Updates Aplenty on Wittgenstein-On-Learning.Com

Things have sure been busy on Wittgenstein-On-Learning.Com. We are rapidly attempting to add all the notes to the topics section of the site.  Once complete, it will free up time to explore the ideas more clearly in possible essays or presentations. In the meantime, here are the  10 sections that have been updated in the past week.

Key Principles

The key principles page presents core themes relating to language, literacy, (cultural) practices, knowledge and equity. 

Commanding Language & Literacy

PI 25: Commanding, questioning, storytelling, chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.

“[We are] the species that reads, records, and goes beyond what went before, and directs our attention to what is important to preserve.” (Wolf, 2008, p 4)

With An Emphasis on Acquisition

“We acquire our linguistic capacities and our ability to participate in human life rather by imitation and habituation, by drill and practice … [in] such simple things as learning to direct our attention, practicing the voicing of sounds so uttering them becomes easy, establishing associations between words and objects, etc.” (Sluga, 2011, pg 107)

Seeing language & literacy as patterned & meaningful

It is a marvel that speakers and readers can find meaning almost effortlessly in stimulus that would appear senseless to someone not familiar with a particular language or who is illiterate in that particular language. How is it that we come to adopt a way of seeing, and how is it that something that was once difficult to master has become second nature?

Language & Literacy as Discursive Practice

“What we do in learning language is neither reduced to, nor explained by, purely material processes ... What we do involves the development and exercise of an ability (based on a prior innate capacity) in actual practice. Nothing is hidden, one might say.” (Eldridge, 2010, pg 172)

Commanding Words

'Our experimental study proved that it is the functional use of the word, or any other sign, as means of focusing one's attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation... Words and other signs are those means that direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution to the problem confronting us' (Vygotsky, 1986, pp.106-7).

Commanding Sentences

 “[Sentences] promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organisation of the world. That is what language does: organise the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can by extrapolation and expansion, write anything. (Fish, 2011, pg 7 - 8)

Commanding Numeracy

 “Mathematics is grounded, as it were, both in the biological and in the social. The rules of calculating and so on, established by human beings like ourselves with certain biological capabilities and limitations, are appealed to in judging the correctness of particular calculations and inferences.” (Phillips, 1979, pg 134 - 135)

The role of affect & emotional attachment in reading

 “As every teacher knows, emotional engagement is the tipping point between leaping into the reading life ... An enormously important influence on the development of comprehension in childhood is what happens after we remember, predict, and infer: we feel, we identify, and in the the process we understand more fully and can’t wait to turn the page. The child ... often needs heartfelt encouragement from teachers, tutors and parents to make a stab at more difficult reading material.” (Wolf, 2008, p 132)

Construing the self through autobiography

“Murdoch wrote, “Re-thinking one’s past is a constant responsibility”: it should be constant because of new light shed by the ongoing recontextualisation of our past deeds, words, and thoughts ... And that ongoing work-in-progress then becomes a picture we come to resemble, in that it determines which experiences are salient and which are not, thus shaping, at least partially, our subsequent choices in response to the picture, the unfolding narrative.” (Hagberg, 2010, pg 118 - 119).

Practices Make Sense

I must start with an image that floats in my imagination as I write today's title.

I imagine a parent sitting down regularly to read a book with a child. Actually, I am imagining a parent reading regularly in the morning at the child's preschool. In fact, what I am really imagining is an Aboriginal parent reading a picture book to a group of children at the local preschool in a remote community in Australia.

The routine of reading together introduces the practice of reading that - over time - becomes more nuanced. It becomes a space in which the participant can become more familiar with the features of reading and of meaning. The practice is a pivotal routine, and access to knowledge and resources to engage in that practice are often taken for granted.

I'll leave it that for the present moment.

Could things be other than we see them to be?

From "Google Glass: Artificial Unconscious?" by Neuroskeptic in Discovery Magazine ​(25 May 2013)

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60 years ago, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote:

Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.

