The New Wittgenstein [Paperback]

This is one of the more important recent books on Wittgenstein. I daresay that it is one of the most exciting and interesting texts since McDowell's Mind and World.

The most interesting and pertinent articles are by Cavell (who is often unclear but is otherwise here), McDowell (Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, which is also in his Mind, Value...anthology), Conant, Putnam (on mathematical necessity--so good--he's soon to have a new book released [UW lectures] by Columbia UP), J. Floyd (on math), and C. Diamond (esp. the article on the PL Arg. in the Tractatus).

This is a very exciting anthology. I highly recommend it.

I also recommend: Wittgenstein in America (Oxford UP) and Smith, Reading McDowell.

Ms. Crary and Mr. Read have compiled texts from unorthodox philosophers young and old, who take Wittgenstein's statement '...Our investigation gains its importance from what it destroys' seriously, without giving way to uncompromising (& incomprehensible) forms of skepticism and relativism. However, that is not to say they do not take skepticism seriously or even believe that it must inevitably appear as an inherent part of philosophical discourse. Skepticism appears, rather, in almost all of these texts as both an impetus and impediment, in need of philosophical treatment. They see the need of destruction in light of the need of discourse, of creation, & if not in light of 'theory' (per se) in light of (textual) investigation. To this end, many of the essays re-examine the Tractatus in terms of W.'s later work, e.g. in the Investigations; they attempt to draw out certain similarities that have been covered up by the forthright assumption that the later work is only a critique of the earlier stuff.

Crary herself was a student of John McDowell at Pittsburgh, who is represented here with his beautiful treatment of non-cognitivism ('Non-cognitivism and rule-following'); followed by Cavell with a text on language learning; followed by Crary with a text on Political Philosophy, by Conant & Diamond with texts on the Tractatus and the Private-Language Argument respectively, etc. Finally, in the role of defendant is a text by P.M.S Hacker representing a more orthodox Wittgenstein - a Wittgenstein in an outright battle against the threat of Skepticism. -dg

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most famous philosopher of modern times but very few understand his pioneering work and there has been a collective amnesia regarding him in recent decades. Most of the essays are new but some date as far back as 1979 and whether they give a new view of his ideas depends on one's understanding of what he said. For me, the interpretations are not new and mostly just as confused as nearly all the other commentary on W and on human behavior throughout the behavioral sciences and by the general public. As usual, nobody seems to grasp that philosophy is armchair psychology, and that W was (in my view) the greatest natural psychologist of all time. He laid out the general structure of how the mind works, which is often referred to as intentionality and is roughly equivalent to cognition or personality or thinking and willing or higher order thought (HOT). He can thus be regarded as a pioneer in evolutionary psychology, although hardly anyone but me seems to realize it. W was thus nearly 50 years ahead of his time as the first to reject (though not entirely consistently) the blank slate or cultural view of human nature, though this has gone unrecognized and he has generally been interpreted as supporting a communal consensus view of psychology--exactly the opposite of his overall thrust (eg., see Short's comment on p 115).

As always in philosophical writing, it is quite striking that nobody (in my view) fully grasps what W was doing and noone to this day has succeeded (and few even try) to follow his Socratic method with constant recourse to perspicuous examples of our psychological functioning.

His wholly novel ideas and unique style and telegraphic writing, coupled with his often solitary, almost solipsistic lifestyle, and premature death in 1951, resulted in a failure to publish anything of his later thought during his lifetime and only slowly has his huge nachlass of some 20,000 pages been published- a project which continues to this day. The only complete edition of the largely German nachlass was first issued by Oxford in 2000 with Intelex now publishing it, as well as all the 14 Blackwell English language books on a searchable CD. The Blackwell CD costs ca. $100 but the Oxford CD is over $1000 or over $2000 for the set including the images of the original manuscripts. They can however be obtained via interlibrary loan and also, like countless other volumes in behavioral science, at even lower cost on p2p. One reason I mention this is that, though most of his best work has now been translated and published in English, it is useful and often indispensable to consider his German remarks in the nachlass and few scholars are up to it. Editing and translating of his work by his executors has also been less than perfect and capturing the precise meaning of the original German is a huge problem as several authors here note (eg, the need in many passages to translate "darstellung" as an action and not as a disposition (propositional attitude)--one of many distinctions W was the first to elucidate. One can get a graphic view of this by looking at Victor Rodych's two revelatory articles (the first without and the latter with the benefit of the nachlass) on W and Godel in the journal Minds and Machines. Interested readers may wish to consult my other reviews of W books and that of Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop".

It is well known that W dramatically altered his views beginning in 1929 and by the mid 30's essentially totally rejected his prior work, including the famous Tractatus. However, the Tractatus continues to fascinate and several of the current authors (Diamond, Conant) follow a long tradition in trying to explain just what he meant and how this changed or did not in his later work. For me, the only value in this is to see how early in his life (ca 1914) he began to express the germs of his later understanding of human psychology. On this issue I think Hacker's final essay here is definitive. His affirmative answer to "Was he trying to whistle it?" indicates that W of the Tractatus was trying to describe what he so famously insisted could not be said but only shown. Hacker (along with everyone else on the planet) does not seem to realize that this meant that W was trying to describe the functioning of the axioms of our innate evolutionary psychology by giving examples from our everyday use of language (ie, from our thought), but he does a beautiful job of refuting Diamond and Conant's views in their essays here, and many others elsewhere, and provides chapter and verse for this view. See eg, various comments on pg 360,363, 372, 373, 376-81 for W's clear references to our innate and unquestionable (ie denying our axioms lacks sense) intentionality. Hacker puts an end (one hopes) to the view that W was actually writing Kierkegaardian nonsense.

