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The Idea of Philosophical Nonsense from Hobbes to Wittgenstein – Notes and
Queries
(updated 30th Dec, 2015, with two additional questions)
I am engaged in a research project into the history of the concept of philosophical
nonsense. I hope eventually to embody my findings in a book. Surprisingly, there
have, so far as I know, only been two historical surveys to date: Charles Pigden,
‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language should not matter (so much) to
philosophy’, in Logique et Analyse, 2010 (and on academia.edu) and my own The
Problem of Philosophical Nonsense – A Short Introduction, Rellet Press, 2015 (now
available from the author), which contains a historical chapter. There is an analytical
table of contents of the latter on academia.edu. Some of my other papers on the idea
of philosophical nonsense on academia.edu also deal with historical matters.
The following are questions that have come up in the course of my research. Some
are confessions of pure ignorance; others are questions about which I have opinions of
varying degrees of tentativeness. Pigden traces the notion of philosophical nonsense
back to Hobbes. He also finds it in Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some
interpretations), the American pragmatists (William James at least), Russell (though
in a restricted sense), Wittgenstein (at all periods), the logical positivists and many
analytical philosophers including some active today. I have questions about most of
these and will probably add to them in the coming months. The fact that there are as
yet no questions about Locke or more recent philosophers such as Ryle, Austin and
Dummett does not mean that I am utterly clear in my own mind about where they
stand on the question of philosophical nonsense but rather the reverse: my thinking
about them has not got as far as crystallising into definite questions. Many of my
questions concern the interpretation of the later Wittgenstein: this reflects the fact it is
his notion of philosophical nonsense that is by far the most influential today.
I have wondered about organising some kind of survey to find out such things as what
proportion of philosophers employ the notion of philosophical nonsense, what
proportion of those who do are Wittgensteinians and what proportion of philosophers
can recall being accused of talking nonsense themselves. But I am unsure about how
this might best be done and for the present will wait to see what response I get to my
historical/exegetical questions.
I have provided some background to each question: how it has come up or why it is
important. This explains the ‘notes’ of ‘notes and queries’.
1. Was there a concept of philosophical nonsense before Hobbes?
Pigden (op. cit., p.159 (p. 9 on academia.edu)) mentions that Hobbes and Gassendi
formulated ‘meaning empiricism’ at about the same time. Thus at least one
contemporary of Hobbes might also have deployed the notion of philosophical
nonsense. What of earlier thinkers? Peter Geach (Providence and Evil, Cambridge:
C.U.P., 1977, p. 64) says that the practice of dismissing one’s opponents’ utterances
as nonsense goes back to Aristotle but the example he gives he seems to regard as
‘mere abuse’. Nevertheless he then seems to imply (p. 65) that it is ‘part of traditional
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Christian doctrine’ that philosophers sometimes talk nonsense. Unfortunately he
gives no references and I only know of one suggestion bearing upon the matter.
Arthur Prior (‘Entities’ in Papers in Logic and Ethics, London: Duckworth, 1976, p.
29) maintains that Thomist claims about what it is and is not possible to predicate of
God are in effect claims about what it makes sense to say. This may be what Geach
has in mind, though he seems to be making a far more general claim than that.
2. Does Hobbes make any serious attempt to convict his scholastic contemporaries of
‘insignificant [meaningless] speech’?
Pigden points out that Hobbes used his theory of meaning to dismiss the utterances of
the scholastics as nonsense. On Hobbes’s view ‘words are meaningless unless they
can be traced back to past sensations’ (Pigden, op. cit., p.159 (9)). This theory
consigned the jargon of the scholastics to senselessness. That way, [he] did
not have to argue with them. (How can you argue profitably with a collection
of wafflers?) (Op. cit., p.161(11).)
Why did Hobbes adopt this strategy?
In the 17th Century, the first concern of modern-minded philosophers was to
refute scholasticism, the fossilized philosophy of Aristotle that had dominated
the intellectual scene since the Middle Ages. This was (they thought) a bar to
intellectual progress, and, in particular, to the new science … But there was a
problem in dealing with the scholastics. They were champion quibblers.
Indeed what a scholastic education taught you to do was to speak a certain
jargon and to argue the toss. The new philosophers did not want to get bogged
down in endless petty disputes or to use a jargon which they believed
embodied all sorts of errors. (Op. cit., p. 160 (10).)
I have no doubt that Pigden is right about this. What I want to ask is how Hobbes’s
strategy of declaring scholastic jargon meaningless was supposed to work. It would
hardly be enough just to declare it meaningless without argument. So he would have
had to debate with – or at least about – the scholastics. So he would not have
succeeded in avoiding entanglement in their jargon altogether. Moreover scholastic
jargon was very extensive; perhaps some of it could be defined in terms of past
sensations. It may be that getting rid of their jargon was a less onerous task than
accepting their jargon and engaging with their doctrines. But it would still have been
pretty formidable. I cannot find that Hobbes seriously attempts it, at least in the
Leviathan. Does he elsewhere?
Of course any attempt to prove that the scholastics meant nothing by their jargon
would have come up against the problem: How do you engage with the utterances of
others without attributing some sort of meaning to them? But that is a problem for all
who use the notion of philosophical nonsense. (See question 12(b).)
3. Does Berkeley think the phrase ‘material substance’ nonsensical, i.e. meaningless,
or self-contradictory?
It is, I think, a fairly common impression when reading Berkeley that he does not
seem to be able to make up his mind whether to condemn the phrase ‘material
substance’ as embodying a contradiction or as so radically defective that it could have
no logical properties whatsoever. Jonathan Bennett (Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central
Themes, Oxford: O.U.P., 1977, pp. 128-34) makes an interesting attempt to reconcile
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these seemingly incompatible tendencies. But I wonder whether in the Dialogues
(Third Dialogue, paragraphs 26-40) Berkeley does not find himself compelled to
abandon the idea that ‘material substance’ is nonsense and opt for saying that it is
self-contradictory. Philonous is presented as saying that we have some kind of
understanding of the soul and its actions (we have ‘notions’ of them) even though we
don’t have ideas of them. Hylas very naturally enquires why we could not have the
same kind of understanding (a ‘notion’ of) material substance. Philonous then tries to
prove that there would be a contradiction in the supposed ‘notion’ of material
substance (which there presumably is not in that of the soul). So perhaps Berkeley’s
considered view is not so much that talk of ‘material substance’ is meaningless as that
it is pretty vague and when carefully spelt out turns out to be self-contradictory.