The “idea” in this case was a particular philosophical theory about language. Wittgenstein saying that other philosophers were making use of this idea without realizing it, unconsciously – so he chose the metaphor of glasses, which are always right before us, filtering what we see, even though we’re rarely aware of them.

​Read more at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/05/25/google-glass-artificial-unconscious/#.UaH1HJWCg-Z

Language Games in Seinfield

From "How Seinfeld Made Something Out of Nothing" by Colin Dray in What Culture! (6 May 2013).

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Wittgenstein, a philosopher concerned throughout his life with the way in which language functioned, came to see human communication as an endlessly expanding, continuously fluctuating organism governed by use – by grammar. In his second major work, Philosophical Investigations, he described language like a city, constantly expanding, being built upon, renovated and remade:

‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.’**

Whenever new terminologies are introduced (scientific and medical terms, new forms of technology, slang and definitions) our language – like a city – grows and adapts to make room for these words, and their new applications. But we have to know these terms and their meaning; see them applied, to learnthe grammar of their usage.

Otherwise, as Wittgenstein notes, we are so alienated from this grammar that we will fail to understand what is being said. As he observes later in the book in one of his most famous statements:

‘If I lion could talk, we could not understand him.’***

What Wittgenstein is essentially saying here – using the example of a beast given the power of speech – is that language requires more than just knowing the definitions of a list of words. It’s about being attuned to their context, to the subtleties of their use. In the case of the lion – magically granted the power of human speech or not – his grammar, his frames of reference (or in Wittgenstein’s terms, his ‘forms of life’), would nonetheless remain so alien, so divorced from our own experience, that we would still be unable to comprehend one another anyway.

It would, on a much smaller scale, be like getting dropped into the middle of a Seinfeld episode, suddenly witness, with no establishing perspective, to a bunch of people jabbering about ‘Mimbos’, ‘shrinkage’ and being ‘anti-dentite.’ Without the necessary back story, we would, like the lion, suddenly have no idea what these words meant – recognising their sounds, but oblivious to their unnatural applications, seemingly locked behind an abstracted code.

Wittgenstein therefore came to argue that the only means to explore the way in which language makes meaning was to examine its grammar – to look at how language is being applied at the very moment of its use, in localised examinations of speech that he called ‘language-games’. One such example of these games was an examination of various uses of the word ‘blue’. After all, the word ‘blue’ could be an adjective, a noun; it could be one of (or all of) a series of colours; even a state of mind:

‘Is this blue the same as the blue over there?  Do you see any difference?’–

You are mixing paint and you say ‘It’s hard to get the blue out of this sky.’

‘It’s turning fine, you can already see blue sky again.’

‘Look at what different effects these two blues have.’

‘Do you see the blue book over there? Bring it here.’

‘This blue signal-light means . . . .’

‘What’s this blue called? – Is it “indigo”?’****

‘Blue’, Wittgenstein reveals, is not simply a label applied to a physical or conceptual object. It can have a myriad of meanings in a multitude of circumstances, all defined by its grammar and discerned by language-users familiar with these uses effortlessly in the moment of its utterance.

And it is precisely these kinds of explorations of language that are undertaken in every episode of Seinfeld, as each week we watch these characters explore – through the myriad potential for meaning that they can engender in their discussions – their own linguistic suburb in the city of language.

Indeed, it helps explain why the show has created such a wide and ubiquitous lexicon. From ‘Yadda-yadda-yadda’, to putting something ‘in the vault’, to ‘re-gifting’, to ‘close-talkers’, ‘high-talkers’, and ‘low-talkers’, Seinfeld has arguably contributed more definitions and turns of phrase to the English language than anyone since Shakespeare.

And the reason that these definitions catch on – when other programs that try to mimic this style fail – is because Seinfeld scripts do not simply label some social phenomenon and expect the viewer to look on with a distanced, wry smile – they play it out, exhibit how applicable it is for its given circumstance. The show’s stories build their momentum by rolling around a premise and allowing its validity or otherwise be tested through application. The characters tease out its possibilities, with the viewer themself drawn into this conceptual exploration, invited to participate in the interrogation of social norms and pondering the foibles of human behaviour.

