"Thinking"

I needed to write some things; I have checked none of my quotations (and give no citations because of it), and am too lazy to italicize where it needs doing etc.; anyone who reads this is advised that they do so only under their own judgement, and I foreswear all responsibility for such actions.

"Only in the context of a proposition has a word really a meaning" Frege tells us; this is the stronger formulation used in the middle of the Grundlagen, after his initial, more cautious warning "Never to ask for the meaning of a word except in the context of a proposition", for fear that what we will confuse with the meaning is an "idea", a subjective Vorstellung which comes to mind when a word is heard but is orthogonal to any question of meaning.

The author of the Tractatus tells us much the same: "Only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning"; only in a proposition can there be a symbol. Outside of the context of a proposition, we have only things which we can confuse with signs: but as a sign is "the perceptible aspect of a symbol", a blot of ink or a noise which is not presently symbolizing is not even a sign. To see the symbol in a sign, we must consider the context of significant use: this means that if we are considering a putative sign in such a way that we can think of it just as we are without its having a context of significant use, then we are not thinking of even a sign: we have only ink or noise, and these have no innate connection to any symbols (for signification is arbitrary).

So, if there is a context in which we are supposed to refer to a sign in a way that is independent of that sign being used, we in fact refer to no sign: we mention only ink or noise, or something else which may (or may not) be arbitrarily connected with a meaning in some further use of it as a symbol. Such a thing cannot have any meaning.

There are many ways to use a symbol: this is demanded by what the author of the Tractatus thinks of as the "bipolarity" of a proposition, its ability to be true or false. If we cannot use the same symbols to say both a true thing and a false thing (with the aid of a sign for negation, or by denying where someone has affirmed) then we lose this bipolarity: the same symbols need to be able to function in both affirmation and denial in the same ways for a given thought to be held as true and held as false. So logic demands that there be ways to modify the force of a proposition, to use Frege's terminology.

Perhaps the same point, perhaps a better one than I just made: "Thaetetus" must be the same symbol in "Thaetetus sits" and in "Thaetetus flies" for the inferences in which these propositions are involved to be intelligible. So there arises the illusion that we can speak of the meaning of "Thaetetus" in these propositions on its own, so that we can after all speak of the meaning of a word outside of the context of a proposition. It seems we have just done so, by putting "Thaetetus" in quotation marks: by doing this we are now talking about the symbol which is combined with other symbols in propositions, but without its being combined in any particular proposition.

I think this must be seeing things wrong.

Rather than saying that in ""Thaetetus" refers to Thaetetus" we refer to a name (or that in the longer quoted expression I just used we refer to a sentence), we might say that we use "Thaeteus" with a modified force: where normally "Thaeteus" symbolizes only in some such proposition as "Thaeteus sits" or "Thaetetus flies", the quotation marks around ""Thaetetus"" cancel the force of the rest of the proposition, for all of the propositions in which "Thaeteus" has a use: thus we do not use quotation marks to refer to something which might exist before any proposition, but to refer to something which exists only in abstraction from propositions. Not: A name has a reference, and can be combined with other words to form a sentences, but: A sentence has names in it, which can be picked out in it and seen in other sentences. The use of quotation marks around an expression thus depend on that expression already having a use in the language, to use them in the way they are ordinarily used in logic and semantics. So this way of using "Thaeteus" is not using it outside of the context of a proposition, but it using it in the context of propositions which are bracketed out: not outside of a context of significant use, but in a different context of significant use which is parasitic on those contexts. "Thaeteus" is not something we can mention which has a meaning by itself, but is something we can mention as having its meaning in this-and-that proposition which we leave unstated (but could state examples of).

This is contrary to the manner in which artificial languages are constructed (as in Carnap), where we distinguish between the introduction of atomic signs and the rules for formation of sentences from the combination of atomic signs (and from other sentences). This gives the appearance that we can have something logical in view before the final proposition-in-a-context-of-significant-use is given, that we can build up one of these out of some things understandable antecedently.

Carnap is one of the inventors of metalogic; he reads into the Tractatus a notion of "a language" which is at home in his own work on metalogic, where a "language" is something we can have in view without presently using it (as its use is external to it: a formal language is in itself a system of manipulable marks, and can be manipulated or not as we please). The Tractatus has no such notion: its author is not teaching us about a formal language, but about a method of rewriting the propositions of ordinary language, which is for its author "the only language I can understand". (Thus we do not need to saddle this author with the view that every language has the same expressive power, that all languages are intertranslatable: his Begriffschrift is not meant to be a language which has the powers of all languages, but to be a style of notation which can serve to rewrite any language. The notation itself does not need to have expressive powers in the way that the languages it is used to rewrite do: anyone who wants to rewrite something in the notation of the Tractatus can make use of whatever sorts of (e.g.) names his own language gives him, and doesn't need a Begriffschrift to supply him with any.)

When working with a formal language which resembled ordinary language, we can mistake a sentence of the formal language (which exists only according to the arbitrary dictates of the formal system in which it is produced) with a sentence of ordinary language which superficially resembles it: we can then imagine that our ordinary language is what this formal language has created, forgetting that the formal language is a free creation of a particular subject and no ordinary language can be this. ("The only language which I understand" cannot be something I produce by a free act, for I must already understand it to formulate any such end for myself.) "Formal language" and "ordinary language" have only a sign in common, and the author of the Tractatus reminds us that this is of no logical import.

(It is probably important that Davidson rejects Tarski's theory of quotation marks in the Warheitsbegriff as an error, and has to replace it to apply Tarski's definition of truth to natural languages; I would have to look at Tarski again to remember what his view actually was.)

This way of thinking goes along with thinking that the rules of "logical syntax" are constitutive of thought, not normative for it: we cannot violate them. Thus there cannot be an impermissible combination of signs, for to speak of "permission" makes no sense here. In not being able to violate these rules, we are not prohibited from thinking anything; outside of the limits of thought there is simply nonsense: not something which we are prohibited from thinking. (I am not happy with any formulation of this I can think of. This is perhaps an important point about the constitutive-normative distinction in these areas, that formulations of either sort of view can be taken as formulations of the other.)

