No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
In Part One of The Examined Life (Radford, 1989) I recalled certain episodes from my childhood and youth in which, as I came to realize later, I had been exercised by a philosophical problem. By so doing I hoped not only to convey to non-professionals what philosophy is—or is like—but to show them that they too were philosophers, i.e., had been exercised by philosophical questions. In Part Two I gave some examples of how such problems may be treated by a professional, in articles.
1 Perhaps the loss of faith since medieval times is in part illusory?
2 Of course, we may admire some who have faith and do so for the qualities they have that are connected with their faith, peace, calm, integrity, strength, conviction, detachment, etc. We may envy them, we may find distasteful the shallowness, shrillness, self-regard of some of those who revel in their disbelief. But, again, although such things may give us reasons for wanting to believe, they do not give us reasons for believing those beliefs are true.
3 He would have done so by 1938 (cf. Redpath, 1990, 70).
4 Anyone still doubtful of the correctness of Wittgenstein's view should remind him or herself that we can refer to one and the same thing using phrases which differ in meaning. The only way to escape this argument is to postulate an analysis of meaning which devolves on words or phrases which, if they refer to the same thing, physical, mental, or whatever, have the same meaning as any other word or phrase which does so. This takes us back to Wittgenstein's ‘names’ and ‘simples’. And this theory will not work because the simples have to be ‘colourless’, i.e., devoid of any features, and the ‘names’ (therefore) devoid of meaning.
5 At this point no philosopher's thoughts could but turn to colour. For surely our talk about colours, our colour vocabulary, is entirely free of theory? Things are, for example, blue if and only if they are the same colour (hue) as the unclouded sky. And something is the same colour as the unclouded sky if those with normal colour vision would say that it looked the same colour as the unclouded sky (in daylight, i.e., outdoors when the sky is unclouded).
But aside from the fact that something's being blue is here elucidated in terms of the more complex notion of something's looking blue, and that natural and man-made disasters could force us to rely on our memories or standard objects other than the unclouded sky, suppose for example there were to emerge persons with supernormal colour vision, i.e., a group of persons who could make all the colour discriminations which normal persons can make and more. What should we say then if they said that the unclouded sky was no more the colour of delphiniums than were delphiniums all the same colour?
But this is an unnecessary extravagance, for anyone acquainted with the history of philosophy and therefore the history of science knows that what we refer to when we talk about the sky is not unproblematic and that scientists have doubted if anything in rerum natura is coloured. This is not to say that in some ways such talk is not confused but that does not mean that it is not also illuminating, not just about us and our confusions but us and our relation to the world we inhabit.
6 Page references are to Pitcher (1968).
7 The example is from Chihara and Fodor (1968), but they cannot be held responsible for my understanding and presentation of it. The original discussion can be found in Pitcher, 409–410.
8 Cf. my "What Wittgenstein failed to learn from Lewis Carroll", 15th International Wittgenstein Symposium, August 1992.
9 Watson made virtually the same point (cf. Wittgenstein,, 1975a, 100). Wittgenstein's reply was to obfuscate. He says ‘I might say that the multiplication of 136x51 makes me adopt a new rule. I proceed from certain rules, and I get a new rule: that 136x51 = 6936.’ But what is this new rule, i.e., to what does it apply, and how does he ‘get’ it? On p. 58 (ibid.) he says ‘The only criterion for his multiplying 113 by 44 in a way analogous to the [earlier] examples is his doing it in the way in which all of us, who have been trained in a certain way, would do it. If we find that he cannot be trained to do it in the same way, we give him up as hopeless and say he is a lunatic’ Well, if that did happen why would he call him a lunatic?