Witt.
Hi everyone,
Sorry for the late post. Jesse and I have been trying to get in conversation, and if we do get a chance to do this tomorrow, we’ll maybe post again. In the meantime, I’m anxious to get us started. I would like to just flag some issues, and I'm sure others will raise different issues, and I'm looking forward to that. But, here, rather than attempting to agree or disagree, I’m more interested in understanding what Wittgenstein (LW) has to say, and how it all applies to our course.
So as you can imagine there is a host of issues in the text. I’m going to focus on three which strikes me as significant for the purposes of our class:
(1) Methodology: one of the first things we notice about Part I is that it’s not written in assertive form. Rather, the text has multiple voices—questions are asked, some have answers, some don’t; there are random diversions and surprising returns to subjects long ago; the language is pretty informal if not down right conversational and often confusing. They’re aphorisms, presented in quasi Socratic manner. A part of this is due to the fact that PI was published posthumously. But on the other hand, LW himself admitted of the difficulty in putting his notes into book form. I think this methodology is a demonstration, if not a “proof”, of the claim that meaning has no “source” insofar as source is defined as a singular and unique origin. I think, to an extent, LW uses this Socratic/aphoristic style in order to resist hammering thesis after thesis into the reader--BECAUSE, that would easily become a kind of language-game, with rules, definitions, names, like chess. But, my question is, how successful is he at resisting authorship? Is PI (and the tradition to which it belongs) also just another language-game? (Yes it is…)
(2) Language games: as a discipline, is IR a language game? As a phenomenon, is "China-US politics" a language game? And if so, how can language games "study" other language games?
posted by tram nguyen at 11:06 PM
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Hi everyone,
I’m with Bea that this text is not the most accessible, and I’m afraid my training in philosophy only further complicates the issues. With this in mind, Jesse and I agreed that it would be best if we, as presenters, tried to first engage just with the text, and explain what W is saying, and for the moment leave at the periphery “applications.” (Reason being, if we understand W better we would be in a better position to apply).
So, here are some things we’d like to discuss tomorrow (numbers refer to sections), as well as a first take on language-games:
(all numbers refer to SECTIONS, not pages)
1. language games
> A language game begins as a primitive language (7), but becomes a form of life (23). Over the course of the text, the notion of a language-game is used to explain different types of human “life forms,” such as a project (building with slabs, 2), a profession (flight craft control panel), the process of knowledge acquisition (how children learn numbers), and philosophy itself. The first interesting thing to note about language games is that it comes to describe virtually every type of human organization, which suggests that it should be more broadly defined, like Geertz’s “culture” or Bordieu’s “habitus” or Searle’s “background knowledge.” The second interesting thing about language games is the way they are generated: existing language games pull new language games into existence, continually and infinitely, expanding through time and space. Consider the fact that PI itself (and the tradition surrounding it) is a language game, which was posed to address the language-game that had been (still is?) the discipline of “philosophy.” Contemporary accounts of events past are present-day language games re-configuring past language-games. The rhetoric of US leaders is a language-game responding to, for example, foreign leaders’ language-games. In 132, W says: “We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one of many possible orders; not the order. To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook. This may make it look as if we saw it as our task to reform language.” So language-games, I’m going to propose, can be understood as an “ordering of knowledge”—note that by ordering you are essentially generating knowledge, generating more language-games. We can’t reform language to better match up with our understanding because understanding itself happens through language.
2. training
> 5-6, 9 (language as training)
> 86 (part of a language-game)
3. rule-following
> 198-201
> 53-54
4. problems with correspondence theory of truth
> 72-74 (sampling),
> 51-59 (redness)
5. the possibility of a pragmatic truth
> 352 (LEM as a picture)
6. problem of other minds
> 293 (beetles-behaviorism)
> 172-173 (following a path-intentionality)
I hear Bea about Witty not being useful in the policy world. I guess that's why i love the bastard so much...and she put her finger on Cox's distinction between 'problem solving' and 'critical' research. Wittgenstein, if taken seriously, puts us in a world where 'authority' is a language game (with dire consequences) but no essential or naturalistic basis. Mistaking governments for things, confining our academic and political practices to a "practical" world where scholars uncritically use the same language as those we are studying, means helping to maintain a status-quo we might not want to... all of which is exactly the sort of problem that occurs to the "fly in the bottle" (para 309) who Witty wants to free. Wittgenstein's goal is to help us stop mistaking the way we talk about things for what 'is'. As he says (para 118) "Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? [...] What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood."
