E vorba de inceputul unui comentariu la Caietul albastru. Am renuntat sa il mai continui, dar m-am gandit ca si-ar putea gasi locul aici. Am lucrat in perioada verii la un alt proiect, dar vreau sa continui cartea in perioada urmatoare.
1. The opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s lectures from BB is: “What is the meaning of a word?” One might wonder why a lecture in general philosophical topics should start with this particular question. There are many philosophical problems which seem to be more important, or at least more interesting: “What is the meaning of everything?”, “Is there a God?”, “How can we live a good life?” a. s. o. We are presented instead with a question regarding words and their respective meanings. Still, asking this question at the beginning of BB is not the result of a random choice. As Wittgenstein sees philosophy, this particular question is prior to all the others. Here is why. The history of philosophical debates extends over several hundreds of years. In spite of this, it is a fact that no general agreed upon answer to any philosophical question have ever been produced. This might call for an evaluation of the fertility of philosophical problems themselves. There is no other way of doing philosophy than that of expressing these problems, looking for an answer to them, arguing for and against the alleged answers and so forth. In doing so we can not but employ a natural language. Saying that philosophy does not produce genuine knowledge amounts to saying that there is something wrong with the sentences expressing philosophical problems.
Let us look at an example, before we get any further. Suppose I ask my friend: “When will you come to visit me?” and he answers: “I will come tomorrow at 6 P.M.” The sentence he utters is neither true, nor false. It makes no sense even to ask whether it is true or false. This is because he has not uttered a statement, but a promise. And it is only a promise that my question could get as a reply. So it seems reasonable to say that “When will you come to visit me?” is a question which could not possibly generate knowledge. The same might hold true for all the philosophical questions, with the notable difference that in this case the respective questions have the misleading appearance of being able to generate knowledge. This appearance is due to a striking resemblance they bear with genuine knowledge generating questions.
Another example might clarify the things a bit. Let us consider the question: “How many people are in this room?” This is a genuine knowledge generating question. One will answer by providing either the right, or the wrong number of the people in the room. We could perform a counting and find out conclusively whether the answer was right or wrong. At the end of this process our knowledge would be richer by one more truth. A similar question is: “How many people are in an empty room?”. To this we can answer instantly: “None.” Even if asking the question and answering it does not increase our factual knowledge, there would be no disagreement between reasonable persons upon the answer. Another question could be: “How many people are in this matchbox?” It seems a little awkward to raise this question and perhaps we need not check the matchbox in order to answer it. However, were our bodily measures different, the question would be a perfectly reasonable one to ask. Let us look now at the following question: “How many dreams are in this room?” This question is somehow similar to the first one. The analogy goes like this: “People do sometimes sleep. They might even snore. We could ask how many people are in a room, how many of them are asleep and also how many snoring sounds are heard in a room. Dreaming is also something people sometimes do. So we could also ask how many dreams are in a room.” The question has the appearance of being a sound one. We could even image that we do something similar to a counting in order to answer it. However, on a closer examination we can see that it is quite meaningless to ask it. Let us ask the other question: “How many dreams are in an empty room?” This can not be answered instantly by saying “None.” As a matter of fact, in spite of our feeling that we should be able to provide an answer to this question, either a right, or a wrong one, the question cannot be answered at all. Dreams are not spatio-temporal object to be contained in rooms. It would be equally unanswerable to ask how many people are contained in a certain geometrical figure. Physical bodies cannot be a part of an abstract space.
What Wittgenstein believes is that all the philosophical questions are of the same kind. They mislead us into thinking that they could be answered (and we could gain valuable knowledge by answering them) but are in fact meaningless. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was an attempt of clarifying and supporting this view1. I will not get into details about that attempt. However, I hope that it has become obvious by now why discussing about the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sentences comes before discussing any other philosophical topic.
