Certainty in Action

Wittgenstein on Language, Mind and Epistemology

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350071315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Analytische Philosophie

In Certainty in Action, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock describes how her encounter with Wittgenstein overturned her previous assumptions that the mind is a product of brain activity and that thought, consciousness, the will, feelings, memories, knowledge and language are stored and processed in the brain, by the brain. She shows how Wittgenstein enables us to veer away from this brain-centred view of intelligence and behaviour to a person-centred view focusing on ways of acting that are both diversely embedded across forms of human life and universally embedded in a single human form of life. The book traces the radical importance of action as the cohesive thread weaving through Wittgenstein's philosophy, and shows how certainty intertwines with it to produce new ways of engaging in epistemology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. This selection of Moyal-Sharrock's essays vividly illustrates some of the ways in which Wittgenstein's pioneering enactivism has impacted – and can further impact – not only philosophy, but also neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, primatology, evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Certainty in Action is essential reading for students and researchers of these disciplines, and for anyone interested in getting a grasp of Wittgenstein's lasting genius and influence.

Part One

Language

Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein’s leitmotif was action. Wittgenstein saw action (or behaviour) as the root, manifestation and transmitter of language and meaning. He makes clear the regress in viewing the proposition, or any kind of mental representation, as a necessary precursor to thought and action, and points out the superfluity of such shadowy inner precursors when instinct and practices can easily be seen to be at the foundation of all our thoughts and actions: ‘In philosophy one is in constant danger of producing a myth of symbolism, or a myth of mental processes. Instead of simply saying what anyone knows and must admit’ (Z 211). Wittgenstein urges us to see the differences in meaning that are often hidden by the uniform appearance of language, famously insisting that meaning is dependent on use or context. Just as Aristotle in the Categories gave Plato’s Forms a linguistic status, so Wittgenstein took a linguistic turn from his predecessors, giving metaphysics a grammatical reading: both showed that concepts are not entities existing in isolated splendour in some metaphysical realm but simply abstractions from our use of language; and as Wittgenstein also makes clear, nor do concepts and grammar exist in the brain. Indeed, we shall see in this section that Wittgenstein gives our grammar and concepts an anthropo-logical and enactive twist: they are conditioned by our form(s) of life and manifest in what we do and in what we say. There is, for Wittgenstein, no ‘language of thought’ or mentalese that then gets verbalized: language is rooted in instinct and behaviour, generated by our practices, and transmitted by enculturation. It can deploy itself in ‘inner thinking’, in ‘thinking out loud’ or in speech; but it is not a mere ‘vehicle’ for some ghostly nonlinguistic thought that craves linguistic expression. However, language is the unparalleled vehicle and evolving repository of human culture, finding its finest and most enactive expression in literature – where, through language, is shown what cannot be said.

1

Wittgenstein’s Grammar:

Through Thick and Thin

This chapter clarifies Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic view of ‘grammar’ and traces its evolution from the Tractatus to On Certainty. I distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge certainties’ of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of his Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work of the third Wittgenstein is the grammaticalization of experience. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. We shall also see that his conception of the logical as internally linked to the human form of life clashes with traditional conceptions of logical necessity and constrains its limits, thus making possibility anthropo-logical.

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1. Defining grammar

The limits of what makes sense and what does not; what can be said and what cannot, is a leitmotif of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But what determines those limits? Wittgenstein’s astonishing answer, already inscribed in the Tractatus, is: grammar. For him, language – any language – is rule-governed (RC 303); that is, governed by rules of grammar. What Wittgenstein means by ‘grammar’ is both similar to and different from what we usually mean by grammar. Ray Monk recounts the following (due to Rush Rhees):

Moore, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures, insisted that ‘Wittgenstein was using the word “grammar” in a rather odd sense. … Thus, he argued, the sentence: “Three men was working” is incontrovertibly a misuse of grammar, but it is not clear that: “Different colours cannot be in the same place in a visual field at the same time” commits a similar transgression. If this latter is also called a misuse of grammar, then “grammar” must mean something different in each case.” No, replied Wittgenstein. “The right expression is ‘It does not have sense to say …’” Both kinds of rules were rules in the same sense. ‘It is just that some have been the subject of philosophical discussion and some have not.’