Unfortunately, Philonous sums up this particular exchange in a way that still seems to
be trying to have it both ways:
I know that nothing inconsistent can exist, and that the existence of Matter
implies an inconsistency … I know what I mean when I affirm that there is a
spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, that a spirit knows or perceives
ideas. But, I do not know what is meant when it is said that an unperceiving
substance hath inherent in it and supports either ideas or the archetypes of
ideas. (Third Dialogue, paragraph 38.)
Of course, in the above I am assuming that contradictions are quite distinct from
nonsense. On this see question 9.
4. Does Hume explain why we think we have ideas of the self and of necessary
connexion?
A standard account of Hume’s views on the supposed ideas of the self and necessary
connexion (and indeed of much else) is that we don’t really have any such ideas since
there are no impressions from which they could have been derived. Why then do we
think we have ideas of them? In a world in which there are only impressions and
ideas what could possibly pass for ideas of these things? I pick on the self and
necessary connexion because Hume has quite elaborate discussions of both of them.
But most of what he says reads to me as though he were trying to explain how we
come to have false or unjustified beliefs, beliefs that have some articulable content.
For example, if we believe that the causal relation is something like a logical
implication we seem to be believing something, however absurd. If he were
maintaining that we have an idea of the self but there isn’t any such thing or that we
have an idea of necessary connexion but we aren’t justified in believing that it is ever
found in the world, most of what he says would be obviously to the point – and
perhaps convincing.
But he is supposed to be explaining how we come to think we have ideas we could
not possibly have and this is much more problematic. Philosophers, when they have
proved to their own satisfaction that a belief is false or unjustified, often supplement
their proofs with an explanation of how people came to have that belief. But if a
philosopher claims that a belief does not amount to anything, that nothing is meant by
sentences purporting to express that belief, that the ideas purporting to constitute that
belief simply do not exist, something very different is going to be needed. So what
does Hume take himself to be doing?
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The later Wittgenstein made some attempt to explain how one could be mistaken in
thinking one meant anything.. I do not find what he says convincing but at least he
had something to say. The positivists made a few perfunctory suggestions but, apart
from that, Wittgenstein seems to be the first to have any claim to have taken the
problem seriously – unless, that is, he was anticipated by Hume two centuries earlier.
If Hume can be read as attempting to explain why we wrongly think we mean
something by our talk of the self or of necessary connexion, why we think such talk is
backed by ideas when it isn’t, this would make the relevant passages very important
indeed. (I cannot think of anything in Hobbes, Locke or Berkeley that helps much.)
But can he be read as seriously attempting this? Or did he just forget what he needed
to explain?
5. Are ‘coercive theories of meaning’ always intentionally coercive?
Pigden suggests that philosophers who have produced theories of meaning have
mainly done so in order to stigmatise their opponents’ utterances as meaningless.
(Pigden, op. cit., pp. 152-167 (2-17).) As regards Twentieth Century philosophers it
is hard to disagree. But I wonder whether the classical empiricists might have a
defence against this charge. Their theories of meaning may now seem simplistic but
what other theories of meaning were available to them as empiricists? Could Hume
for example have consistently given any account of meaning other then by tracing it
back to impressions?
6. Did Kant think speculative metaphysics nonsense?
Consider the Kantian antinomies. Kant held that if one asks, for example, whether
time had a beginning, one can produce equally convincing proofs that it must have
had one and that it cannot have had one. So what is the status of the claim that time
had a beginning (or of its negation)? It is surely not self-contradictory. The fact that
one can, on Kant’s view, produce equally good ‘proofs’ of a claim and of its negation
and then by conjoining them obtain a contradiction does not mean that either of the
conjuncts is self-contradictory. So what then is wrong with the claim that time had a
beginning (or its negation)? It is clear that on Kant’s view there is something wrong
with it. It will be tempting for many a modern philosopher to answer on Kant’s
behalf, ‘It is nonsense’. And it would not be anachronistic to attribute this view to
him since Hobbes and the classical empiricists had had what is recognisably a concept
of philosophical nonsense. But that does not mean it would be correct to do so.
A. C. Ewing writes:
[Kant’s] contention is rather that metaphysical statements are incapable of
theoretical justification than that they are meaningless. Traces of the latter
view may indeed be discovered in Kant. Metaphysical statements would have
presumably to involve the categories, and he repeatedly denies that the latter
have any ‘meaning’ except as applied to phenomena, but this is not consistent
with his subsequent use of the categories in making metaphysical statements
of a theological kind, and his admission that, although we cannot ‘know’
transcendent objects according to the categories, we can ‘think’ them.
(‘Kant’s attack on metaphysics’ in Non-Linguistic Philosophy, London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1968, p. 145.)
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For example, we cannot prove the existence of God but we have to have some concept
of God even to understand the practical argument for belief in God that Kant offers.
So which represents the real Kant – the denial that space, time and the categories have
meaning except as applied to phenomena or his use of them in making theological
statements? Ewing no doubt thinks the latter but this leaves us with no answer to the
question: What did Kant think was the status of the claim that time had (or did not
have) a beginning? What if anything did he think it meant?
7. Is there any precedent for Russell’s rejection of his own paradox as nonsense?
This question seems self-explanatory so I will simply explain why I think it important.
Russell wasn’t trying to refute anybody when he decided that the only way to deal
with the paradox that bears his name was to reject certain seemingly meaningful
statements and questions about classes as meaningless. He was trying to deal with a
paradox that he himself had discovered. He was in effect accusing himself of having
talked or been taken in by nonsense. The paradox had indeed arisen in the course of
his highly controversial attempt to reduce arithmetic to logic but he wasn’t telling
some rival group of philosophers that their questions and assertions were nonsense.