This view is objectionable, I think. Perfectly meaningful questions, we have already seen, can require and obtain answers which do not improve our knowledge. Perhaps they could also disguise as knowledge generating ones. Why do we have to assume that philosophical questions are different? I do not know how Wittgenstein would answer to this. Nevertheless, I suppose that an answer could be sketched along the following lines. It might be the case that a meaningful question is taken for a knowledge generating one without being in fact so. Two sentences like “Will it rain tomorrow?” and “Will you come tomorrow?”, for instance, do resemble a lot, so one might mistakenly understand the second as requiring a prediction and not a promise. When it so happens, we can still point out what was the precise question the second one was mistaken for. Perhaps it was something like: “Based on your knowledge of the circumstances you will find yourself in tomorrow and on your knowledge about your previous behaviour in similar situations, do you predict that you will come tomorrow?” Meaningless questions are different. In their case, we might have the feeling that something is asked and that the answers will greatly enhance our knowledge, but we cannot point out, even if we admit our fault, what were the correct knowledge enhancing questions the wrong ones were mistaken for. Saying that this holds also for the philosophical questions brings about a further complication, however. The history of philosophy provides numerous examples of philosophical problems turning into research tasks for other disciplines: mathematics, physics, psychology, cognitive sciences and so forth. A prominent one, for instance, is that of the psychological study of the functioning of our senses, memory, linguistic and conceptual faculties being initiated by epistemological problems regarding the validity of our knowledge. It appears in this case that a question like “What is the justification of our knowledge?” (or: “What is it for a belief to be justified?”) was a meaningful one and only a clumsy expression of the problem of how do we effectively acquire knowledge. In order to overcome this objection, let us take one more look at the “How many dreams are in this room?” example. The question could be, of course, replaced by a factual one: “How many people in this room are dreaming?”. Is this second question the one we were trying to ask in the first place? I think not. One could get the answer to the second question and still linger over the initial question. I a similar fashion, supposing that the processes by which we acquire new bits of knowledge are fully described and explained, one could still say: “Yes, I understand how our senses, memory a. s. o. work. But what is the justification of our knowledge, regardless of the way it is actually produced?”2 If we agree to this, then, instead of speaking of philosophical problems transforming into scientific problems, we should perhaps speak of people having both philosophical and scientific interests (and even founding new scientific disciplines or study fields)3.
There are still two problems left. First, how is the question “What is the meaning of a word?” going to help us get a better understanding of what do we say when we claim that a sentence (or a question) has no meaning? Secondly, if the question concerning the meaning of a word is itself a philosophical question, what assurance do we have that it is not a meaningless question in its turn?
The most plausible reply to the first question is perhaps this. We understand a sentence by understanding the words it is constituted from. By showing what it is for a word to have a meaning, we will also show what it is for a sentence to have a meaning, and also what it is for a sentence to lack meaning. Yet, this is not the way Wittgenstein himself regarded this matter in Tractatus4. For him, to get the meaning of a descriptive sentence was to be able to figure out what would happen if the sentence were true. One can not get the meaning of a word in the same way, of course, because words can not be true or false. Thus, it seems that getting the meaning of a sentence and getting the meaning of a word are completely different things. Investigating one would be of no aid for investigating the other5. Though, it is a common practice for Wittgenstein (in BB) to express his views by creating an imaginary opponent and making him say things which he himself disagrees with. It might be the case that the opening question of BB belongs to this imaginary opponent. The purpose of trying to clarify what the distinction between meaningful and meaningless questions consist in is right, but the question asked is the wrong one.
The answer to the second question comes straightforwardly. It might very well be that the question “What is the meaning of a word?” is a meaningless question in its turn. In fact, it is so indeed, as Wittgenstein will claim, if by asking it we are looking for a certain kind of object which constitutes the meaning. The task it was meant to trigger, namely that of analysing the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sentences (or questions) is, however, a sound one. To say that there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless sentences is to say that there is no language and no communication. But then, this very assertion cannot be made, for there is no language left for it to be uttered in6. One might object to the question that there is not a unique distinction between the two kinds of sentences. In the same vein, it could be said about various attempts at answering the question that they are wrong. Still, the question itself cannot be dismissed on the ground of having no meaning. But is it a philosophical question? For our present concerns, it should be enough to notice that the question cannot be answered by making appeal to our ordinary linguistic intuitions, which may sometimes deceive us into believing that a meaningless sentence has meaning. Neither can it be answered by a scientific, i.e. descriptive, approach, because we are looking for normative criteria for meaning.
2. Wittgenstein goes on with two successive replacements7 of the opening question:
(1) What is an explanation of the meaning of a word?
(2) What does the explanation of a word look like?
We can note that (2) does not even speak of something which is “the meaning of a word” anymore. Because of this, I think (2) is a better formulation than (1). However, both questions are intended to ask the same thing: “How do we teach someone a new word?” The following analogy is meant to explain what is the relation between this last question and the initial question about the meaning of a word. Wittgenstein says:
The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question ”how do we measure a length?” helps us to understand the problem, ”what is length?”
The analogy goes like this. Objects have lengths and words have meanings. We can ask of an object what is its length and of a word what is its meaning. We can also ask what is length (or: “what is the length of an object?” or: “what is it for an object to have a length?”) and what is meaning (or: “what is the meaning of a word?” or: “what is it for a word to have a meaning?”). In order to understand what is it for an object to have a length, we might ask how do we measure the length of an object. In the same way, in order to understand what is it for a word to have a meaning, we might ask how do we explain the meaning of a word.