1991, 322–3

And what Monk importantly adds here is that grammatical mistakes made by philosophers are more ‘pernicious’ than ordinary grammatical mistakes. Wittgenstein, then, merely expands our ordinary understanding of grammar rather than altering it: he does not see grammar as comprised merely of syntactic rules, but of any rule that governs ‘the way we are going to talk’ (MWL 72): ‘By grammatical rule I understand every rule that relates to the use of a language’ (VOW 303). For him, grammar is ‘a preparation for description, just as fixing a unit of length is a preparation for measuring’; so that ‘A rod has a length’ is as much a preparation for description (e.g., ‘This rod is three feet long’) as the grammatical rule to use ‘were’ and not ‘was’ in some cases is a preparation for our intelligible use of language. Wittgenstein is simply more liberal than grammarians as to what he will count as grammar:

Everything that’s required for comparing the proposition with the facts belongs to grammar. That is, all the requirements for understanding. (All the requirements for sense.)

BT 38

Another way of putting this is that grammar consists of the conditions of intelligibility of a language. It is the conventionally established basis on which we can make sense: ‘Grammar consists of conventions’ (PG 138), keeping in mind that conventions here are not due to a concerted consensus, but to an unconcerted agreement in practice.

Now if grammar includes ‘[a]ll the requirements for sense’, it must then also include rules such as ‘There exist people other than myself’. For isn’t that a requisite underpinning of sense – a preparation for such descriptions as ‘There are twenty of us in this room’ or ‘Vietnam’s population is 96.5 million’? Moreover, following Wittgenstein’s criterion for the misuse of grammar in his reply to Moore above (‘It does not have sense to say …’), it has at least as little sense to say ‘I can’t be sure that anyone exists but me’ as to say ‘Three men was working’. In fact, people are more likely not to understand what you are saying in the first case than in the second. In both cases, they’ll understand all the words, but as Monk noted, violations of grammar can be more or less pernicious – so that whereas ‘Three men was working’ is laughable at worst, ‘I can’t be sure that anyone exists but me’ smacks of the pathological. We’ll come back to this.

Grammar, then, is a normatively sanctioned system or method of representation / description; it allows us to use words in order to intelligibly represent, describe, express, misrepresent, misdescribe, imagine, pretend, lie about, etc. how things are. I would say that one of the continuous tracks of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar – its nature and its limits. This chapter traces Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. We can distinguish in Wittgenstein what I will call a ‘thin grammar’ – a grammar that governs our use of words independently of facts about the world – from a ‘thick grammar’ – a grammar that is ‘reality-soaked’¹ or fact dependent. It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s thick grammar grows increasingly thick; so much so that there occurs in ‘the third Wittgenstein’² what I call a grammaticalization of experience. This is particularly notable in his notion of ‘patterns of life’ in Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology and of hinge certainty in On Certainty³; and it reflects his growing realization that grammar can be anthropo-logical, as it were, and that it can manifest itself as a way of acting. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. However, we shall see that his unrelenting, albeit at times hesitant, connection of grammar to the stream of life in no way infringes on the ‘autonomy of grammar’. I will now briefly retrace Wittgenstein’s drawing of the limits of language in the Tractatus as it relates to nonsense and ineffability; for it remains, in this, essentially unchanged and informs what the later Wittgenstein will call grammar.

2. Drawing the limits of language

In ‘On Heidegger on Being and Dread’, written in 1929, Wittgenstein writes:

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. … This running-up against the limits of language is ethics.

WVC 68

Why is anything we might say in explanation of the astonishment that anything at all exists, nonsense? Why would such an attempt constitute a ‘running-up against the limits of language? And how is that ethics? In his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (written in the same year), Wittgenstein writes:

I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, ca...