(This was in fact something he rarely did – see Pigden, op. cit., p. 164 (14).) So it
probably seemed to many philosophers that Russell had without having any polemical
axe to grind discovered that what seemed to make sense could in fact be nonsense.
And, so long as no alternative way of dealing with the paradox was known his
discovery would have stood as a discovery – an accepted example of philosophical
nonsense that could be wheeled out to convince doubters. (Op. cit., p. 165 (15).) As
far as I know, there had been nothing like this before. All references to philosophical
nonsense had been straightforwardly polemical; other philosophers were being told
that their assertions or possibly their questions were nonsense. So for the first time
philosophers had ‘a respectable non-self-serving reason to suppose that what seemed
to make sense was in fact nonsensical’ (op. cit., p. 165(15)).
But logical paradoxes were nothing new. Many of them go back to the Greeks. So if
someone before Russell had had the idea of dismissing a logical paradox – say that of
the Liar – as nonsense, philosophers who wanted to use the concept of nonsense
polemically would have had an apparently convincing example of philosophical
nonsense earlier than Pigden suggests.
8. How, on the traditional interpretation of the Tractatus, must one orient oneself to
what cannot be said?
On the traditional interpretation of the Tractatus there are things that cannot be said
but only shown. Perhaps, as James Conant has suggested (‘Elucidation and nonsense
in Frege and early Wittgenstein’, p. 201n.26, in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice
Crary and Rupert Read, London: Routledge, 2000), the notion of ‘showing’ employed
here is something of a hybrid, but this may not matter much for present purposes,
since I am concerned with whatever it is that contrasts with ‘saying’, even if this turns
out to be mixed bag. I am interested in the psychology of what cannot be said.
Suppose someone reads the Tractatus intelligently according to the traditional
interpretation and ‘gets something out of it’. He notes that, since tautologies and
contradictions do not say anything, they cannot be understood in the normal way; he
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appreciates Wittgenstein’s points about a properly constructed logical notation and
about ‘formal concepts; and he comes to terms with Tractatus 7: ‘Whereof one cannot
speak etc.’. What has been going on? He has not been reading an ordinary book,
even an ordinary book on philosophy, and understood what the author was saying or
trying to say, what the author meant. He has somehow got to grips with things that
cannot really be said.
Consider now Anthony Kenny’s summary of an exchange between Russell and
Wittgenstein:
Since a picture is a combination of elements, the question arises: what are the
elements of a logical picture, of a thought? This was put to Wittgenstein by
Russell in 1919, and received a rather brusque answer. Since a thought is a
fact, Russell asked, ‘What are its constituents and components, and what is
their relation to those of the pictured fact?’ ‘I don’t know what the
constituents of a thought are’, Wittgenstein replied, ‘but I know that it must
have such constituents which correspond to the words of Language. Again the
kind of relation of the constituents of the thought and of the pictured fact is
irrelevant. It would be a matter of psychology to find out’. ‘Does a thought
consist of words?’ insisted Russell. ‘No, but of psychical constituents that
have the same sort of relation to reality as words. What those constituents are
I don’t know.’ (Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975, p. 58.)
These thought-constituents are mysterious enough. They must have some kind of
arrangement (in the brain, perhaps, or non-spatially in a non-spatial realm?) if they are
to correspond to the words of a language and represent a fact in the world. But what
of the person who reads the Tractatus intelligently? How does she differ from
someone who reads the Tractatus and – we can’t say ‘fails to understand it’ or
‘misunderstands it’, but whatever we should say, perhaps ‘fails to make anything
much of it’? What role do or could her thought-constituents play here?
All this will of course be grist to the mill of those who favour a ‘resolute reading’ of
the Tractatus. They will simply say that this is just the sort of exegetical difficulty
one gets into if one fails to realise that, apart from a few ‘framing’ remarks, the
Tractatus is supposed to be complete nonsense.* Nevertheless, I myself am inclined
to favour the traditional interpretation and so the problem will remain. If one cannot
say something, one cannot understand it either. What can one do about it? How can
one stand towards it? I am sure that suggestions will have been made as to what
Wittgenstein’s view is or ought to be, but I seem not to have come across them.
* Incidentally, doesn’t the above exchange between Russell and Wittgenstein pose a
problem for the ‘resolute reader’? I once read – in a newspaper – that those who
knew Wittgenstein thought him ‘pathologically honest’. A ‘resolute reading’ of what
he wrote to Russell makes him look more like a pathological liar.
9. Who has held that contradictions are nonsense (meaningless)?*
From time to time I have come across references to the view that contradictions are
meaningless. As it happens, the only example I can put my finger on at the moment is
this: ‘There is an old (and, I think, futile) debate about whether contradictions are
“meaningless”’ (Hilary Putnam, ‘Rethinking mathematical necessity’, p. 227, in Crary
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and Read, The New Wittgenstein, op. cit.). What I have never come across is anyone
who does believe that contradictions are meaningless. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus
(on the traditional interpretation at any rate) came as near as anyone I know to holding
this but he prudently held back. Contradictions (and tautologies) were sinnlos but not
unsinnig; they lacked sense but were not nonsense. (I am uncomfortable with his
terminology in 4.46-4.4611, since it seems to me to suggest too strongly that
contradictions and tautologies are really very little different from nonsense.)
If anyone were to hold that contradictions were simply nonsense, meaningless, he
would be recognising ‘positive nonsense’ in Cora Diamond’s sense. On her
interpretation of Wittgenstein there is only ‘negative nonsense’, nonsense that is
nonsense
because some determination of meaning has not been made; it is not nonsense
as a logical result of determinations that have been made. (The Realistic Spirit,
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991, p. 106.)
There is no ‘positive nonsense, no such thing as nonsense that is nonsense on
account of what it would have to mean , given the meanings already fixed for
the terms it contains. (Op. cit., p. 107..)
Whether something is a contradiction does depend on the meanings of the terms it
contains.