In logic we can never do something we shouldn't do, but only misunderstand what we are doing. We can only mistake something other than logic for logic, as Frege warned us about; but Frege's rule to always sharply distinguish the logical and the psychological does not go far enough, for there are other troubles than psychologism to worry about. (Frege perhaps falls into a confusion of logic and language when he looks for the referents of concept-expressions, as both names and concept-expressions are written in words.) Or perhaps: we all too easily underestimate what it is that is "psychological" as opposed to logical: not just the subjective play of Vorstellungen is opposed to the logical. "Logical" is perhaps not a term that wears the pants, as Austin said of "real".

I have no idea if I'm going anywhere (with this?). I want to say: I am a mass of errors, and can do nothing but err. Is there a context of significant use in which such "philosophy" as I produce has a sense, or is this too nothing but confusion? (That there is not is suggested by the fact that this question strikes me as sophistry: but I feel it forced upon me by my own thinking, which is also tarred as sophistry by this association, and so the question seems to have force: and on in circles I go.)

A Conference viewed Sub Specie Aeternitatis

The third day of the Wittgenstein conference was terrific.

I missed the first paper due to sleeping in a little late and then having to prepare for leaving town etc. It was about "Count Eberhard's Hawthorn", which is the poem of which Wittgenstein, in a letter to Engelmann, famously said "Uhland’s poem is really magnificent. And this is how it is: when one does not attempt to utter the unutterable, then nothing is lost. Rather, the unutterable is, – unutterably – contained in what is uttered." I would've liked to have heard the discussion of this, but I definitely needed the extra sleep for the drive home at the end of the day. If anyone reading this was at this part of the conference, I'd be interested to hear how it went.

The second paper discussed was a piece Michael Fried has published in Critical Inquiry vol. 33 no. 3, "Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday". Fried is fantastically interesting to see speak, and his passion for this material is infectious. I know nothing about art history or art criticism, but here's some of what I took away from his talk:

The previous day of the conference, someone had mentioned that Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein had bonded over their love of movies. Wittgenstein claimed that there could not be a great British movie, and Ryle conceded that there had not yet been one (at this point Conant interrupted "And the evidence has mounted ever since!"). Wittgenstein blamed this on British actors being too theatrical: even in a movie, you could tell they were acting as if they were in front of an audience, etc. Fried said that a similar sort of worry had struck Diderot in the 18th century, that stage-acting was too manifestly stage-acting to really have the sort of impact he wanted it to have. So Diderot introduced the dispositif of the "dramatic tableau", basically an invisible "fourth wall" of the stage, with the actors acting as if there was nothing outside of the walls of the stage (while still being conscious of themselves as acting, and so not having this hinder their ability to project to the back of the room etc.) (I am sure my presentation of this is woefully inadequate, but I'm out of my depth here.) In this way you can portray "ordinary" life on the stage without it being obtrusively theatrical: you can put ordinary happenings in front of an audience and have them seem ordinary, not staged. But this isn't quite the right way to put it: ordinary events in life are not seen in this way (not usually), so the ordinary happenings which are seen "as ordinary" on the stage are in fact seen in a way different than how they would ordinarily be seen. To get the audience to see the ordinary as the ordinary, you have to give it to them on a stage which they don't notice. Fried also related this to the photography of Jeff Wall, an artist & friend of his, in particular his photo of Adrian Walker, where you see Walker absorbed in his work, but can also see both his sketch of a hand and the model he's sketching from. Many of the works Fried discusses in his paper are striking because in them we see figures totally absorbed in what they're doing, but (says Fried) before Wall this was not thematized, but merely taken advantage of: every decade or so, an artist would stumble upon the idea of depicting someone totally absorbed in what they were doing, and this would amaze everyone, and then people would get tired of it and forget about it until someone else discovered it a little later. In Wall's Adrian Walker photo, Wall both takes advantage of the aesthetic appeal of absorption and shows us an artist copying something, thus making us realize that we are not seeing the everyday, but an artificial copy of it. (I suspect that this paragraph is worse than a freshman Art History major could write. Fried's article is good.)

Fried has been a friend of Stanley Cavell's for years, and it was through Cavell that he became interested in Wittgenstein. Fried stressed that he is "not a philosopher, and couldn't do philosophy", but that Wittgenstein (Cavell's Wittgenstein) was still hugely important for him and his work. Fried said that while he was working on his Diderot book he wished that Diderot and Wittgenstein could've met each other, somehow -- "and then when I read this passage from Culture & Value, I realized that they had!" -- here Fried proceeded to read the following passage C&V 6e-7e, from 22 August 1930. I wish someone'd been filming it, his reading was so animated; he noted and emphasized each punctuation mark with little hand-gestures. Delightful. Anyway, the passage, as he has it in his paper:

Engelmann [Paul Engelmann,Wittgenstein’s close friend and faithful
correspondent] told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious that he thinks they would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm & value & becomes impossible. I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage.We should be seeing life itself.—But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view.—Similarly when E. looks at his writings and finds them splendid (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, & as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever. But only the artist can represent the individual thing [das Einzelne] so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly & in any case without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art compels us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.[)]
But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is—as I believe—the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.

Fried seems to be entirely right to connect the Diderotian tableau, his theme of absorption, and this passage: Wittgenstein's imaginary scenario about a theater is pretty much what Diderot wanted. And then the final lines connect all of this back with the Tractatus and the 1916 Notebooks. Lot of stuff going on here.

One thing to note: the passage I underlined is italicized in Fried's paper. Joachim Schulte noted that this was a place where "Culture & Value" had an unfortunate critical apparatus: the passage is underlined with a squiggle in the manuscript, but C&V has it underlined normally (and then Fried converted all the underlinings into italics). But squiggly underlines are how Wittgenstein marked words he wasn't sure about. So when Wittgenstein says "the work of art compels us to see it in the right perspective", "right" is a word that's not quite right, here.

Another thing to note: Fried thinks the shift from das Einzelne to der Gegestand is significant: art makes us see an ordinary Gegenstand as something Einzelne. This fits very well with the October 7 1916 Notebooks passage:

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics.

The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeterinatis from outside.

In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

Is this it perhaps--in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time?

Each thing modifies the whole logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak.

(The thought forces itself upon one): The thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space.

One of the (many) ideas here is that seeing something as a work of art is seeing it not "from the midst of things" (as we ordinarily see things) but "from outside": with space and time instead of in them. The object is seen as with the whole world, not as part of it: it stands out from the whole world, which recedes as into a background.

This is redolent of the way Schopenhauer thinks of artworks: the importance of artworks is that in viewing them my individual will is quieted, and I apprehend things as a "pure subject of knowing", as a non-individual subject.

The third book of "The World as Will and Representation" is Schopenhauer's aesthetics, and begins with a lengthy discussion of "the Platonic Ideas". The Idea which a particular object manifests is always one and unchanging, but the objects which manifest the Ideas are always many and changing. Schopenhauer takes this Platonic distinction between the Many and the One to be at heart identical with the Kantian distinction between the phenomena and the thing-in-itself: plurality, change, duration, extension are all mere forms of our awareness, and do not condition the things themselves (Plato's ontos on, the proper objects of episteme as opposed to doxa, knowledge rather than opinion). Schopenhauer takes as one of his main additions to philosophy the idea that we can become aware of this distinction not only "in abstracto" through philosophy, but also "in exceptional cases" intuitively: the work of art shows us the truth of transcedental idealism/Platonism. Spelling this out and making it plausible is the task of book three of WWR.

I think the best way to make sense of this is to look at how artworks function, on Schopenhauer's account. In most artforms (music is an exception), Schopenhauer thinks that we see the art-object not as the particular object it is, but as the Platonic Idea which it manifests. Architecture gives us Ideas of hardness and rigidity, landscape paintings of various species of plant-life, portraiture the Ideas of various human types, etc. These are very odd claims to make, but I think I've found a way to make Schopenhauer's view look non-insane: the trick is to think of artworks as opposed to ordinary objects.

Normally, the way I apprehend objects is in terms of their practical significances for my purposes: I see the clearing as a good spot for building a fire, the fire as for cooking over, the pot as for making soup in, the soup as for eating, eating the soup as for satisfying my hunger, etc. Schopenhauer is withering about the endless nature of these fors: "satisfying" desire is an endless task, and he thinks it fundamentally misguided. The way to deal with a desire is not to satisfy it (since this brings more desires in its tow), but to stop desiring. (The Buddhist influence on Schopenhauer is obvious and self-conscious here.)

So, when we perceive an ordinary object, for Schopenhauer, this is entirely at the service of our will: we see it as for this-or-that task which we care about. We see it only in relation to ourselves (our tasks, our desires) and other things (to use it with/for). But perceiving an artwork is not like perceiving an ordinary object. So if you think about ordinary perception in the way Schopenhauer does, it's natural to think that what this means is: we see a work of art as not in relation to ourselves or other objects. We just see it by itself, not as an element of a totality which is spread out around it. We see it as One, not as one-among-many. So the idea that an artwork presents us with a Platonic Idea is not the pure rubbish it initially appears as, seen in this light. (Music is said to present us with "the will itself", and not an Idea, because music does not involve representing a particular sort of thing in the way that painting or sculpture does (or architecture, where the represented thing is identical with its representation) and so there's no particular sort of Idea it could be presenting. But the contrast is still present: listening to music involves perceiving the world in general in a way that is not related to our will or other things.)

From section 34 of WWR:

Raised up by the power of the mind, we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final relation is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it.... It was this that was in Spinoza's mind when he wrote: Mens aeterna est, quatenus res sub aeterinitatis specie concipit [The mind is eternal insofar as it conceives things from the point of view of eternity.]

To be fair to Schopenhauer, he thinks this is a place where he's going to be misunderstood (and taken to be ridiculous). He prefaces the above remarks with the plea that "the reader must suspend his surprise at it for a while, until it has vanished automatically after he has grasped the whole thought to be expressed in this work." So this is a place where Schopenhauer is aware that he's having a hard time saying what he wants, and doesn't think anyone will understand him unless they're in a position to understand his work as a whole: the claim about what Spinoza meant by conceiving of things sub specie aeternitatis is key to all of Schopenhauer's philosophy. And it's doubtless that Schopenhauer is where Wittgenstein took the phrase from (there being no evidence he ever read Spinoza). I am still working out what to make of this, but the conference was helpful for stimulating thinking on it.

...so with all that said, back to Fried: the contrast he sees between Einzelne and Gegenstand can easily be worked out along the lines I did above, but the German also allows for der Gegenstand to just be a pronoun that refers back to das Einzelne. And the Notebooks passage talks in terms of Gegenstand throughout, except for the line where Wittgenstein says "Jedes Ding bedingt die ganze Logische Welt" (where I can't help but feel the pun as doing work). So Fried might be reading too much into that particular word-choice. The German doesn't demand his reading.

Shifting focus: Someone asked Fried if the pleasure taken in seeing a work of art in which someone is totally absorbed in their doings was not a voyeuristic pleasure. Fried was adamant that it was not: A voyeur is a hidden spectator, and there is nothing like this in viewing an absorptive work of art. One does not view an absorptive work of art as a spectator at all -- there is no place in the picture that one is supposed to be viewing from (though of course it has to be drawn/shot from a visual perspective, this is not part of the content of the picture).

Here Conant added some remarks related to his work on film (he's part of the Film Theory group at Chicago): In an ordinary objective shot in a film, the question "Where is the camera in this space?" is something he says "has no application". There are ways of shooting a scene such that this *is* a question you can ask, like with point-of-view shots or tracking shots, but it is not a question you can intelligibly ask about an objective shot. Fried added that you can splice together things shot with different cameras or at different times, such that no camera in any location could've taken the shot you end up with in the film, which I think makes Conant's point more vivid.

In an objective shot, we are not seeing things from a place in the space of the film: thus it is natural to say we are viewing it from "outside" the space. But it is easy to be misled by this: Saying we view things from "outside" the space of the film is not to answer the question "Where in the space of the film is the camera located?" but to refuse it: viewing things "from outside" is not viewing them from any place. "Viewing things from outside the space" isn't a matter of having the things in the space being related to some point outside it, but is a matter of how the whole of the space is arranged. Shooting something "objectively" is a style of shooting, not a special position you're shooting from. To view things "from the point of view of eternity" is not to view them from a special point of view, eternity's, but to have the way one views things differ from the normal in some other way.

Conant related this to what he sees as the central concern of Wittgenstein: he is criticizing the idea that we need (or could have) a "view from outside", what McDowell calls a "sideways-on view", of our lives/thoughts/practices, in logic, in ethics, and in aesthetics. ("Skepticism is not irrefutable, but is obviously nonsense" is a pregnant Tractarian slogan here, for those familiar with Conant's writings.)

A sidenote: Someone asked Conant how the C&V passage relates to part two of Philosophical Investigations and its discussion of aspect-seeing, given that one thing Wittgenstein says in C&V is that Engelmann is "seeing his life as God's work of art". Conant's "gut reaction" was to say that this was a metaphor, and that you could push it too far, but that there was a similarity here: In both cases you see things the same, and you see them differently. The same drawing is now a duck, now a rabbit; similarly, Engelmann's life is not different when he views it as God's work of art and when he views it as he normally does, but there is a difference between those two. I'm not sure how Conant thinks you could push this line too far (and in fairness, he said this was only his gut reaction, not a considered opinion). Perhaps what he had in mind was that you can capture the aspect-changes of a duckrabbit by making different judgements: "I see a duck" vs. "I see a rabbit". It's not clear you can do this with seeing Engelmann's life normally and seeing it as God's work of art -- and more to the point, I think the author of the Tractatus would adamantly deny that any differences in judgements would capture the distinction he wanted. ("In the world there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.")

That's about all I have noted for Fried's talk (and I've missed/left out a lot -- it was a very fun two hours), but I'll close with a Walter Benjamin quotation that David Wellbury drew our attention to, because I don't have it quite right and I'm failing to google up the source: "What is the difference between this world and the world messianically redeemed? The difference is everything, but miniscule."

This post is probably already too long, so I'll leave my notes on Ray Monk's paper for another post. It was easily my favorite paper of the conference. Skipping past it: I really enjoyed the reception at the end of this day. I feel like this was the first conference reception that I really "got" how these receptions are supposed to go; the socializing was fun and stimulating and I didn't end up sitting in a corner sipping on a drink. I spoke to Ray Monk for around half an hour about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, which was good times. He thinks that when Wittgenstein refers to his first philosophy as "a Schopenhauerian idealism" he probably is referring to something he'd outgrown before he ever met Frege or Russell, since his interests had by then shifted to the foundations of mathematics. (Before he'd written to Russell he wrote a letter to Philip Jourdain about the axiom of choice.) But there's no knock-down evidence about this. More interestingly: I mentioned in passing that there wasn't any evidence Wittgenstein had read anything beyond the first volume of "The World as Will and Representation", and he said that he was pretty sure he'd mentioned "On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason" once. I pressed him on this, and his best guess was: He thinks that Anscombe had told him in conversation that Wittgenstein had mentioned it in conversation!

Also, Irad Kimhi said that the first "Twilight" movie was "beautiful", but he didn't like the second one. I just want this to be out there in the public record: Kimhi liked the first "Twilight" movie. He also seemed to be really enthusiastic about "Cowboys and Aliens".

A Link Post

I haven't been keeping my blogroll maintained, so here's some links to blogs the reader might not have known of:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy is about reading the early moderns along an experimental-speculative dichotomy rather than an empiricist-rationalist one. This has the merit of being a distinction actually in use at the time, rather than being one which first comes into full flower with Karl Reinhold. I continue to be impressed with how much of what "everyone knows" about Kant and Kantianism comes from places where Reinhold varied from Kant.

OLP & Literary Studies Online regularly links to/mentions new work on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

The Renaissance Mathematicus is a history of science blog. I should probably read more of those. They're fun.

Child's Play is a psychology blog that regularly says nice things about both Wittgenstein and "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". They also had a nice post on the "Knobe Effect" a while back that I can't recall if I ever got around to linking.

Extrablogically, I am currently going back and forth between Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein, looking for term paper ideas. Lots of connections slip in and out of view. Still in search of something term-paper-sized to poke at.

i has an m.a.

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.

Brief notes on various things

I am pretty satisfied with this comment on my previous post.

Paul Redding's "Hegel and Piercean Abduction" (European Journal of Philosophy 22:3) hits a lot of interesting material. It's mostly about the German Idealists' conceptions of the logical structure of judgements and the intuition/concept distinction. Redding, following Brandom, claims that the Idealists adopted an inferentialist approach to conceptual content. Hegel's opposition to Kant's distinction between intuitions (as singular representations) and concepts (as general representations) is shown to flow from his commitment to the notion that empirical judgements have their conceptual content because of their inferential relations; this is related to Hegel's treatment of the syllogism as "the truth of judgement". Empirical judgements are shown to have "syllogistic" structures, with concepts figuring variously as singular, as particular, and as universal, rather than (as on the Kantian account) being combinations of concepts with non-conceptual intuitions. This is related to the Romantic emphases on the authority of "feeling" and of the natural as normative, and Hegel's rejection of both of these, by way of Hegel's treatment of aesthetic judgements as the paradigm of judgements in general. There's also an extended discussion of Pierce's appropriation of Aristotle's syllogistic logic, and a few other lines of thought, all in fourteen pages. It'd be nice to have a more extended treatment of pretty much everything Redding mentions, but what's here is quite nice.

