NORDIC WITTGENSTEIN REVIEW 3 (1) 2014 available online

NORDIC WITTGENSTEIN REVIEW 3 (1) 2014

Note from the Editors
Yrsa Neuman, Martin Gustafsson, Lars Hertzberg     5-6
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/2970/pdf

INVITED PAPER
Reasons for Action: Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian perspectives in historical, meta-philosophical and philosophical context     Hans-Johann Glock     7-46
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/2971/pdf

ARTICLES
Trust in Conversation
David Cockburn     47-68
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1947/pdf

"Meaning is Use" and Wittgenstein’s Treatment of Philosophical Problems
Stefan Giesewetter     69-89
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1939/pdf

The Trouble with Harry
Don S. Levi     91-111
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1929/pdf

Wittgenstein's Critical Physiognomy     FULLTEXT PDF
Daniel Kirwan Wack     113-137
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1942/pdf

FROM THE ARCHIVES
A Passport Photo of Two: On an Allusion in the Pictures of Wittgenstein and von Wright in Cambridge
Christian Eric Erbacher, Bernt Österman     139-149
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1948/pdf

The Wittgenstein Collection of the Austrian National Library
Alfred Schmidt     151-172
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1897/pdf

BOOK REVIEWS
Fact and Fiction – Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein biographisches Album (2012) by Michael Nedo
Dinda L. Gorlée     173-177
http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1904/pdf

What can we learn from Gettier?

Edmund Gettier, in 1963, published a short paper  (1,000 words) which stirred up and keeps stirring up debate in epistemology. In it he gave what have been thought to be counter-examples to the plausible-sounding idea that knowledge is to be defined as justified true belief. (I discussed his paper in an earlier entry.) In these examples someone is said to hold a true belief, to be justified in holding it, and yet not be said to know it. In response, philosophers have tried to formulate ways of getting around the problem, others have proposed different examples, etc. (See http://www.iep.utm.edu/gettier/.)

Many of the examples used in the debate are utterly artificial or farfetched – that, I would argue, is a problem in itself. I wish to get back to that issue in a later entry. However, the following example seems to be fairly straightforward: as I hurry past the big clock on the railway station, I notice that it shows six. However, without my knowing it, this clock, which I have always relied on in the past, actually stopped at six this morning. On the other hand, it actually is six p.m., and I believe it is. So I have grounds for believing it to be six, it is six, and yet one might question whether I know that it is six.

So far so good. The question that intrigues me is what contribution this debate is making to an understanding of knowledge. What would happen if we found ourselves at a loss for a definition of knowledge? First of all, what purpose would a definition of knowledge serve? Clearly, we don’t need one for pedagogical purposes: it is not a question of conveying the use of the words “know” or “knowledge” to people who are not familiar with these words. (Proposal for a thought experiment: try to imagine life without these words or equivalent words in some other language.)

Sometimes definitions are created in order to formulate standards for the application of a word. We do this when we introduce technical terms, or give a specialized application to a word currently in use. A “child”, for the purposes of buying a train ticket, is anyone under the age of 12, etc. But neither can this be what we are after here. The discussion is not about reforming the use of these words, nor about sharpening the criteria; rather, it is concerned with giving an account of how they are actually used. Remember: what seems to make Gettier’s examples counter-examples is the fact that they seem to fulfil the standard we presumably accept, yet we are not ready to accept them as cases of knowledge. (Hanfling, however, has argued that Gettier-type examples might qualify as knowledge in certain cases.)

Another way of thinking about the task of definitions in philosophy is to think about them as providing an overview of the use of some expression in the language. On this view of the task, the problem is not that speakers are at a loss when it comes to using certain expressions; the difficulty arises when we try to give an account of the use. The Gettier examples have been taken to show that the picture we had of the use of “know” and “knowledge” was erroneous, and philosophers have been trying to amend the picture ever since.