Finding an example of someone who thinks contradictions are meaningless would
only be of importance if the philosopher in question had plausible arguments for that
view. For then a case could be made against the ‘austere’ conception of nonsense of
Cora Diamond, James Conant, Edward Witherspoon and others including myself. It
would suggest that we should look into the possibility of showing that something was
nonsense, though not necessarily self-contradictory, by attending to the meanings of
the terms it contained. One might be able to show that the meanings of the terms
combined to produce overall meaninglessness and the problem of diagnosing
nonsense might become more tractable. (See question 12(b).)
*The colloquial use of the word ‘nonsense’ to refer to the patently false might cause
confusion here. On the assumption that contradictions are meaningful, they are false.
So a patent contradiction will be patently false, and so it will be nonsense in the
colloquial sense.
10. Who first pointed out that one has to understand a claim in order to apply the
Verification Principle to it?
I regard this objection to verificationism as extremely important since similar
difficulties confront attempts to convict philosophers of talking nonsense on grounds
other than verificationist ones. I would like therefore to be able to give credit where it
is due. The earliest formulations I know are by Morris Lazerowitz. (The Structure of
Metaphysics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955, pp. 54-56. He makes a
closely related point in ‘The Principle of Verifiability’, Mind, 1937.) But Popper,
writing in the mid-1970s, makes it sound (to me at any rate) as though the point was
under discussion at an early date:
A further and less interesting point, later acknowledged by Ayer, was the sheer
absurdity of the use of verifiability as a meaning criterion: how could one ever
say that a theory was gibberish because it could not be verified? Was it not
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necessary to understand a theory in order to judge whether or not it could be
verified? And could an understandable theory be sheer gibberish? (Unended
Quest, Glasgow: Fontana, 1976, p. 80.)
Was it perhaps Popper himself who first noticed the difficulty?
11. Did Wittgenstein sanction the verificationist use of the term ‘criterion’?
I was once told that it was well-known that Wittgenstein, when confronted with the
speculation that you and I might experience different sensations of red even though
we call the same things ‘red’, used to say, ‘People talk of experiencing different
sensations of colour but without specifying any criteria of sameness and difference’.
Since then I have never come across any further reference to this dictum. Maybe it is
mentioned in one of the published reminiscences of those who knew Wittgenstein. I
heard it in 1968, so it would have to be in something that had appeared by then. It
was at Cambridge that I heard it, so perhaps it represents an oral tradition there.
If Wittgenstein ever did say this, then it would provide some warrant for the way
Norman Malcolm uses the term ‘criterion’ in his book Dreaming. I have always
thought of Malcolm’s argumentation in that work as essentially verificationism with a
late-Wittgensteinian veneer (though it has to be admitted that what Wittgenstein says
on p. 189 of Part II of the Investigations gives him some support). Malcolm’s
analysis of dreaming was once notorious but is probably not so well-known now.
Here is a more recent example of the verificationist use of the notion of criteria:
A.R.Luria in The Mind of the Mnemonist … relates how the mnemonist
explained an error in his mnemonic performance … manifesting an ability to
recollect a large number of random objects … His mnemonic device was to
imagine himself walking down a street in St. Petersburg, and as each object
was called out, he would imagine himself placing it at a particular place in the
imagined street … [H]e would recall the objects named by imagining himself
walking down the street again, and would, as it were, read off the list of
objects from his imagined scene. On one occasion he forgot an item, viz. a
milk bottle. He explained this by claiming that he had imagined putting the
bottle of milk in front of a white door, so that when he imagined walking
down the street again … he did not notice the milk bottle against the white
door! This makes no sense. (What would be the criteria for its being there,
even though he did not ‘notice’ it?) (An Analytical Commentary on the
“Philosophical Investigations”, Vol. III, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 408n.)
It might be suggested that PI, I, 580 – ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward
criteria’ – could perhaps be used to justify the verificationist use of the notion of
criterion (on the reasonable assumption that Wittgenstein would be prepared to apply
it, not just to ‘processes’, but to states, events, activities and the ‘inner’ generally).
But should one take it as saying more than that we would not have such concepts as
those of dreaming and mental imagery if there were no outward manifestations of
them?
12. Does Wittgenstein ever question the idea that philosophers talk nonsense?
I pick on Wittgenstein as the most astute proponent of the notion of nonsense as an
instrument of philosophical criticism. I do not wish to imply that he has nothing to
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say relevant to answering the following four questions; only that I do not know that he
anywhere poses them directly? In each case I have tried to formulate them in terms to
which he ought not to object, since he uses similar terminology in formulating his
own questions and assertions. I am not sure how successful I have been.
a) Does Wittgenstein ever ask: ‘Is it actually possible to think one means something
when one means nothing?’? After all, it is by no means obvious that it is possible.
Would one not expect him to tackle the question head-on, since his whole approach to
philosophy depends upon it? I do not know of anything like the above formulation of
it in his writings. But consider the following passage:
There are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’) which I might
call ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject’. Examples of the first kind of
use are these: ‘My arm is broken’, ‘I have grown six inches’, ‘I have a bump
on my forehead’, ‘The wind blows my hair about’. Examples of the second
kind are: ‘I see so-and-so’, ‘I hear so-and-so’, ‘I try to lift my arm’, ‘I think it
will rain’, ‘I have toothache’. One can point to the difference between the two
categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of
a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I
should rather put it: The possibility of an error has been provided for. (Blue
Book, pp. 66-67.)
Much might be written about this passage and indeed about the subsequent discussion,
but here I just want to extract one thing from it – the question whether, when one
makes a first-person assertion, the possibility of an error has been provided for.
(Wittgenstein is particularly concerned with the possibility of an error in the
identification of a person, but I shall ignore that.) If I claim that there is something I
mean by what I say, has the possibility of an error been provided for? Wittgenstein
clearly thinks the answer is yes. A couple of pages earlier he writes;
The meaning for us is not a mental accompaniment to the expression.
Therefore the phrase ‘I think I mean something by it’, or ‘I’m sure I mean
something by it’, which we so often hear in philosophical discussions to
justify the use of an expression is for us no justification at all. (Op. cit., p. 65.)
