark, or shade cast, lay out as clearly and forcefully as you can the argument Wittgenstein describes as showing that "[t]his was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule."