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Sometimes I feel I don't know what kind of picture of the world Wittgensteinian philosophers have in mind at all. (I know--pictures are probably not what they should be in the business of providing....) The kind of picture this is will be shown by the ways in which they criticize other philosphers (the "terms of criticism" they use). One criticism they, and I, often use--one of the more advanced ones, I think--is that so-and-so is oversimplifying x, and thereby being unfailthful to the complexity of our forms of life. This is the essential criticism given by Wittgensteinian philosophers. We accuse others of oversimplifying, of assimilating all cases of such-and-such to a single paradigm, and proceed to explain how things are more complex than that, and how this complexity is shown by the way we talk. We learn things about ourselves and help others to see them by doing this.
What is less clear is why these other philosophers should be worried, or why this is the criticism we make. Why do we take the interconnectedness of things as the final arbiter of what makes sense? Are we, in fact, philosophers working with a particular kind of rationality, one not based on arguments? If so, this new kind of rationality feels especially slippery. Tutoring a non-native English speaker in writing is enough to show that intelligibility depends entirely on tiny aesthetic choices--on choices that can be made correctly only on the basis of their sounding right, choices no rules dictate, and for which there are few explanations. (Semantics may be built on syntax, but it's also built on aesthetics.)
One part of the general neo-Wittgensteinian picture that I have a hard time latching onto is the distinction between the philosophical and the ordinary. I'm genuinely unsure what this distinction amounts to. Is there a specific way we experience the ordinary, a sort of first-person unreflective experience, that is not available to us in detached philosophical reflection? And what, exactly, is philosophical reflection detached from? (I am suspicious of saying it is detached from our 'ordinary forms of life' because that implies that there is one way of being detached from these things, or thar they are somehow unified so that we can be detached from all of them simultaneously.) And this, I suppose, is exactly the point of the ordinary language philosopher who says that what the ordinary philosopher--usually a skeptic--does is impossible because one cannot be detached from all our ordinary forms of life simultaneously. The problem is that it is almost impossible to be so detached; one always has little hidden commitments, conceptual or practical, to the ordinary world, that one is ignoring or denying in order to claim that one doubts. The doubt itself is suspiciously unconnected to the rest of one's life, or--if beliefs form a web and should therefore check each other--beliefs. The ordinary language philosopher insists on these commitments. (Real commitments, not ontological 'commitments'--an oddly unportentious way of using a portentious word.)
But what do we get for badgering people about the consistency between their philosophical claims and their other beliefs? Why insist on consistency? One answer would be: because it is rationality. There is nothing else that intelligibility is, and if philosophers wish to be intelligible (don't they?) and clear, they should care about our badgering. So this is, in a way, a formal philosophy. It describes, or at least repeatedly points to, the conditions for something: the conditions for making sense. I feel, actually, that I am able to give subtler criticisms this way than I would otherwise give: there just aren't enough terms, between the formal and informal fallacies and ways of disagreeing with premises, for all the things that can go wrong in what a philosopher says. There aren't terms because philosophy, in the academic sense, is not responsible to anything. One can adduce reasons for and against most of the major philosophical positions (especially in metaphysics) without staking any claims to which all of one's beliefs will in principle be subject. But I think the impulse to philosophy that people feel wants it to be responsible to life; if it isn't, then what has it shown us?
What is less clear is why these other philosophers should be worried, or why this is the criticism we make. Why do we take the interconnectedness of things as the final arbiter of what makes sense? Are we, in fact, philosophers working with a particular kind of rationality, one not based on arguments? If so, this new kind of rationality feels especially slippery. Tutoring a non-native English speaker in writing is enough to show that intelligibility depends entirely on tiny aesthetic choices--on choices that can be made correctly only on the basis of their sounding right, choices no rules dictate, and for which there are few explanations. (Semantics may be built on syntax, but it's also built on aesthetics.)
One part of the general neo-Wittgensteinian picture that I have a hard time latching onto is the distinction between the philosophical and the ordinary. I'm genuinely unsure what this distinction amounts to. Is there a specific way we experience the ordinary, a sort of first-person unreflective experience, that is not available to us in detached philosophical reflection? And what, exactly, is philosophical reflection detached from? (I am suspicious of saying it is detached from our 'ordinary forms of life' because that implies that there is one way of being detached from these things, or thar they are somehow unified so that we can be detached from all of them simultaneously.) And this, I suppose, is exactly the point of the ordinary language philosopher who says that what the ordinary philosopher--usually a skeptic--does is impossible because one cannot be detached from all our ordinary forms of life simultaneously. The problem is that it is almost impossible to be so detached; one always has little hidden commitments, conceptual or practical, to the ordinary world, that one is ignoring or denying in order to claim that one doubts. The doubt itself is suspiciously unconnected to the rest of one's life, or--if beliefs form a web and should therefore check each other--beliefs. The ordinary language philosopher insists on these commitments. (Real commitments, not ontological 'commitments'--an oddly unportentious way of using a portentious word.)
But what do we get for badgering people about the consistency between their philosophical claims and their other beliefs? Why insist on consistency? One answer would be: because it is rationality. There is nothing else that intelligibility is, and if philosophers wish to be intelligible (don't they?) and clear, they should care about our badgering. So this is, in a way, a formal philosophy. It describes, or at least repeatedly points to, the conditions for something: the conditions for making sense. I feel, actually, that I am able to give subtler criticisms this way than I would otherwise give: there just aren't enough terms, between the formal and informal fallacies and ways of disagreeing with premises, for all the things that can go wrong in what a philosopher says. There aren't terms because philosophy, in the academic sense, is not responsible to anything. One can adduce reasons for and against most of the major philosophical positions (especially in metaphysics) without staking any claims to which all of one's beliefs will in principle be subject. But I think the impulse to philosophy that people feel wants it to be responsible to life; if it isn't, then what has it shown us?