Broadly speaking, I accept Wittgenstein’s claim that the meaning of an expression is
not a mental accompaniment to it. But I am not certain that it follows that it is
possible to be in error about whether one means anything by it and I certainly do not
think that it gives any hint of how one could be in a position to overrule someone
else’s sincere claim to mean something by what she says. (On this see my Do
Philosophers Talk Nonsense? – An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning,
New Romney: Teller Press, 1995, particularly Chapters Eight and Nine and The
Problem of Philosophical Nonsense – A Short Introduction, pp. 62-70.) But this
brings me to my next question.
b) Does Wittgenstein ever state clearly the general difficulty with any attempt to show
that someone else does not mean anything? Consider the following much quoted
passage from the Investigations:
When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is
senseless. Rather a combination of words is being excluded from the language,
withdrawn from circulation. (PI, I, 500.)
Why does Wittgenstein think it necessary to point his out? Some light is thrown on
the matter by a slightly fuller discussion in Philosophical Grammar, p. 130. We say
of a locution that
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these words are senseless. But it isn’t as it were their sense that is senseless;
they are excluded from our language like some arbitrary noise, and the reason
for their explicit exclusion can only be that we are tempted to confuse them
with a sentence of our language.
The point would seem to be that in philosophy it is often necessary to point out that a
certain combination of words is not a meaningful sentence and the reason why it is
necessary is that the combination has been or is likely to be taken for a meaningful
sentence. But there is a further point that Wittgenstein could make that is closely
related to this, though, as far as I know, he never does.
Recall that in his later philosophy Wittgenstein condemns as nonsense combinations
of words that are possible sentences of the language on the grounds that they are
uttered in unsuitable circumstances. (This tendency seems to get more marked from
the Blue Book to the Investigations to On Certainty.) So they are not ‘excluded from
the language, withdrawn from circulation’. But on Wittgenstein’s view their utterers
do not mean anything by them. Now is it not virtually a corollary of what he says in
the passages just quoted that when someone does not mean anything by an utterance it
is not what she means by it that is meaningless? And does this not bring home the
difficulty of diagnosing the talking of nonsense? When one criticises what someone
says one normally does so on the basis of what one thinks she means by it and one
cannot do that if one is trying to show that she means nothing by it.
c) Does he acknowledge that he needs to show that he is using the words ‘mean’ and
‘meaning’ in the normal way? Consider PI, I, 116:
When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’,
‘proposition’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must
always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language
which is its original home? –
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday
use.
Charles Pigden has suggested that those philosophers who accuse other philosophers
of talking nonsense are employing ‘coercive theories of meaning’; they are working
with narrower conceptions of meaning and meaningfulness than the ordinary,
everyday ones and, unsurprisingly, they are able to show that those they accuse do not
mean anything in these special senses. (Pigden, op. cit., passim.) There is room for
argument as to just how deliberate the ‘coercive theorists’ are (see question 5); and it
should be noted that only the logical positivists have ever come anywhere near
admitting that that was what they were doing. Nevertheless anyone who accuses
others of not meaning anything by their words surely has to give us some reason to
think he is talking about meaning – what is normally meant by ‘meaning’ – rather
than some artificially restricted notion. Did Wittgenstein appreciate this? What
would have been the effect of inserting the word ‘meaning’ in PI, I, 116 along with
‘knowledge’, and so on. Wittgenstein’s use may not be ‘metaphysical’ but that does
not guarantee that it is ‘everyday’.
A slightly different way of looking at the matter is suggested by this passage:
But let’s not forget that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it, as it were, by
a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific
investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning
someone has given to it. (Blue Book, p. 28.)
11
Here I will simply ask: If one is told by a philosopher that one does not mean
anything by what one has said, even though one thinks one does, does one not have
the feeling that one is being told what the word ‘mean’ really means, as distinct from
what one naïvely thought it meant? One might have thought that the meaning of the
word ‘mean’ allowed for the possibility of meaning something by, say, metaphysical
or sceptical utterances but apparently it does not.
d) Does he consider the possibility that the concepts of meaning and meaningfulness
might be vague ones? The later Wittgenstein emphasised that the meanings of words
are often vague. Sometimes we are well aware of this: for example, with colourwords. Everyone would agree that there are greenish-blues, that there are things that
are neither definitely green nor definitely blue. In other cases it may take a thoughtexperiment to bring out the vagueness, as with the ‘disappearing chair’ of PI, I, 80.
(Actually, there is a more obvious way in which the word ‘chair’ is vague: is a stool a
chair? Some writers distinguish between vagueness and ‘open texture’ here.) But
what if the words ‘mean’ and ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful’ are vague? It is possible to
read some of his remarks about ‘secondary sense’ as recognising a certain vagueness
here. I am thinking particularly of Brown Book, p. 148, section 10, and Zettel, 185.
Now suppose vagueness turns up in philosophically sensitive areas: the distinction
between scientific and metaphysical claims, for example, or between ‘legitimate’ and
sceptical doubts. Does Wittgenstein ever pause to consider the possibility that there
may be no definite answer to the question whether we are dealing with meaningful
claims and doubts? I cannot think of anywhere that he does, unless it is in the
following (to my mind) rather obscure passage:
When one says: ‘Perhaps this planet doesn’t exist and the light-phenomenon
arises in some other way’, then after all one needs an example of an object
which does exist. This doesn’t exist, - as for example does …
Or are we say that certainty is merely a constructed point to which some
things approximate more, some less closely? No. Doubt gradually loses its
sense. This language-game just is like that.
And everything descriptive of a language-game is part of logic. (On Certainty,
56.)
It is the ‘Doubt gradually loses its sense’ that may be relevant.
13. Why has an obvious counter to accusations of talking nonsense been so widely
missed?
Charles Pigden has drawn attention to an argument used by Richard Price against
Hume. (Pigden, op. cit., pp. 175-79 (25-29).) Let me present the argument as baldly
as possible. Price takes Hume to have argued that we do not really have certain ideas
since there are no impressions from which they could have been derived. (See
question 4.) The words purporting to denote them are therefore really nonsense.