Crary's introductory essay is tolerable, but makes a grotesque understatement on p3 when she states that there is "something essentially unsatisfactory" about the view that W supported the idea that there is "no such thing as fully objective agreement." In fact such a view is utterly mistaken, as is amply demonstrable throughout his latter writings in which he shows that our normal behavior is the very definition of objective agreement and it's denial is incoherent (see eg. his last work "On Certainty").

Cavell was one of the first to begin to penetrate deeply into W and his typically brilliant essay (reprinted from 1979) almost gets to the core of the matter, but he tends to get rather more florid and poetic than I think useful, and just does not quite get that W was laying out the structure of our evolved EP. Of course he can be forgiven as nobody else does either.

McDowell's essay from 1981 is quite dated and severely hampered by his rather opaque style, but has some good points, in spite of the expected oblivion to W's defining the modern study of innate intentional psychology.

I find Finkelstein's article on W and Platonism to be excellent and agree that Kripke and Wright are wrong and McDowell and Tait are right about this. Though neither he nor anyone I have read sees it this way, it seems to me very useful to view Plato's Ideals as our cognitive modules programmed by our genes. No term will be perfect, but if we have to label W's views, then I agree with Finkelstein and McDowell that "naturalistic Platonist" get pretty close. Certainly he dealt the death blow to the idea that an interpretation is required to follow a rule.

Read's comments on word meanings seems unexceptionable but the writing is horrific (ie, more or less standard philosophy).

Stone on W on Deconstruction has its moments but for me Decon and Derrida are an utter waste of time and it is comical how he tends to lapse into the typical Decon word salad (I first typed "world salad", which seems apt as well) when he discusses Derrida. Again we find Kripke's bizarre skeptical interpretation of W discussed and rejected. In spite of occasional lapses, it is clear as crystal that W rejected the blank slate community consensus view in favor of his novel innate axiomatic description of our psychology. Meaning is normative because it's innate, automatic and invisible and not subject to interpretation--a word W reserves for "the substitution of one expression of the rule for another."(p100). Neither Kripke nor Derrida gets the point since (like nearly everyone) they are hopelessly ensnared in the blank slate defaults when trying to explain behavior.

Crary's essay on W and political thought is clever but standard blank slate again and so hopeless. Politics, like all of culture, is a slight extension of our evolutionary psychology which demonstrates the ineluctable dominance of nature over nurture and W's contribution was to point this out, though usually indirectly.

Putnam's "Rethinking Mathematical Necessity" shows that by 1994 he had begun to understand W, but even so it's a big advance over his earlier work.

Floyd on W and mathematical philosophy is pretty good stuff, but does not grasp the overall picture of W as an evolutionary psychologist and math as a slight extension of our intuitive psychology. There is no boundary between math and the rest of our intentionality and W interleaved math examples throughout his work. Many of his most incisive revelations on our psychological functions and the relation of language to the world he demonstrated with mathematics or geometry. Floyd gives a good discussion of W's example of trisecting the angle which requires that we carefully examine the operation of disposition words like think, doubt, imagine, believe, know, decide and realize they depict actions or potential for actions and not mental states, as W first pointed out in the 1930's. But in this case, as in all cases (ie, all of language and philosophy) this is only the beginning of what W shows us and we need to realize that "question", "answer", "mathematics", "proof", "equation", etc., the various uses of which comprise complex language games (concepts or cognitive modules or groups of them) which often have little or NOTHING in common except that they are all included in our psychology (our form of life as he liked to say,) but this all operates invisibly and automatically in our subterranean psychology and thus is overlooked by virtually everyone including, incredibly, nearly all philosophers (even specialists on W), as this book also sadly illustrates. To Floyd's great credit, she gets it mostly right and the book is worth buying just for her article! Those intrigued by mathematical avenues into intentional psychology, as well as a general view of W might find a few things of interest in my comments on W and Godel in the Hofstadter review.

Diamond wastes her article on W by spending most of it discussing such items of philosophical esoterica as what the Tractatus implied regarding Russell's work, which is probably one of the least interesting ways to investigate human behavior.

Cerbone likewise expends his energies mostly on the historical aspects of W's relation to Frege, though he does make some good points about the limits of sense along the way (eg, that the language games W proposed often would require a substantial remodeling of our psyche to work). Sadly and almost inevitably (ie, oblivion to how our mind works is another of the hundreds of universals of our EP) he seems to evince no real grasp that it was his insights into our evolutionary psychology that gave such power to W's work, that these innate axioms (or concepts or cognitive modules) provide our "conceptual skin"(p308), is not clear that T and F do not apply to logic and math in the same sense as to empirical facts and that they are extensions of limited parts of our psychology, and that if we have a reasonable test for "illogical" then this term definitely characterizes much of our behavior. But a reasonably stimulating read nonetheless.

Witherspoon's article on W and Carnap ( member of the Vienna circle and the only person W ever accused of plagiarism) leaves me cold, as he has no insight at all into the workings of the mind, although he uses (abuses) lots of the right words--"logical syntax", "linguistic framework," "grammar." Yes, he is certainly right that we often misunderstand W, but the really important point is that we ought to understand behavior. He justly gives attention to W's last work "On Certainty" which some regard as his best (though he was dying of prostate cancer at the time and was often barely able to work) and seems on the way to becoming (with TLP and PI) his most famous (eg, see the two recent books by Daniele Moyal-Sharrock). But, he wastes his time on vague theorizing about "quasiunderstanding" rather than explicating the depths of our intentional psychology, so beautifully laid out by W.

Those who wish to have a more conventional (but in my view typically confused-- in spite of some good points) review of this volume may consult Philosophical Investigations 24:2 p185-92(2001).