The conventional way of thinking about this task is to assume that we have to identify some condition, some state of things, to which the words refer: “knowledge = X”. To say that I, or somebody else, knows something is to maintain that the condition X is fulfilled with respect to the matter in question. But would anyone seriously wish to defend the definition Gettier was trying to undermine?

When we speak about knowledge, would we ever be inclined to substitute “justified true belief” for the word? First of all, the whole discussion doesn’t seem to fit first person present tense uses of “know”. That’s evidently because there’s something strange about first person present tense uses of “justified”. Just imagine the following conversation:

“Are you sure your sister will find the way?” – Suppose instead of answering (1) “I know she will” I said, (2) “My sister will find the way, I believe she will, and I am justified in so believing”, or for short, (3) “I’m justified in believing she’ll find the way.”

The suggested paraphrases sound bizarre. Perhaps if I said (3) I meant something like “I have grounds for believing … “; but if that’s what I mean, it would be misleading for me to say “I know…” (I hope get back to the sense of “justified” in a later entry.)

What then about third person uses? A to B: “She knows that those mushrooms have to be parboiled.”

(1) “So you don’t need to tell her.” The question whether they need to be parboiled doesn’t arise. Both A and B take it for granted that they need to be parboiled to get rid of the poison. The question how Sue came to know it doesn’t really matter.

(2) Paraphrase: “Sue knows how to cook mushrooms. She says they have to be parboiled. So we can rely on that.” They assume that Sue has the competence, and from that they infer that the mushrooms have to be parboiled, arguing from knowledge to truth, as it were.

(3) “So we’ll have to think of another method of poisoning her.” Again, the truth is taken for granted, her justification doesn’t matter, the main thing is that A and B know how Sue will act.

(These examples were suggested by Oswald Hanfling’s chapter “Knowledge and the uses of ‘knowledge’”, in his book Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue, 96 ff.)

One point to note here is that there is a shift between foreground and background in these examples. In (1) and (3) the facts are taken for granted, what is foregrounded is Sue’s relation to the facts. In (2) we argue from Sue’s assertion to the facts. So we might say, in some cases the truth of the judgment in question is being presupposed, in other cases the truth is what we wish to get at. The definition which is the target of Gettier’s critique fails to acknowledge this distinction. Another related point is that we need to distinguish between the question of justification and truth. Suppose it is discovered that those mushrooms don’t really have to be parboiled; the story of their being poisonous is really a myth, though one that is generally believed at the time. After learning this, we might say that people used to believe they had to be parboiled, not that they knew it. But that doesn’t mean that A and B were misusing the word “know”, since they believed the judgment – and its truth was not at issue.

I believe that most attempts to define “know” miss both these points. Indeed, this is probably what is bound to happen if you start out looking for a definition. A definition is supposed to give you the conditions for a word truly to apply to some object or circumstance. This presupposes that the conditions for its application can be determined independently of a context of use. When it comes to the widely ramified use of a word like “know”, this blinds us to the dynamic of the word’s actual roles in the context of human interaction. The problem may not be so evident when it comes to words or expressions like “titanium”, or “king’s gambit”, or “referendum”, where the purpose of asking for a definition may be taken for granted. (Cp. Avner Baz on “the theorist’s question”, in his book When Words are Called for: a Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy, chap. 3).

So I suggest the lesson from Gettier should be, not that some other definition should be found, nor that the lack of a credible definition constitutes a crisis in epistemology, but rather that the search for a definition is not the right way of trying to get a clear understanding of how we operate with the word “know”.

Morality grounded in grammar?

I want to continue my reflections on the interchange between Drew Carter and Michael Campbell (see my previous entry).  According to Carter (as I read him), Wittgensteinian moral philosophers – such as Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner – regard morality as grounded in propositions possessing a kind of indubitable truth. Two of his examples are “One can’t love evil” and “One can’t love cow dung”. The first he understands to be a grammatical claim, the second a basic fact of human nature. He considers a grounding in human nature as solid, while a grammatical grounding seems to reduce morality to a mere matter of convention; he speaks of a “slide to relativism and subjectivism”. (I discussed the idea of a grounding in human nature in the first entry.)