Hume’s argument thus has the form: If my theory of meaning is correct, we have no
idea of X; my theory of meaning is correct; therefore we have no idea of X. Price
simply inverts this: If your theory of meaning is correct, we have no idea of X; we do
have an idea of X; therefore your theory of meaning is not correct. One philosopher’s
proof is another philosopher’s reduction ad absurdum.
12
Let us set aside all questions of exegesis. Indeed let us forget about Price and Hume
and simply ask: If you are accused of not meaning anything by what you say, why
can’t you reply, ‘I do mean something and that shows that your theory of meaning,
whatever it is, is not correct’? Well, that assumes that a person is the final authority
on whether she means anything. So let us turn the reply into a challenge: Why, if you
are accused of not meaning anything by what you say, can you not simply demand to
know what reason your accuser can give you for thinking that he is talking about
meaning, what is normally meant by meaning? (See question 12(c).) This seems to
place the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of your accuser. Instead of
accepting the challenge to ‘give sense’* to your words, you will have forced him to
lay bare and defend his theory of meaning. (Some Wittgensteinians may not like the
word ‘theory’ here. Well then, ‘view of’ or ‘assumptions about’ meaning.)
But the question I really want to ask here is why this obvious (obvious at least in
retrospect) way of deflecting accusations of talking nonsense has been so rare? The
only clear examples I know of are in Pigden and Price. Do readers know of any
others? Some criticisms of verificationism could probably be reformulated in PricePigden terms but I would like to know of examples that don’t require reformulation.
* Minor question: When did the expression ‘to give sense to’ enter philosophy? The
earliest example I know of is in the Blue Book, p. 7.
14. Does the private language argument employ the concept of philosophical
nonsense?
I have often wondered whether there might be an a priori argument for the possibility
of philosophical nonsense. In Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense?, Chapter Eight, I
suggested that Wittgenstein’s negative observations about meaning – that it is not an
experience, a process, a state, an activity, or any kind of accompaniment to one’s
words – seem to leave room for the possibility that one can be mistaken in thinking
there is something one means by what one says. If meaning is not some kind of
‘introspectible’ entity, then perhaps one does not have first-person authority on the
question whether one means anything. I never thought that this amounted to a proof
that the error of thinking one means something when one means nothing was possible.
But could there be an a priori argument that such an error is possible? One naturally
thinks of the private language argument: if language is necessarily something public,
then perhaps public criteria determine whether one means anything or not. But there
is a problem. Early work on the argument treated the idea of a private language as
reasonably clear and asked whether there were any logical difficulties with it.
Norman Malcolm’s review of the Investigations treated the argument as having a
reductio form (p. 75 of the reprint in George Pitcher (ed.), Wittgenstein: The
Philosophical Invesigations, London: Macmillan, 1968. This anthology also contains
the papers by Ayer, Rhees and Cook mentioned below.); and A. J. Ayer thought the
notion of a private language defensible. (I do not know what to make of Rush
Rhees’s contribution to the symposium with Ayer and have always been astonished
that first-year students of philosophy were often recommended to read it; I don’t
know whether they still are.) But then the idea began to gain ground that all talk of a
private language was nonsensical. John W. Cook, for example, wrote:
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A chief complaint against Wittgenstein is that he does not make it sufficiently
clear what the idea of a private language includes – what is meant by ‘a
private language’ … I will argue that there can be no such genuine complaint
even though it is true that Wittgenstein does not say clearly what is meant by
‘a private language’. He does not try to make this clear because the idea under
investigation turns out to be irremediably confused and hence can be only
suggested, not clearly explained. (‘Wittgenstein on Privacy’, p. 186, in
Pitcher.)
My impression is that most subsequent discussions have tended to follow Cook rather
than Malcolm and Ayer. I ought to say that I have a high regard for Cook’s paper and
regard it as one of the best things ever written by a believer in philosophical nonsense.
But it does prompt the following reflexion: If the private language argument itself
uses the notion of philosophical nonsense, then it cannot be used to establish the
possibility of philosophical nonsense. If it assumes that one can be mistaken in
thinking one means anything, then it can’t establish that one can be so mistaken.
So what of the earlier view that the notion of a private language is clear enough, has
enough articulable content, to figure in an ordinary philosophical argument, for
example a reductio argument? I have no objection in principle to this. Perhaps there
is a valid argument that shows that there is something logically amiss with the concept
of a private language: that when it is clearly defined it turns out to be selfcontradictory for example. I would only point out how unsuccessful philosophers
have been in refuting any philosophical thesis of importance by this kind of proof.
(Need I have included the phrase ‘of importance’?) Was not the failure of
philosophers to prove anything much one of the reasons for the switch – at least the
Twentieth Century switch – from a concern with the true/false to the sense/nonsense
opposition?
15. Why does Wittgenstein sometimes call ‘grammatical propositions’ nonsense?
Elsewhere I have struggled to reconcile Wittgenstein’s view that no nonsense has any
more meaning than ‘Ab sur ah’ (Wittgenstein’s Lectures:1932-35 from the notes of
Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, ed. Alice Ambrose, Oxford: Blackwell,
1979, p. 63) with his tendency to call ‘grammatical propositions’ nonsense when their
status is misunderstood (e.g. in Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense?, pp. 53-56). As J. F.
M. Hunter puts it:
[I]n a large number of places, Wittgenstein seems to take the view that
grammatical points when not marked as such are nonsense when they sound
like empirical generalizations, but not if their grammatical character is well
understood. (Wittgenstein on Words as Instruments, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
U.P., 1990, pp. 16-17.)
The problem is this. Grammatical propositions are not excluded from the language:
they are all right ‘if their grammatical character is well understood’. So the fault must
lie with the utterer. But it seems that anyone who makes the mistake of seeing and
presenting a grammatical point as a generalisation about the world – however
horrendous this mistake may be – must mean something by what she says. So her
utterance is of an acceptable sentence of the language and she means something by it?