John Divers's "Quinean Skepticism about de re Modality after David Lewis" (European Journal of Philosophy 15:1) is a very nice discussion of Quine's "Reference and Modality", Lewis's response to it, Lewis's use of "On What There Is" to motivate his modal realism, and possible motivations for continued "Quinean" skepticism about de re modalities after all of this is taken into consideration. In the audio interview with Burton Dreben, Quine claims that he rejects Lewisian defenses of de re modality because they are ontologically profligate; "possible worlds" are too high a price to pay to be able to make sense of modal operators. Divers does a good job of showing how this sort of response is in tension with Quine's mathematical platonism: Quine is already willing to allow for unaesthetic extensions to his "desert landscape" ontology to accommodate number-talk, so it's not clear why he can refuse to do the same with modal-talk. Divers ends up offering a suggestion as to how de re modal-talk might still be resisted: Insist that de re modal-talk hasn't been shown to serve any useful purpose, and so there's no immediate reason why we should bother trying to make accomodations for it, rather than just dropping it altogether. I suspect that at least a partial response to this demand might be made by way of the Brandomian-Sellarsian notion that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms", but this sort of answer would show as unmotivated many "metaphysical" uses of de re modal-talk -- there's no need for a theory of counterparts if "A is necessarily p" and "B is possibly q" can be fully cached out in terms of what moves are and aren't allowed in a language-game.

Haugeland's "The Intentionality All-Stars" (Philosophical Perspectives, volume 4, 1990 pp.383-427) has the best meta-philosophy joke ever. I won't spoil it. The article is good apart from that joke, too.

Huwe Price's Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?" is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the queer fact that metaphysics is alive and well nowadays, after so many attempts to kill it. Price focuses on the role Quine's "On What There Is" has (purportedly) played in the rehabilitation of metaphysics, with an eye to reversing the trend. Price notes that appeal to a supposed Quine-Putnam "argument from indispensability" plays a central role in debates about "modal realism", and offers a rebuttal to it: Refusing to either give or deny an "ontological" ground for our mathematical practices is not "intellectually dishonest" in the way Quine claims. Ironically, Putnam himself opposes the argument attributed to him in a variety of places; he thinks the Quinean insistence on a univocal reading of the quantifier is absurd, and so is mathematical platonism.

Price's "One Cheer for Representationalism" is slated to appear in the "Library of Living [sic] Philosophers" volume on Rorty, which is currently in development. Rorty plays almost no role in the paper. It is mostly about Brandom and Blackburn's "quasi-realism", which Price expands to a "global expressivism", as he has previously urged in other places. (Link has powerpoint slides and audio, for maximal "I-don't-feel-like-reading-this"-ness!) Price seems to me to recoil too far away from representation-talk, just as Rorty did, so perhaps the essay is not as inappropriate as it initially seems. Price only wants to rehabilitate talk of "representations" in an expressivist manner, but I can't see any motivation for stopping there, beyond a "naturalism" which makes the causal world seem "sparse" rather than "rich". I don't know how Price reconciles a global expressivism with this scientism; if no language plays the role of "representing how things are", then why are we supposed to take "our best current science" as somehow giving us a picture of "the causal order"? Why are we supposed to think there's any sense to talking about "the" causal order at all?

I have read in various places that Wiggins was influential for both Davidson and McDowell, so I looked him up on JStor. So far all I've read is "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", because it was only six pages long, and some book reviews. I can already sense why Wiggins might've been a cool dude. A quote from "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", p.92:

If it is a materialistic thesis that T = W [where T=a tree, W=the cellulose molecules that compose the tree], then my denial that T = W is a form of denial of materialism. It is interesting how very uninteresting an obstacle these Leibnizian difficulties-real though they are-put in the way of the reduction of botany and all its primitive terms to organic chemistry or to physics. (If it does not follow from T != W that trees are something over and above their matter, how much the less can it follow that they are immanent or transcendent or supervenient or immaterial beings. This is obviously absurd for trees. A Leibnizian disproof of strict identity could never be enough to show something so intriguing or obscure.) I should expect there to be equally valid, and from the point of view of ontology almost equally unexciting, difficulties in the reduction of persons to flesh and bones, in psychophysical event-materialism, and in the materialisms which one might formulate in other categories (such as the Aristotelian categories property and state or the categories situation and fact). Over and above is one question, identity is another. But of course the only stuff there is is stuff.

That's a pretty elegant way to avoid a bunch of ontological claims that I want to avoid. Is there some particular piece of Wiggins's I need to hunt down ASAP?

I read Derrida's "Signature Event Context"at Barnes&Noble. It was collected along with "limited ink abc...", an afterword where Derrida responded to some criticisms of "limited ink abc...", and a summary of Searle's article; apparently he wouldn't agree to having it reprinted in between the Derrida articles. Derrida's style still strikes me as the opposite of pleasant, but 'd' in "limited ink abc..." was pretty funny. Somewhere partway through 'e' I skipped to the afterword, where (paraphrasing since I didn't buy the book) Derrida is asked if he doesn't assume that concepts must have "rigid" rules for application, such that something is always "A or not-A" (vague or not vague, communicable or not communicable, etc.; he runs through a big list of them). Derrida answers in the affirmative: He does think concepts must be "rigid" in this way, so that one must always say, with the tradition, that (and here he runs through a whole slew of "A or not-A" phrases that I want not to affirm). I am now confident that I'll be fine not reading anything else Derrida wrote. Rorty's "Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition" left me with the strong impression that Rorty only praised Derrida so highly because of his style, and I am now convinced that this is how it is. As a philosopher, Derrida does not seem to have much to recommend him -- he is too caught up with dead projects.

Cavell would be easier to get into if he wasn't so damned erudite. Stop tying your philosophical points in to plays I haven't seen and novels I haven't read, dagnabit!