The next paragraph is meant to explain why do we need to replace the opening question. It is said that questions like “What is length?” or “What is meaning?” get us in the state of a “mental cramp”. Let us take the case of a person having a mental cramp while asking “What is length?” I imagine the person’s attention being focused on the question, not being able to answer it as such and still not being disposed to give up looking for an answer. Perhaps this can be compared with the case of someone asking “What is gold?” and finding out, as an answer, that gold is a chemical substance with this and this properties (melting point, colour etc.) and with a particular atomic structure (number of electrons etc.). Now, what could be the difference between the two cases? Both questions are of the same sort – “What is x?” Questions of this sort, Wittgenstein says, require that we point to something in order to provide an answer to them. When asked about gold we can point at least to its atomic structure. This settles the matter. There is nothing of the kind with respect to length or meaning.
Wittgenstein goes on with insisting on the reasons for rephrasing the question about meaning as a question about the way we explain the meaning of a word. Besides the fact that the reformulation helps us remove the mental cramp, if we take (1) to be the new question, we can notice that providing an answer to it will help us get a better understanding of the expression “explanation of meaning”. This is a syntagm formed with the word “meaning”. Other similar syntagms could perhaps be: “distortion of meaning”, “forgetting the meaning”, “having more that one meaning”, “having the same meaning” and so forth. Wittgenstein seems here to make the understanding of a word (or at least of this particular word) dependent on understanding certain expressions formed with it. This is perhaps disputable. One may reply: How do we know which expressions are relevant for the meaning of that word and which are not? There is no relation, for instance, between understanding “bachelor of arts” and understanding “bachelor”. Furthermore, saying that “bachelor” is a part of “bachelor of arts” in a way similar to the one in which “win” is a part of “window” is of no use8. If we separate the semantic distinction between simple and composite parts of language from the respective phonetic or graphic distinction, I see no way in which we can account for it without making appeal to meanings as objects. We do not need to go one with this here, however.
We already encounter here the phrase “grammar of a word”. What is it to study the grammar of a word or of an expression? Wittgenstein does not speak of school grammar, of course. The best way to get what he means here by grammar is to look at some examples, I think. There are many different things which I might do to study a word like “and”. I could, for instance, point out that no sentence may end with it9. Furthermore, I could notice that there are similarities between the way “and” is used and the way other words and signs like “but”, “furthermore” or “.” are used. Another thing would be to compare the word “but” with the expression “and yet”. Speaking of expressions, the phrase “now and then” might also come to my attention. I could also contrast a sentence like: “John and George went to a movie” with “John went to a movie and George went to a movie” and discuss whether they mean the same thing or not. In a similar fashion I could compare the way the word is used to construct composite statements, on one hand, and composite imperatives, on the other10. I might even give some examples of ways in which the word could be used, although it is not or of the ways it could be misunderstood by someone. In doing all these, what I do is to study the grammar of the word “and”. This is not a definition for “grammar of a word”, for sure, but for now it will suffice. When we understand the grammar of “explaining the meaning” we see similarities between how this expression is used and the way other expressions are used. We also see the differences between these and the expressions containing words like “gold”, when we compare, for instance, “made of gold” with “made of meaning” and “explaining the meaning” with “explaining the gold”. This way we will be less inclined to look for something which is the meaning in the way we look for something which is gold.
With the next paragraph we move to discussing how we explain the meaning of a word. The common view has it that we explain a word to someone either by giving him a definition, or by showing him an object to which the word refers.
1 See his Introduction for this.
2 This can be compared with the case of a person asking: “What is ice, apart from what it is in our universe, given our physical laws and all?” Which may come to asking: “What is the essence of ice, regardless of it being could, slippery, translucent, made of frozen water and solid?”
3 Wittgenstein himself was renowned to dismiss “philosophical questions” either by saying that they are meaningless, or by saying that they are in fact questions belonging to mathematics, physics, economy and so on.
4 See, for instance, T 3.3.
5 This is also apparent in my previous example. The trouble with “How many dreams are in this room?” does not come from the fact that there is a word in that sentence which we do not understand.
6 A similar argument can be found in Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Γ, Chapter 4.
7 I take (1) and (2) to be replacements of the opening question and not preliminary questions, different from the opening question, which we should ask before we get to ask it, as the text seems to suggest. Wittgenstein seems not to do always what he says he does.
8 See W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, part III.
9 This is a matter of syntax, indeed. I am afraid that the later Wittgenstein takes the syntax/semantics distinction rather lightly. I could use the observation that no sentence ends with “and” but some may end with “red” to say that “and”, unlike “red”, is not a predicate a. s. o.
10 While “It is dark and it rains.” is true only if it is dark and it rains, we might agree that a person who produces a glass of water without going anywhere has still executed the order “Go and bring me a glass of water”.
