Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in The Language Dork's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, February 5th, 2003
12:12 am	David Hume, you magnificient bastard, I read your treatise! Take my previous entry. Add sosjtb12's most recent entry. Bring to a boil and reduce. End result: David Hume's problem of induction. Everywhere I turn I find the problem of induction. It surfaces it much more refined ways and in much more interesting situations but nonetheless there it is: problem of induction. sosjtb12's entry, which I thought was really great,drew my attention to this one facet of the problem of induction. We can never be sure of our conclusions from a finite number of instances of a behavior. Worse than that point is one that doesn't necessarily touch on induction but is still harrowing; our inability to verify claims about the internal states of others. As someone who oftentimes is extremely neurotic about how his friends feel about him I identify with what was said. I think this whole situation is one example of why Wittgenstein refers to internal states as "a something of which nothing can be said". There is nothing verfiable about people's claims about their internal states. Quine's solution focuses on behavior as the proof. I find that unfufilling because it leaves you in a place where you deny way to much. I much prefer Wittgenstein's approach. He doesn't deny internal states, he just insists that they're unverfiable and that language is unable to accurately capture them. I really need to revisit the Philosophical Investigations. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 4th, 2003
12:43 am	The Wittgenstein Stomp I've been reading Kripke on Wittgestein on Rules and Private Language. First the paradox in Wittgenstein's words. in S201 of Philosophical Investigations: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord out with that rule." This paradox is a great one. Is there a fact of the matter about me, along with a justification, that proves that whenever I apply a rule I'm using the same rule as I was in the past? I'm looking forward to exploring this piece of skepticism in the next few weeks. What I'll turn up remains to be seen, but I'm set to tackle the issue. Let the paradox-solving begin. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 7th, 2003
7:31 pm	Hodge-Podge of Wittgenstein on Rule Following. So this week starts my foray into Wittgenstein and Rule Following as an independant study. I should be updating much more and I hope for ample responses from all my readers, the few of you that exist. I've only done a little bit of work regarding this, mainly on the grammar of the word "understand". My knowledge is spotty because it is a particularly difficult portion of the text and I only read it twice. Basically Wittgenstein's idea is,in a nutshell, that to say that someone understands is simply to mean that "you've gone on as I wanted you to." Example: I give you the list of numbers 2,4,6,8,10 and I ask you to go on. You reply 12, and I say continue and you say 14,16,18,20. You've used the operator "+2". I say good, you "understand". What I really mean here is that you've gone on as I wanted you to. Understand simply means to do as I wish you to do. We often want to believe that to understand refers to some inner process, inside our heads. This simply cannot be the case because, as Wittgenstein points out earlier in Philosophical Investigations, words cannot refer to internal states. The reason for this is that internal states are 100% private and language is a public tool. For anyone to comprehend what someone says when they use a language means that the word must refer to something public. Since private sensations are not public, words cannot refer to them. This is Wittgenstein's famous "Beetle in the Box" example. Wittgenstein points out that the operator "+2" is also not a hard and fast rule as we tend to think that it is. It is possible for the operation "+2" could mean to someone what the operation "+2 until 20, then +3" means to us. This doesn't seem that interesting at first, but you've got Wittgenstein showing us that even mathematics is not absolute, like we think it is. The "+" operator is not carved in stone, like we tend to consider it. Wittgenstein also comments about how the concept of grasping a rule is so peculiar because if we take the concept of grasping a rule to be referencing an inner state of being then to grasp rules we would have to grasp meta rules first which provide us with the framework to utilize rules. But then we would need Meta Meta rules to grasp the meta rules, on and on ad infinitum. We're caught in an infinite regress. There are lots of parts in Wittgenstein's work where he shows that our beliefs don't work because they trap us in an infinte regress. That is a very interesting tactic I think, it works much like the argument reducing things to solipsism works. Solipsism and infinte regresses are so ridiculous to us that we rarely even question them as a possibilily and in fact use them to reduce others ideas down to nonsense. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 9th, 2002