McDowell has an essay linked here which I can't recall anyone having linked to: "Why Is It Called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"?", which is a reading of Sellars as an empiricist, contra Brandom. I still haven't read Brandom's "study guide", and I'm now inclined to keep putting it off; McDowell's reading of Sellars strikes me as so obviously correct that I don't know how Brandom could read it otherwise. (I am of course aware that it is uncharitable to think Brandom is ever writing on something other than his own project. But Brandom's claim to be a Sellarsian is rather more forceful than his claim to be a Hegelian or Kantian, so a misreading here is more irksome.)

I'm slowly getting through "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The end of Chapter X left me still wondering why Kuhn thinks it's worthwhile to talk of scientists as "operating in different worlds" rather than just "doing different things" or "seeing things differently". Why the "swinging stone" could not have been seen as the same thing by both Aristotelians and Galileans is unclear to me -- the Aristotelians cannot see it as a pendulum, and the Galileans cannot see it as an object which by nature moves "down", but why can't both see it as a swinging stone? Doesn't Kuhn's presentation of the matter actually require this? Doesn't this leave "different worlds"-talk looking too strong? (A more detailed discussion of Kuhn's account would be needed to flesh this out, I realize.)

I suspect that this is tied to a passage that struck me as bizarre: speaking of the duckrabbit picture beloved of gestalt psychology (and the second part of Philosophical Investigations), Kuhn notes that a subject might eventually come to see the picture as neither duck nor rabbit, but as "lines on paper", "and he may then say (what he could not have legitimately said earlier) that it is these lines which he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit." (p.114 in the third edition) -- Isn't it just as legitimate for him to say that he sees the picture of a duck (or of a rabbit) as "mere lines"? I don't get what "really sees" means here. Surely he sees the ink on the paper (or pixels on a screen) as lines; then it is really the ink (or the pixels) that he sees! But both of these strike me as absurd -- the duckrabbit isn't "really" ink or lines or a duck or a rabbit, though it can be seen as all of these. There isn't anything it "really" is, behind all the aspects that one can perceive. The aspects one sees are what it "really is", in the only sense in which it "really is" anything at all. It's not as if the duck-aspect disappears when we don't see it; if someone (at first) can only see the rabbit, or can't see either picture (as happens with some of the worse gestalt images), then it isn't the case that the aspects have yet to come into being (after all, other people might be able to see them already). The fellow simply hasn't noticed them yet. So "perspectival aspects" seem as real as anything has claim to be.

Kuhn claims that the absence of an "external standard" in duckrabbit-like cases distinguishes simple gestalt shifts from scientific revolutions. If the "seeing lines as such-and-such" approach was supposed to be this "external standard", then scientific revolutions seem to revert to "simple" gestalt phenomena if that line was unintelligible. I want to say: One could view phenomena as they were conceived under an obsolete paradigm, it's simply (exceedingly) inconvenient scientifically, and suicidal professionally, for any given scientist to do so. In fact, it's not clear to me why one can't always go back to "pre-paradigm science" talk, if one doesn't mind giving up huge amounts of utility -- one can always talk in terms of "that thingy over there" and "that other thingy", if nothing else. It's liable to be confusing and there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, but I don't see that it would somehow fail to "get a grip" on the world discussed by our best paradigm-enabled science. There's an awful lot you won't be able to discuss profitably, but what you can talk about, you can talk about. Similarly, I don't see why anything other than psychological limitations prohibit a scientist from working with multiple incompatible paradigms, at different points in time, and suspect that there have been such individuals. Which seems to sap Kuhn of some of his philosophical interest.

Kuhn seems so focused on the theory-ladenness of observation (not his term) that he ignores how much conflicting paradigms can have in common. For instance, both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (and our modern systems of astronomy) agree that there are visible stars at some distance from us. There are many other theoretical commitments which incompatible paradigms do not share in common, but they aren't entirely exclusive of one another. There's no "core" of observational data that all theories share among themselves, nor any definite set of observation sentences which are independent of all paradigms. And perhaps there are not sentences shared by all paradigms, since the "is common to these two paradigms" relation needn't be transitive. But I don't see why one can't grant all of this, which seems to be what Kuhn is actually interested in convincing us of, without going to some of the rhetorical extremes that Kuhn does.

But, like I said in an earlier post, I should probably finish the book before thinking about it too much.

And finally, because I do not think I have posted enough random pictures recently: Cirno.

She is the strongest!

The meaning of §122 is of fundamental importance to us

It turned out to be sooner rather than later: A contribution to the ongoing discussion about §122 of Philosophical Investigations.

To begin with, a copy of a copy: Cavell, Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy, duplicating a paragraph from "Aesthetics and Modern Philosophy" (I cite the former because I don't have a copy of the latter handy):

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says, "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem," and in the Investigations he says: "... the clarity we are aiming at is indeeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear." Yet he calls these problems solved (Investigations), and he says that when "there are... no questions left... this itself is the answer" (Tractatus). Putting these remarks together, the implication is that the problems of life and the problems of philosophy have the same form -- Wittgenstein would say they have the same "grammar": they are solved only when they disappear; answers are arrived at only when there are no longer questions. In the Investigations, this turns out to be more of an answer than, in this simple form, it seems to be; for here such an answer more explicitly dictates and displays the ways philosophy is to proceed in investigating problems, ways leading to what he calls "perspicuous representation," which means, roughly, that instead of accumulating new facts, or capturing the essence of the world in definitions, or perfecting and completing our language, we need to arrange the facts we already know or can come to realize merely by calling to mind something we know. Philosophical conflict, say as expressed in skepticism, does not arise from one party knowing facts the other party does not know. Wittgenstein also says that perspicuous representations are "the way we look at things," and he then asks "Is this a 'Weltanschauung'?" The answer to that question is, I take it, not No. Not, perhaps, Yes, because it is not a special, or competing, way of looking at things. But not No, because its mark of success is that the world seem --- be -- different.