Campbell, in my view rightly, rejects the proposed dichotomy between two kinds of grounding. I’d be inclined to say: to think of grammar and of human nature as somehow offering parallel modalities – each setting its own kind of limit to what is possible in moral thought – is confused. Indeed, I’m not even clear what it would be to think of the two sentences above, taken in isolation, as expressing either an empirical claim or a point of grammar. Deciding whether someone loves evil (or cow dung) is not like establishing whether someone is allergic to fish roe. For one thing, the terms of the relation, “fish roe” and “allergy” are distinct. But love and its object cannot in this way be thought of separately. How love is expressed, what it demands of us, is dependent on the object of love. To show my love of someone is to show my understanding of her.

It is also unclear under what aspect a person might be taken to love evil. Does he love evil for its own sake (e.g. a sadist, a person embittered by life, someone in the grip of vindictiveness, etc), or for what he hopes it will bring (e.g. a terrorist)?

For another thing, and connected with this, we are acquainted with the kinds of context in which food allergies are spoken about, the reasons for being concerned about it, the practical consequences. But when the philosopher raises the question whether it is possible or impossible to love evil, there is no context enabling us to get clear about the nature of the relation being considered.

*

What about the notion that morality might be grounded in grammar? How are we to think of the idea that the wrongness of an action is part of the very concept of the action (is internal to its description)? Would that mean that someone who murders an innocent human being or who lies to a friend is in violation of grammar or in the grip of a grammatical confusion?

                       Campbell quotes Cora Diamond’s “Eating Meat and Eating People”:

[T]here are some actions. . . that are part of the way we come to understand and indicate our recognition of what kind it is with which we are concerned. [. . .] [I]t is not “morally wrong” to eat our pets; people who ate their pets would not have pets in the same sense of the term. (C. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, MIT Press, 1991,  p. 323.)

Well, there might be circumstances in which a person would find herself reduced to eating her dog, for instance, to fend off imminent starvation. So perhaps we might reformulate the point as follows: to think of an animal as a pet is not to think of it as food - though the fact that a person will eat something in a dire situation, or, say, as part of a ritual, does not entail that she thinks of it as food.

                      Would the realization that if I thought of my dog as food I would not regard it as a pet in the same sense as others do somehow keep me from eating it? Why should it? I might simply shrug my shoulders and say to myself: “All right, so my dog isn’t a pet in that sense.” The fact that we don’t think of pets as food is bound up with the fact that we aren’t tempted to eat them, indeed we normally have a revulsion to eating them. In that sense, not regarding pets as food is not a “mere convention”, notwithstanding the fact that customs concerning what kinds of animal are food vary between cultures. (In China, for instance, the attitude towards eating dog meat is different: there is a movement afoot there to discourage the eating of dogs and cats. In this connection, one may need to distinguish between eating certain species of animals often kept as pets, and eating one’s own pets.)

                      Now could we imagine people who shared our attitudes to pets in most respects, but regarded them as food? First, we should recall that “our” attitude to pets vary greatly: pets are a varied category (the Swedish category husdjur even more so), and so is the category of pet owner: not every dog owner has his dog sign Christmas cards or brings flowers to his cat’s grave each year on the date of her death. Anyway, if there is a conflict between regarding an animal as food and having towards it the other attitudes that go with regarding an animal as a pet, the conflict is of a psychological kind; a matter of “human nature”. This by itself entails nothing as to the way pets should be treated.

                      Could we, on the other hand, imagine a society lacking anything corresponding to our concept of a pet? Without difficulty: though of course, life in that society would differ markedly from ours in several respects.