1:27 am	This is my first entry for this journal, which is to be a collection of my thoughts and responses to issues in the Philosophy of Language as I encounter them. This entry is an excerpt from a short essay for class. Quine commented, in Two Dogmas of Empiricism, that "for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind." I find this quote from Quine compelling because it really sums up his points about language and science in an eloquent fashion. Many people don't understand it and become furious because he is comparing something like Homer's gods to Science. I find his comparison is compelling, if you're willing to look at it closely, slowly and with an open mind for his end-goals. One major point here is his re conception of our notion of language, more specifically the act of naming. Most people think that a word refers to the thing it names. It is precisely this conception of language that gives rise to conceptions of magical realms inhavited by the "form of x". The notion of meaning as referent is simply not rich enough to encompass everything we call language. This re conception is not unique to Quine; Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein all gave us this same lesson, Wittgenstein most completely. Quine discusses a problem that stems from this he calls "inscrutability of reference" which basically can be summed up in the point that it is impossible to tell whether an object you refer to with a word is the same object that I refer to with that word. When I say "rabbit" am I referring to the thing that is hopping about in front of us or am I referring, to use Quine's example, to "undetached rabbit-parts"? The answer is there is no way to know, as long as when I use the word "rabbit" you provide the response for which I am looking. Here is an important juncture, leave the discussion here and you will miss the point, as so many before have. Quine's point is not that we should all be skeptics and we should just question whether anyone understands us, his point is that there is a certain amount of ambiguity in our use of language. Quine says that "reference is inscrutable". The interesting thing about this point is that despite this we manage to use language every day for everything we do and we use it to a marvelous success! Surely Quine's point is not that since we cannot know the absolute fact of the matter that it is a pointless waste of time to bother at all. Quine seems simply to be drawing our attention to the bounds of our language, much as Wittgenstein did. Quine seems preoccupied with what can be said or, as Wittgenstein calls it in the Tractatus, "the limits of our language" So we turn back to our quote, specifically to the part where Quine compares the conceptions of science to the conceptions of Homer's gods. His point is that epistemologically they are no different and I think he is right about that. People ask me if I believe that electrons exist and my answer is always "does it matter?" So long as our conception of electrons aides us in controlling and predicting I fail to see whether it matters if they really exist. Conceptions of what really exist seem wrong-headed to me. Science is in the business of explaining and controlling. As long as the things they postulate allows us to explain and control whether they really exist is pointless conjecture in my book. I'll never "see" an electron which, in my view, is the only way to ever know if something really exists. I refer you to G. E. Moore's famous response to Skepticism: "I know that I have a hand." If you want to be such a hard core skeptic about things that you'll deny what is in front of your eyes I have very little in the way to discuss with you. If you want to ask me questions like "Do electrons exist?" I'm going to be baffled. Sure we can play the language game of philosophy and ask do Electrons really exist, but we won't be any further towards an answer when we're done. The same can be said about Homer's gods. Does Zeus really exist? my response: "Come again?" There is truly no point in these questions, epistemologically. We'll never know if there was or wasn't a Zeus. Does this mean that I'm a hard core skeptic? No, if you think that you've sorely misunderstood both Quine's quote and my picture of the world. It is not accurate to talk about the existence of electrons, quarks, or Z particles. It is not accurate to ask whether Zeus, Hera or Ares exist. These are constructs that were/are used to explain phenomena. They are only as useful as how well or poorly they explain phenomena. We, as a society, embrace science because we feel it more accurately portrays the world. The real reason we embrace science, in my estimation, is because it is highly predictive. We can turn that predictive nature of science into many wondrous things. Zeus does not give us computers, automobiles or blogs. Science does, largely because of its self-correcting nature and its atheistic attitude towards the universe. (Regardless of a supreme being's existence, it cannot be part of the scientific system- but that is another debate entirely) Because science does not postulate a being with free will that can do as it pleases with the universe it has a much easier time in finding patterns and regularities. In ancient Greece if your boat sank and you asked why I'd tell you to make a sacrifice to Poseidon. If another boat sank I'd tell you that you didn't sacrifice a big enough goat. Along this avenue a woman I was having a conversation with once asked me how I know that when she sees red that she is seeing the same thing as I am. My response: "It doesn't matter, so long as when I ask for the red shirt you bring me the shirt I desire." (20 Comments |Comment on this)