So why accuse her of talking nonsense? I am perfectly willing to concede to
Wittgenstein that she has said nothing about the world, even if she thinks she has.
And perhaps this is all that Wittgenstein means by calling her utterance nonsensical.
14
But this hardly fits with the ‘Ab sur ah’ claim or with the ‘sense that is senseless’
passage (PI, I, 500).
My question is really just, ‘Any ideas, anyone?’; but let us try to get a sense of the
problem by considering a particular example or type of example. At Blue Book, p. 30,
Investigations, I, 251-52 and Philosophical Grammar, p. 129 Wittgenstein discusses
whether we ought to reply, ‘Of course!’ or ‘Nonsense!’ to utterances like ‘Has this
room a length?’, ‘This rod has a length’, ‘Every rod has a length’ and ‘This body has
extension’. Consider what he says in Philosophical Grammar:
When one wants to show the senselessness of metaphysical turns of phrase,
one often says, ‘I couldn’t imagine the opposite of that’ or ‘What would it be
like for it to be otherwise?’ (When, for instance, someone has said that my
images are private, that only I alone can know if I am feeling pain, etc.). Well,
if I can’t imagine how it might be otherwise, I can’t imagine that it is so. [At
PI, I, 251 he says that if one tries to imagine or depict every rod’s having a
length, one can do no more than simply imagine a rod; and the most that this
could show is what is called the length of a rod.] For here ‘I can’t imagine’
doesn’t indicate a lack of imaginative power. I can’t even try to imagine it; it
makes no sense to say, ‘I imagine it’. And that means, no connection has been
made between this sentence and the method of representation by imagination
(or by drawing).
But why does one say ‘I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise’ and not ‘I
can’t imagine the thing itself’? One regards the senseless sentence (e.g. ‘This
rod has a length’) as a tautology as opposed to a contradiction. One says as it
were: ‘Yes, it has a length; but how could it be otherwise: and why say so?’
To the proposition ‘This rod has a length’ we respond not ‘Nonsense!’ but ‘Of
course!’. We might put it thus: when we hear the two propositions, ‘This rod
has a length’ and its negation ‘This rod has no length’, we take sides and
favour the first sentence, instead of declaring them both nonsense. But this
partiality is based on a confusion: we regard the first proposition as verified
(and the second as falsified) by the fact ‘that the rod has a length of 4 metres’.
‘After all, 4 metres is a length’ – but one forgets that this is a grammatical
proposition.
It is the portion of the second paragraph that I have italicised to which I want to draw
particular attention. The reference to tautologies and contradictions suggests that
Wittgenstein might have in mind something like the sinnlos of the Tractatus as
distinct from the unsinnig, but confusingly omitted to mark the distinction. So the
condemnation ‘Nonsense!’ would mean something close to ‘What you say is no better
than a tautology!’. But, since on this view it is no worse than a tautology either, the
choice of the word ‘nonsense’ is misleading.
16. Is there any external evidence to support the ‘resolute reading’ of the Tractatus?
Peter Hacker, in his critique of the so-called ‘resolute reading’ of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus (‘Was he trying to whistle it?’ in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and
Rupert Read), distinguishes between the internal and the external evidence against it
and is able to produce an impressive array of both kinds. He contrasts this with the
‘sparseness of the evidence’ the proponents of the resolute reading muster in its
support (p. 360). Although I cannot find that he makes the point explicitly, all the
15
evidence they do adduce – certainly all the evidence he discusses – is of the internal
variety. I myself know of no external evidence and wonder whether anyone else does.
The internal evidence for the resolute reading seems to be of two kinds: (a) a very
literalistic-minimalistic reading of 6.54 and (b) general considerations about the
avoidance of the inconsistent and the self-defeating. Let us take a look at 6.54:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who
understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used
them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw
away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world
aright.
The resolute readers, such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Warren Goldfarb, in
effect ask us to read this as if the ‘me’ and the first ‘them’ were italicised:
understanding the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus does not involve understanding (all
of ) of his propositions since they are (mostly) nonsensical and in particular not even
gestures towards ineffable truths. There are some remarks – the ‘framing’ remarks –
that are not nonsense, since they tell us how the work is to be read. I have argued
elsewhere (in ‘The dispute between traditional and resolute readers of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus – An outsider’s view. (Part One.)’ on academia.edu) that this reading of
6.54 is not necessarily ridiculously literal. It all depends on what is done with it and
whether it fits with the totality of the evidence that can be brought to bear on the
interpretation of the Tractatus.
The other kind of evidence offered by the resolute readers is simply the problematic
character of the idea of illuminating nonsense that is somehow a cut above mere
nonsense. Many commentators on the Tractatus have been uncomfortable with this,
feeling either with Russell that ‘Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about
what cannot be said’ or with Ramsey that ‘what we can’t say, we can’t say, and we
can’t whistle it either’ (Hacker, op. cit., p. 355). Others have been more nonchalant:
Anscombe speaks of ‘comical frequency with which, in expounding the Tractatus,
one is tempted to say things and then say that they cannot be said’ (p. 86 of her
Introduction to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’). It is only relatively recently that anyone
has proposed a ‘reading’ (this term seems to be deemed more fitting than
‘interpretation’) that is supposed to circumvent the whole dilemma.
This reading is not without its difficulties. Hacker points out that the resolute readers
are compelled by their methodology to find ‘framing’ remarks embedded in the body
of the text and to read parts of the preface (which one might have expected to be
‘framing’ if anything is) not literally, but ‘dialectically’, ‘ironically’, ‘tongue in
cheek’ (Hacker, op. cit., p. 360). This perhaps only makes the ‘frame’ elusive,
difficult to identify, but Hacker goes on to argue that the resolute readers are also
compelled to reinstate the distinction between two kinds of nonsense, this time
between mere nonsense and ‘transitional’ nonsense. The latter is supposed to be
nonsense that one has somehow to grasp, if only temporarily, in order to see that it or
something else is nonsense (Hacker, op. cit., p. 361).