So I guess the question I would pose would be: if language functions in its use to accomplish tasks (as Wittgenstein argues), rather than there being a correspondance between words and "brute facts" (which the Tractatus refers to as "atomic facts")...what would this imply for our practice as scholars? How might even ethnography be changed by such a conception?
"...giving examples is not an indirect means of explaining - in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too. The point is that this is how we play the [language-game]" (sec. 71). Wittgenstein has hit on a very important concept that has the impact my colleagues seem to be searching for. How much time do we spend searching and fighting about definitions that would create a clear boundary between what is o is not, for example, terrorism or authority. The idea of blurry boundaries and commonality struck me as precisely the problems when we attempt to create rigid definitions that will no doubt be culturally biased. LW's insight about seeing and describing what is common, about family resemblances, could be a useful concept for scholars to keep in mind because it allows one to avoid the demagoguery of definitions that too often turn people off of an argument because they disagree with an aspect of the boundary drawn. Think of how much further one might get in discussing terrorism using this approach, especially if one wanted to assert that the United States practices terrorism or tha the insurgents in Iraq are terrorists even though they don't fit a standard definition as such. Of course, this begs the question of whether it's all about semantics... I don't think it is, since as LW points out, we can usually figure out through description whether a game is a game or just a boy throwing a ball against a wall.
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"Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning" LW says in sec. 198. This would be an important point to keep in mind when doing ethnography. For as he points out just below this, a person heeds a sign-post only if that is the regular use of it, the custom. This reminds us of Geertz's wink and twitch, for LW seems to be saying that context is essential for determining rules and meaning. Furthermore, one needs an element of cultural sensitivity and must no be judgemental, for who's to say that chess must be a quite, dignified, library-type game and not a rousing, combative game (sec. 200)?
So Wittgenstein, huh? Well, it’s a good thing we have a trained philosopher in our midst, because I must admit that to me, this book is pretty much a person’s brain poured out on pages (and, since it was published after his death, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually is).
As for today’s discussion, I think Ludwig (I refuse to call him “Witty”!) has put us in a Catch 22 position, at least some of us. I say this because his methodological approach puts a heavy burden on the reader; nothing is spelled out, he doesn’t try to convince us of the validity of any arguments and we are left to come to our own conclusions (the horror!). But for a reader like myself, untrained in the realm of philosophy, Philosophical Investigations is not a very accessible text. The solution, then, is for our two presenters (and possibly Mr. Z, who seems to like Ludwig) to spell it out for me – which I suspect is what Ludwig wanted to avoid in the first place.
Be that as it may, I didn’t come out of the reading of this book completely empty handed. Perhaps what I found is rather the product of wishful thinking, in the sense that I found what I wanted to find. But if this is the case, given Ludwig’s methodological approach, the fault is his. It seems to me, Ludwig keeps returning to the issue of how futile it is to try to standardize definitions (as pointed out by CCR) and, indeed, the uselessness of definitions. Instead, we somehow know - or think we know - the difference between various categories and the distinctions within them. Hence, we “know” the category “games” include many subcategories, some completely different than others. Ironically, then, I read Wittgenstein as telling all of us to stop making things so ridiculously complicated…
Regarding the application of “blurry boundaries” when it comes to terrorism, as suggested by CCR, I’m not sure Ludwig’s concepts are useful beyond the scholarly act of recognizing the intersubjective nature of, well, everything. It seems to me that trying to “assert that the United States practices terrorism,” which is a common practice in the world, is precisely the same sort of language game as that which asserts that al-Qaida practices terrorism. For this reason, I am confused on precisely how Ludwig’s approach will bring us “further” in discussing terrorism, and, in the extension, in discussing anything IR-ish.
I certainly subscribe to the view of language as a means of asserting authority, of exercising power even. As Jesse points out, uncritically using the same language as those we study may mean helping to maintain a status-quo we don’t want to. But then again, where will using a “private language” take us? After all, I’m here “living at the heart of the beast,” as a Cuban revolutionary once put it, and I need to be able to speak more than one language if I want to further my cause, whatever that may be.
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