Being a Philosopher: The First Step

What Verheggen does is pay close attention to a particular line of thought in Wittgenstein, a set of arguments on questions about how signs get meanings. She derives from close analytical work the claim that those arguments will not do to make a case for dismissing the questions.  Surely she is right. 

              Verheggen's argument is that rejecting problems of meaning in general based on generalizing Wittgenstein's work on skepticism of meaning would be a mistake, because

              a. the problem of accounting for meaning can survive, though in a new form; that is, that W's (and, tangentially, McDowell's) rejection of one way of construing the assumption which gives rise to the skeptical question of meaning is not the only way (and that W. shows us this) the question can arise;

              b. Wittgenstein's redirection of our search for meaning can be thought of as a solution to the problem of meaning, which implies the problem is a legitimate problem; and

              c. problems of meaning are compelling problems even if Wittgenstein is correct. 

              All three of these because-clauses seem to me to be right, and I think Verheggen on these matters has done a good job of reminding us of some crucial distinctions to keep in mind as we work on questions of meaning.  I think there is another, more important, problem with this paper, however, a problem about understanding Wittgenstein's methods and what it means to say he recommends that we reject philosophical problems.

              We could put the earlier, smaller issue as, what is the relation of our mental contents to the meanings of the words (and maybe the sentences) we use?  This comes up because W. investigates this question from several directions and concludes we have been confused and we have been assuming way too much when we asked the question.  The next issue then, raised by W's work,  is where does this leave us?  Can we stop asking the question?  Are we to give the question up?  Are all problems of meaning destroyed if we have destroyed the question of the relation of our mental contents to the meanings of our words? 

              In other words, we have a smaller question, the one about mental contents and meaning, and then we have a larger question which resonates into problems about method and goals in philosophy, on one hand, and exposition of Wittgenstein on the other.  The smaller project leads to a question about whether we can see from the end of that project to some larger conception of what doing philosophy is.  A piece of that is the question, to what extent is W. recommending a kind of philosophy that rejects philosophical problems? 

              At one time I used to be happy to engage in debates about what Wittgenstein really says, and what his goals really are.  We all still have to do this with students--last semester I worked with a reading group on _On Certainty_, and often, the better-read the students, the harder they found it. Even when I have the students read the debate between Malcolm and John Cook regarding hinge propositions, where I am tempted to think that Cook understands W. much better than Malcolm, it is very difficult work and resolution with agreement is unlikely.  One can find this same situation in the reviews of the book Cook wrote on W.'s Metaphysics. On one hand there are those who are horrified by the idea that W. can still be taken to believe in all those things we commonly stack up against reality--appearances, seemings, perceptions, the way it looks to me, qualia, sense data, neutral monads--and on the other hand there are two camps, those who assume those things make sense and find confirmation in language W. uses, and those who are seriously arguing for their existence and who find arguments in W. to help them.  Cook of course is against all these camps, and so we are still waiting for a reviewer who will admit Cook may have gotten W. right.  I'm teaching a seminar on the Investigations in the fall and so have to steel myself to take on questions and disagreements about what he's really saying, what he's trying to get to. 

              But these debates now fill me with dread.  Many of those who disagree are as smart as I, some have read more W. than I (though perhaps not as much as Cook), none of us change our minds, none of our readings are consistent with any others.  I'd rather change the subject, to the philosophical problems themselves, where it seems to me the things we have learned from Wittgenstein really are making a difference in the discipline, often without being acknowledged as such.  The objections against use theories of meaning, for instance, are sometimes informed by a realization that nonphilosophical examples will sooner or later help show us where the questions have been begged.  The progress Schiffer has made toward calling into question all those beliefs he took for granted about language and meaning (well, almost all) has been partly because of a kind of paranoia about the extent to which philosophy of language itself is built on unquestioned assumptions in philosophy of mind.  That's a Wittgensteinian approach whether Schiffer thinks of it that way or not, and in the near future I hope to see him question whether language consists of sounds and marks, that is, signs.  At that point he will be perhaps caught up with Wittgenstein.

              Accordingly, I'm not going to do what I did in the first version of these comments, which was to summarize Verheggen's arguments and claims and insights and then think about them, which led to comments longer than her paper and despair on my part and graceful and careful questioning on hers.  (I've printed a half-dozen copies of that first version of my comments and have them here for those who are interested.)  Instead I'm going to speak from a fairly high altitude and at high speed about what I think W. is doing and what that means for our attitude toward rejecting philosophical problems.  

              The reason W. rephrases his questions, patiently and often maddeningly, is that he wishes to give our philosophical temptations every possible chance to reveal themselves clearly, and because how we put it makes a difference.  (Mental states require one investigation, mental processes another, mental contents a third. Contents are not states, and neither of those are processes, but we forget.)  This does not imply that he is looking for the way in which the philosophical question will be a legitimate question, one to which illuminating answers may be offered.  There is no need to look for another question to work on, because the philosophical problem will supply plenty of questions, plenty of temptations.  Laying out our temptations, he remarks, is not philosophy but the material on which we may do philosophy.  When we find one question will not stand up to examination, another can be counted on to rise up in its place.  I think this is what drives him to the talk about pictures, since there seems to be something more to a philosophical problem than any of the particular articulations of it, and why Ebersole talks about philosophical problems as things you can draw in the sand with a stick. 