Morality and the (im)personal

In a recent article, Drew Carter (“’Part of the Very Concept’: Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy”, Philosophical Investigations, 36 (2013), 37-55 ), criticizes philosophers like Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner for leaving the foundation of morality unclear. They appear to suggest, he claims, that moral judgments are grounded in a conceptual scheme (a grammar), but if so, they constitute mere conventions. This is obscured, it appears, by the fact that what these philosophers claim to construe as matters of mere grammar are actually facts of human nature. Carter’s underlying worry, if I understand him correctly, is that in the absence of a grounding in human nature, nothing distinguishes moral convictions from mere matters of personal taste or preference.

In a response (“Inwardness and Sociability”, Philosophical Investigations, 37 (2014),  57-77),  Michael Campbell questions the idea of a grounding of morality whether in grammar or in facts of human nature. In the same issue there is a rejoinder by Carter . I found Campbell’s response on the whole well-argued and instructive. At the same time, there were things in the discussion I found it hard to get a grip on. In this and a later installment I wish to make a few comments, mainly with the purpose of trying to work out the issues for myself.  

Why is it a problem if moral convictions cannot be distinguished from matters of taste or preference? One central reason, I take it (though this is not made explicit in the debate), is that this would make it impossible to understand why we should accord a person’s moral convictions a respect which we do not accord, say, his taste in curtains or his preference for watching hockey rather than football on tv. Respect, I should empasize, is compatible with rejection, though it will show itself in the manner in which the rejection gets expressed.

Thus, for instance, there is the question of whether the unwillingness of health-care personnel to participate in abortions is to be respected, or whether they can be obliged to participate as part of their professional duties. This, one might suggest, is connected with whether we think of their unwillingness as an expression of a moral conviction or just a personal reluctance.

For another example, let us consider an episode in the film Chariots of Fire, which is based on real events. Eric Liddell was on the British team for the 1924 Olympics in Paris. He was deeply religious, and was reported to have said, "I believe that God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure." This meant that he would not race on the Sabbath. He is selected to run the 100 metres, but when it turns out that the trial heats for the event are on a Sunday, he declares that he cannot compete. The British Olympic Committee, including the Prince of Wales, try to persuade him to change his mind, but he does not budge. (The standoff is resolved by his swapping events with another member of the British team.)

What I found of interest in this connection is the way the committee members approach the issue. They ask Liddell whether he would not be willing to make a sacrifice for Britain by competing on a Sunday. Thus, they seem to treat his unwillingness to compete as a matter of personal preference rather than an ethical / religious conviction. (I submit that the ethical and the religious are on a par in this respect.) They think that for him running on the Sabbath is something he prefers not to do, and thus running would involve a sacrifice on his part, one that he might be persuaded to undertake for a more important cause (the glory of Britain). But actually abstaining from running was the sacrifice he felt obliged to make; for him, there was no higher cause.

As I construe Carter’s position, if it is to be intelligible why certain convictions are to be accorded respect, they must be grounded in something independent of the individual or the practices of some group. A conviction deserves respect if it is “right”, as it were. The analogy here seems to be with being a credible witness: the speaker deserves to be believed if she has what we can all agree are valid grounds for the claims she is making. Similarly, the Olympic Committee might have been able to respect Liddell’s abstention if he had adduced grounds on which we can all agree, e.g. considerations of health. Since he could not adduce such grounds, there was no right or wrong about his wish, it simply boiled down to a matter of personal (or group) preference, and thus had no particular claim to be respected.

Campbell’s position, I gather, is almost the opposite of this. What makes a conviction deserving of respect is the depth with which it is held by the individual, the degree to which it is anchored in his or her life. This is why it is hard to imagine, for instance, how a love of evil – one of the examples discussed by Carter and Campbell – could take a form worthy of respect. Perhaps we could say: the more alien the proposed object of love appears to us, the heavier the burden of proof required if we are to be able to meet it with respect.

In a later entry, I plan to comment on the relation between morality and grammar.