I think Cavell notices something which I took to be clear, but which Baker & Hacker both appears to disagree with Cavell & me on: what a "perspicuous presentation" (ubersichtlichen Darstellung) is. Wittgenstein says that this concept is of "fundamental importance" to us, that it "earmarks" (bezeichnet, names, labels) the form of account we give, the way we look at things. It "produces just that sort of understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'"; this is said to be the reason "finding and inventing intermediate cases" is important.

The way I take all of this is -- the goal of Wittgenstein's approach to a philosophical problem is to attain a "perspicuous presentation" of the issues which have given rise to the problem -- to get a view of things which does not leave us wanting to ask questions which don't have answers (such as "how do I know that what I call "pain" is like what you call "pain"?"). Being "perspicuous" is just this quality of not being confusing to us (here, now, on this occasion) -- not leading us to ask the bad sort of questions, or make bad, "metaphysical" inferences from our everyday knowledge. And what is "presented" is nothing that was "hidden" in our everyday talk, nor something that we require a systematic treatment of our language-use to notice -- though a systematic treatment might be useful, in some cases! --; what is presented is just our everyday practices, which we were already familiar with. "Philosophy leaves everything as it is."

"A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspecuity." We fail to understand, to have the right sort of understanding, because we might not immediately notice that certain questions or assertions are nonsense; we can be wrong when we feel that we have a clear view of the words involved. We might need leading to see a piece of "disguised nonsense" for the patent nonsense it is.

Why is finding/inventing "intermediate cases" important? Not, I would argue, because this is somehow a "fundamentally important" "form of account" that Wittgenstein is concerned with presenting. The presentation of "intermediate cases" is important because the sort of understanding Wittgenstein aims at (and aims at cultivating) is one which consists in "seeing connexions" -- in seeing how things hang together. And presenting a confused consciousness with "intermediate cases", with cases where the connexions are more readily drawn, is a means to cultivate this sort of understanding. When one has this sort of view (which need not be a "bird's eye" or "God's eye" view), one doesn't ask questions about "how things hang together" which have no answer (such as "How does thought hook onto the world?"). Nor does one fall in for metaphysical rubbish which purports to explain how things hang together. (Seeing connexions means not imagining what connexions would have to be like.)

Based on n.n.'s post, Baker and Hacker both seem to take "perspicuous representations" as naming means to Wittgenstein's end, rather than Wittgenstein's end itself. (Though Baker seems to come close to my reading when he claims that "a 'perspicuous representation' is not a representation that is perspicuous, but a representation that renders perspicuous what it represents" -- though he seems to then go on to say that "all of the reminders of 'landmarks', the suggestions of 'patterns, analogies, pictures, etc. which enable us to find our way about in the motley of "our language"' will qualify as 'perspicuous representations." Whereas I don't want to call these anything more than -- helpful. They aren't of "fundamental importance" to Wittgenstein's "method", because there is no method in philosophy, and so nothing could be fundamentally important for that method. And neither can there be anything "fundamentally important" to the end Wittgensteinian philosophizing aims at, other than the end itself.)

And now, since n.n. was skeptical that his geography quotations allowed for a non-Hackensteinian reading, I shall attempt to give a non-Hackensteinian reading of the lot:

My aim is to teach you the geography of a labyrinth, so that you know your way about it perfectly. (MS 162b, 6v).
Knowing one's way about a labyrinth "perfectly" would just mean that one didn't go towards a dead-end at any point, or towards a wrong exit. There's no reason to assume that this imagery (which is basically that of the fly and the fly-bottle) is intended to hint at something like "conceptual topography." The geography/knowing-your-way-about talk could just be swapped out with talk of confusion & its avoidance.

The philosopher wants to master the geography of concepts. (MS 137, 63a)
I read this line two ways; I'm not sure quite what the context is, so I'm unable to get a firmer grip on it than that:"The philosopher" wants to do a lot of impossible things; "mastering the geography of concepts" might be no better a goal than "trying the grasp the incomparable essence of language" (PI 97). Alternately, this line may just be saying the same as the previous one: The philosopher wants to not get lost when he wanders in thought. He doesn't want to fall into paralogisms, antinomies, etc.

I am trying to conduct you on tours in a certain country. I will try to show you that the philosophical difficulties which arise in mathematics as elsewhere arise because we find ourselves in a strange town and do not know our way. So we must learn the topography by going from one place in the town to another, and from there to another, and so on. And one must do this so often that one knows one's way, either immediately or pretty soon after looking around a bit, wherever one may be set down.
This is an extremely good simile. In order to be a good guide, one should show people the main streets first.... The difficulty in philosophy is to find one's way about. (LFM, 44)
Suppose one had no guide when one was dropped into a strange city. One would wander around, not knowing where one was headed. And then after one had wandered around for long enough, one would instead be wandering around while knowing where one was headed (if one had been paying the least attention to one's surroundings). One might do this without ever drawing a map -- one simply "gets a feel" for the place.

If one has a guide, then the most helpful thing the guide can do is point out places where it is easy to get turned around, where the topography is unintuitive, and places which are hubs, which lead to many places (the "main streets"). This too might be done without ever drawing a map (even mental one).

In this "extremely good" simile, the main streets are the uses of the confusing bits of language which are not confusing to the one being guided; the guide aims to lead the wanderer to stop heading down blind alleys by pointing out the main streets, and leading the wanderer to learn how the alleys and streets line up -- the philosophical therapist aims to lead the confused thinker to stop trying to "dig below bedrock" by pointing out how things stand on the ground, and how the bedrock lies relative to the surface; how we use certain terms, and how their apparently metaphysical use stands to their everyday use.

One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language and the geography its grammar. We can walk about the country quite well, but when forced to make a map, we go wrong. (AWL, 43)
When forced to make a map!

I admit, I'm not sure what to make of this passage. But I will note that it's different than the earlier ones -- here the problem is not one of being lost or not (for "we can walk about the country quite well"), but of the difficulty of making a map. So it appears that these various geography-images don't share a common backing; they're just all places where Wittgenstein uses similar sorts of metaphors to convey some point or other.