All this is highly controversial and, if I may speak for myself, liable to make the head
spin. In any case, the problem about how to read the Tractatus is in my view best
seen as a special case of a general problem with the notion of philosophical nonsense:
16
How do you say what you are talking about when you hold that there is really nothing
there to be talked about? Nonsense is nonsense, not an inferior species of sense. And
this will cause difficulties whether one is polemically accusing a philosophical
opponent of talking nonsense or trying to read sympathetically a work that apparently
proclaims itself to be nonsense. It is not just the problem of how one can talk about
the non-existent, though that has given philosophers headaches enough. It is the
problem Wittgenstein notes at PI, 500 that ‘[w]hen a sentence is called senseless, it is
not as it were its sense that is senseless’ (see question 12(b)) and what is virtually a
corollary of this, that when someone talks nonsense it is not what he means that is
meaningless.*
Still, the resolute readers do, as Hacker seems prepared to admit, have at least some
internal evidence for their reading. But do they have any external evidence? Hacker
notes that ‘we are fortunate enough to possess a wealth of source material prior to the
Tractatus, documents contemporaneous with the Tractatus, and a vast quantity of
post-1929 writings and lecture notes in which Wittgenstein often discusses the
Tractatus’ (Hacker, op. cit., p. 371); and he refers also to ‘what Wittgenstein wrote
and said to others about his work before, during and after the composition of the book
(op cit. p. 360). Does this wealth of material contain anything that supports the
resolute readers’ case? (I mean: supports. It is not sufficient that it be reconcilable
with their case.) Even a single remark to the effect that commentators were wrong in
attributing to him the intention to convey ineffable truths by writing what was, strictly
speaking, nonsense would vastly strengthen their position.
*There is a rhetorical figure called occultatio or paralipsis in which the speaker
mentions something by saying he is not going to mention it, e.g. ‘I cannot bring
myself even to allude to the nameless crimes and unspeakable infamies that are laid at
the door of Bloggs’. This is only a device and no one is likely to be deceived into
thinking that speaker has succeeded in mentioning something without mentioning it.
17. Did William James deploy a concept of philosophical nonsense?
Pigden believes that ‘[p]ragmatism, at least in its Jamesian form, is reliant on a
coercive theory of meaning’ (Pigden, op. cit., p. 163 (13)). He considers the
pragmatist theory of truth: that truth is that which it is expedient to believe. The
obvious objection to this, pressed by Russell and Moore, is that one can envisage
situations in which it is not expedient to believe what is true and situations in which it
is expedient to believe what is false. According to Pigden, James’s response is ‘to
deny that a statement could be true or false independently of our knowledge or
experience’ and to claim that the ‘idea of a paying falsehood or non-paying truth is
simply nonsense’(op. cit. p. 164 (14)). However, Jim Grant has pointed out to me that
it is not entirely clear that the quotations from James that Pigden adduces support this
interpretation. The first is
There is no meaning left in this idea of trueness or as-ness if no reference to
the possibility of concrete working on the part of the idea is made.
(Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, Harvard U.P., 1978, p. 312.)
It is the mention of possibility that raises a doubt. The Russell/Moore objection does
not depend on any denial of the possibility of there being good consequences of
believing a true claim; rather it raises the possibility that in actual cases believing it
might have bad consequences or at least not have good consequences. On the other
17
hand, James does seem to be ruling out something that seems to make sense as not
really doing so; it is just that this is off-target as a reply to Russell and Moore. This
makes it very obscure just what James’s considered view is.
The other quotation is:
Good consequences … assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that
difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports.
(James, op. cit., p. 313.)
Here the problem is rather more straightforward. Notice the phrase ‘intelligible
practical meaning’. Can there be an unintelligible meaning, one wonders? I suggest
that James has just been careless here. But the word ‘practical’ creates a problem for
Pigden’s interpretation. Perhaps James was contrasting ‘practical meaning’ with
some other kind of meaning, in which case he was not dismissing the idea of a truth
that it was a bad or at least not a good thing to believe as totally meaningless. The
logical positivists, it will be remembered, eventually came to take a similar line:
unverifiable claims were cognitively, factually or empirically meaningless, which
seemed to leave open the possibility that they still had some kind of meaning.
I know of another relevant passage in James. In it he certainly seems to be deploying
a concept of philosophical nonsense, even a positivistic one:
If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God’s metaphysical
attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think
that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe in them, we still
should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance.
Take God’s aseity, for example [aseity: God’s existence derives a se, from
himself alone]; or his necessariness; his immateriality; his ‘simplicity’ or
superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession we find in finite beings;
his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity,
substance and accident, potentiality and actuality and the rest; his repudiation
of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his ‘personality’, apart from the
moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive
and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in
himself:– candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite
connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive
adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a
man’s religion whether they be true or false?
Now it is well-known that James was sympathetic to religion and indeed this passage
comes from The Varieties of Religious Experience (Collins, Fount, 1977, pp. 427-28).
There is some vacillation in it (Compare and contrast ‘destitute of all intelligible
significance’ and ‘what vital difference can it possibly make … whether they be true
or false?’) and, even when it is carefully considered in its context, it is not clear, to me
at least, just what kind of meaning he is ascribing to religious utterances. If one can
imagine a logical positivist who still retained some emotional attachment to religion
(conceivably some of the positivists did), then one is perhaps imagining a state of
mind similar to James’s. An ordinary atheist could perfectly wish God did exist; there
is nothing unusual about thinking something false yet wishing it were true. But it is
not clear to me what sort of attachment one can have to claims one does not think
amount to anything. Doubtless James has more room for manoeuvre than a positivist
but at present I do not feel able to say much more than that.
18
I have only just begun to consider how the pragmatists stand with respect to the
notion of philosophical nonsense and would welcome any suggestions about relevant
texts. Pigden (op. cit., pp. 157 (7), 164 (14)) mentions Putnam and Rorty as latter-day
pragmatists who also employ coercive theories of meaning but since they are both
influenced by Wittgenstein it may be that their concept of philosophical nonsense
derives from him alone.