1 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 2 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 3 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? 4 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.) 5 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 6 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 7 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 8 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 9 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 10 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: 13 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.