I am inclined to connect this passage with the introduction to the Investigations: the "difficulty in philosophy" here is just that which prevented Wittgenstein from writing a "normal" book, with chapter-headings etc. But as he notes in that introduction, this isn't an accidental difficulty; the only way to go about this process is to "travel criss-cross in every direction." (And the only way to draw a map is through wandering around as one notes landmarks.)

Teaching philosophy involves the same immense difficulty as instruction in geography would have if a pupil brought with him a mass of false and falsely simplified ideas about the courses and connections of rivers and mountains. (BT, §90)
This geography-quote could be replaced with "...as instruction in poker... about the values of hands and how to spot a bluff." Any resemblance to "conceptual geography" is entirely superficial.

In order to know your way about an environment, you do not merely need to be acquainted with the right path from one district to another; you need also to know where you'd get to if you took this wrong turning. This shews how similar our considerations are to travelling in a landscape with a view to constructing a map. And it is not impossible that such a map will sometime get constructed for the regions that we are moving in. (RPP, §303)
The only sense in which I would need to know where I'd get to if I took a wrong turn, if what's at issue is whether or not I know my way about, is that I need to know how (if I took a wrong turn) I might get back on the route I wanted to be on. (For if I had to know where all the wrong turns would lead before I could be said to know my way around an environment, then the only way I could know my way around an environment would be to know my way around any environment that environment could lead to, since I could take wrong turn upon wrong turn, which is absurd.) So the sort of map in question here, I want to say, is the sort of map you're given as directions to a party (as opposed to the sort sold at gas stations). (I suspected I might be missing something from lack of context here, but a glance at the surrounding sections in the RPP seem to show that there is no context for this remark -- it's just there, between some remarks about pain and "inner processes".)

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.—And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.
The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. (PI, Preface)
Here the metaphor is just that of writing a book as being like painting a landscape. Wittgenstein is apologizing for the painting not being very good, just as he'd hoped that someone might do a better job at writing the Tractatus, in that book's introduction. Landscape painting, not cartography, is what is being gestured at here.

This may be compared to the way a chartered accountant precisely investigates and clarifies the conduct of a business undertaking. The aim is a synoptic comparative account of all the applications, illustrations, conceptions of the calculus. The complete survey of everything that may produce unclarity. And this survey must extend over a wide domain, for the roots of our ideas reach a long way. (Z, §273)
Here I think context is helpful:

273: Hardy: "That 'the finite cannot understand the infinite' should surely be a theological and not a mathematical war-cry." True, the expression is inept. But what people are using it to try and say is: "We mustn't have any juggling! How comes this leap from the finite to the infinite?" Nor is the expression all that nonsensical--only the 'finite' that can't conceive the infinite is not 'man' or 'our understanding', but the calculus. And HOW this conceives the infinite is well worth an investigation. This may be compared to the way a chartered accountant precisely investigates and clarifies the conduct of a business undertaking. The aim is a synoptic comparative account of all the applications, illustrations, conceptions of the calculus. The complete survey of everything that may produce unclarity. And this survey must extend over a wide domain, for the roots of our ideas reach a long way.--"The finite cannot understand the infinite" means here: It cannot work in the way you, with characteristic superficiality, are presenting it.
Thought can as it were fly, it doesn't have to walk. You do not understand your own transactions, that is to say you do not have a synoptic view of them, and you as it were project your lack of understanding into the idea of a medium in which the most astounding things are possible.

I will admit that Wittgenstein does seem to have something like Hackenstein's approach in mind, here. Hackenstein's approach strikes me as a pretty decent way to handle confusions that arise from the misuse of a calculus. So, I am inclined to just concede this one: a Hackensteinian approach will get it about right. It's a fine tool for working with calculi.

A philosophical question is similar to one about the constitution of a particular society.
—And it's as if a group of people came together without clearly written rules, but with a need for them; indeed also with an instinct that caused them to observe certain rules at their meetings; but this is made difficult by the fact that nothing has been clearly articulated about this, and no arrangement has been made which brings the rules out clearly. Thus they in fact view one of their own as president, but he doesn't sit at the head of the table and has no distinguishing marks, and that makes negotiations difficult. That is why we come along and create a clear order: we seat the president at a clearly identifiable spot, seat his secretary next to him at a little table of his own, and seat the other full members in two rows on both sides of the table, etc., etc. (BT, §89)
"They in fact view one of their own as president, but he... has no distinguishing marks"strikes me as incoherent. If the president is identifiable as the guy that he is, then anything that allowed that guy to be distinguished would be a "distinguishing mark." And if the president isn't identifiable as the guy that he is, then I don't see how they could view him as their president. This paragraph does not strike me as being Wittgenstein at his best: The people are supposed to have an instinct to follow rules which they are unable to follow? How is that supposed to work? If I do a piss-poor job at something, it would be awfully strange to say I'm doing it instinctively -- instincts are supposed to be capabilities. (I can duck a ball instinctively. I can't try (and generally fail) to duck a ball instinctively. If I usually get hit by a ball when it's thrown at me, but flinch while it's approaching me, then all I'm doing "instinctively" is flinching, not repeatedly trying (and failing) to duck.)

I will note, though, that we are supposed to just be rearranging the seating-order here: We seat the president here, the secretary there, with an aim to making it easier to conduct meetings. We aren't making an organizational chart, and then using the chart to arrange with. The arrangement itself is said to "bring out the rules clearly" -- the rules don't get a further, explicit, formulation.

I also feel compelled to note that some countries have done perfectly well without written constitutions, and some have even argued that written constitutions are detrimental to the cause of the rule of law (since a written constitution can be adhered to in letter only while violated in spirit, but this is not possible when a nation's constitution is just its most central customary laws -- or at least it is much harder to simultaneously present an account of the law of the land which will be recognized as such and bend that law to be something it isn't). There are all sorts of things I don't like about this paragraph.

(I should probably finish Insight and Illusion at some point. I laid it down somewhere in the middle period; I remember finding Hacker's account of the "mystical" in the Tractatus hand-wavey.)