              The problems about meaning can be put differently.  No, that's not quite right, is it?  There are several related questions about meaning--that's better.  When we try to spell out the problem which gives rise to the question given in Verheggen's paper as "How is meaning possible?" it might go something like thisWhen we talk to each other, we make articulate sounds into sequences of words and sentences, but the way that these words become signs of the things we communicate by their means is problematic.  Augustine and Wittgenstein alike inquire into how it is possible that dead signs can be made to carry the life of the mind.  How do the signs come to have the meanings that they do?

              A great deal has been left out of this skeletal account, but that is just as well, seeing as how what has been left out has also been the site of hundreds of years of sometimes vicious philosophical infighting.  I've left out what the signs are signs of--ideas, thoughts, propositional content and propositional attitudes, mental images, mental this and mental that, interpretants, lexical and syntactic rules, messages, dispositions to behave, illocutionary act potentials, intentions, references, contexts, senses.  It is striking, when one thinks of it, that all these warriors have fought over what belongs on one side of this opposition while they took for granted that on the other side are those sounds and marks which philosophers call signs.  Striking, and suspicious. 

              If we put this particular question about meaning in this particular way, as a question about how the signs or words we generate get the meanings they do, then we might be inclined to read W. as saying something like the following  It would help us get clearer on this problem if instead of asking about the meaning we would ask about the use of the word or the use of the sentence.  When we look at the uses of words we are less inclined to insist on something hidden or mental or private for which the words stand as signs, because with this reminder we find that words are used in practices, in forms of life, in language games.  And the uses they have in those various examples, situations and practices are what provide us with ways of saying whether the people who use them have understood them or not, whether the words are meaningful or not, whether those who use the words have done what they meant to do or not.  Now we might take this to be W.'s positive account of meaning, --or we might take "meaning as use" to be different from "meaning is use," and W. to be offering a kind of therapeutic move to get us to let go of that terribly seductive philosophical temptation, the temptation to think we are deploying words as signs of something and so the problem of meaning will be a problem about what the signs are signs of and how the connections get made.  That is, meaning as use could be a positive account or it could be the moral equivalent of a dope slap, an attempt to wake us up.  Here's a hintit's the latter. 

              What would a positive account of meaning look like if Wittgenstein were to give one?  Here's a sketchfirst of all, let's remind ourselves of the philosophical temptations, the temptations to think that language is made necessary because we have that which we wish to communicate hidden and invisible within our breast which cannot of itself be made to appear, so we have to find some external sensible signs whereby we might share or communicate that which is unseen and unseeable.  That'll take a while.  We might sketch it in the sand or in our introductory lectures on language  as two Cartesian beings conversing, with dotted lines going through the intervening physical space to show the articulate sounds or other signs making their way from speaker's mouth to listener's ear, and the speaking or encoding machine in one leading from the cloud which is the thing we wish to say  to the lips etc. moving and in the other the listening or decoding machine leading from the ear to the light bulb. 

              The next phase is to articulate how there are problems with this view.  For this, see W.'s _Blue Book_ and the _Investigations_.   They lay out problems. They lay out arguments against the philosophical temptations. They articulate the versions of the temptations.  They also make fun of it.  They point out the independence of the temptation to think this way from the arguments we might give for the view. 

              Next, arrange a perspicuous array of those examples in which nonphilosophers might converse about meaning or meanings, asking about meanings of words, denying or asking or claiming whether or that we mean things, correcting one another regarding what was meant or what something means, composing verses which are nonsense or meaningless, reciting those and explaining in the face of questions about meaning, and so on.  We will of course work to provide examples which test our temptations as well as those which express our temptations or in which we think we can see our temptations fulfilled, and see whether what we would say within those examples is consistent with that. 

              Perhaps, among other things, we might find out something like the followingthe meaning of a word is often what we tell someone when they ask for help in mastering the word.  What we tell them might vary a lot depending on who is asking and for what kind of settings they need to master the word and what resources they and we have in the example.  For a great many words there are no meanings in this sense, though of course lexicographers have to supply something, which gives us another kind of meanings.  Questions about meaning and remarks about meaning make sense in certain kinds of examples of conversations and not in all, suggesting that there may be no such thing as meaning or meanings involved in most or many human conversations.  The conviction that every conversation does involve meaning or meanings is an expression of our temptation to see that picture of Cartesian entities and dotted lines as a picture of all human communication, and to include our conversations as examples of communication.  

              We might then have learned something about our philosophical work as well.  There is an issue about intelligibility which is prior to issues of truth value, about whether the philosophical temptations make sense in any other way than as an expression of our assumptions.  Is language properly captured in that sketch?  Does language consist of signs by which we communicate?  Is there any such thing as the thing philosophers speak of as language, as meaning?  And then, how do we establish intelligibility if we are worried that we might have deluded ourselves with disguised nonsense? 

              To call this a positive account of meaning is of course ironic, since it is based on rejecting, in some sense, the question to which it is a response --or rather, it is based on doing the kind of therapy on that question one does on a neurosis, namely reducing its ability to interfere with our thinking --in our case, our ordinary or nonphilosophical thinking.  Rejecting the question, then, does not mean we delude ourselves into thinking we have no neuroses, we just insist on therapy, and, in a way that is accepting that we have these questions. This is not the way that Verheggen means it, but she's right that we cannot simply be rejecting the philosophical problem; instead, the first step of our twelve-step program is admitting that we have a problem.  Hello, I'm John, and I'm a philosopher.

J. W. Powell

Notes: Claudine Verheggen, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Stance on Meaning” paper read at Pacific APA, 3 April 1999

John McDowell, Mind and World, (Harvard: 1996)