Read more at http://whatculture.com/tv/how-seinfeld-made-something-out-of-nothing.php#ItDygGFQow4Zeuub.99

Wittgenstein's Two Views of Language

From "The Wittgenstein Controversy" by Evelyn Toynton in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1997).

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Whilst not the article's focus, Toynton's article does presents the common division between Wittgenstein's early and late perspectives on language.  The young Wittgenstein was deeply influenced by the study of logic. Consequently, he sought to illustrate how our descriptive sentences convey pictures of the world, which could articulate empirical truths under examination. However, he admits that a vast range of propositions do not fall into this category, including religious, ethical and aesthetic statements. These statement cannot be understood by merely understanding the elements of the sentence. One needs to understand the context in which these propositions are uttered and applied to fully grasp their significance. This leads to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In the latter years, he was preoccupied with the ways we use language in context and in culture and in our form of life. Instead of seeking the absolute structure of language, he sought to investigate the vast range of human practices in which language plays a role in shaping experience and in executing activity. 

Tractarian View of Language

"This was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which altered the practice of philosophy, perhaps forever, by calling into question the ability of language to talk about ethical and metaphysical questions in any meaningful way. Wittgenstein maintained that language could only show; it could not say anything that went beyond description: "Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. . . . Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." To establish the limits of what could be spoken of, he stripped language down to its logical structure, which he saw as mirroring that of reality."

View of the Philosophical Investigations

"Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier quest for a logically perfect language to consider how language acquires meaning through use, the multiple ways it functions "in the stream of life."

Love Is in the Air, and in the Art

From "Love is in the Air, and in the Art" by Ken Johnson in the New York Times (7 February 2013).

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"Philosophers have traditionally distinguished three forms of love: eros, or passionate, sensual attraction to another person; philia, or affection for family, friends, clubs, teams, nations and humanity in general; and agape, which is love for God or the functional equivalent.

"Wittgenstein thought that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you should forget the dictionary and examine how it is used by people in the real world, including, I would add, how it appears in art." 

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

From "Wittgenstein on God and Belief" from The Bully Pulpit.

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“A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way. Life can educate one to a belief in God."

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Wittgenstein held that religion was a practice that would be justified through the form of life of which it was part. This resonates with the central premise of Alain de Botton's recent popular exploration in Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion. In short, it is unfair to judge religion based on the factual basis of its beliefs. Instead, one should curiously explore how a certain belief structure gives rise to a form of life. It is - then - that one can - perhaps - be permitted to judge.

“The way you use the word “God” does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean.”

— Culture & Value

Philosophy is an Activity

From "5 Minute Tute: Philosophy" by Rick Lewis (founder and editor of Philosophy Now) on Cherwell.org

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"Most academic disciplines are defined by their subject matter, but with Philosophy this is tricky, because its subject matter is, well, everything. We could say that Philosophy is a critical investigation into any aspect of the universe or of human experience. Maybe Wittgenstein’s approach is more useful here: he said that Philosophy is an activity rather than a subject. It is the activity of rational reflection, of challenging assumptions and asking questions.

Can we all be philosophers?

Yes of course – it doesn’t even require any expensive equipment! We all stumble across philosophical problems at one time or another: Is there a God? Should we eat meat? What is life for? What comes after death? Is it sometimes all right to lie? How should we deal with this or that ethical dilemma? Some of these problems are inescapable, so the only question is whether we deal with them well or badly. Sadly, many people deal with dilemmas on the basis of emotional responses, tradition, or peer pressure rather than reasoned argument. As Bertrand Russell said, 'Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do.'"

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Despite the simplicity of the above entry, there are aspects that clearly illustrate the purpose behind Wittgenstein's philosophical method. It has been written before, "Don't Think! Look!" which takes on a different quality here. Wittgenstein repeatedly urged his reader to look at how phenomenon was applied rather than explain or judge based upon expectations. For instance, one should assess religion by examining the various practices of religion rather drawing judgements based on a pre-established criteria, such as the scientific probability of the religions claims. Similarly, one should prepared to change perspectives if evidence comes to substantial alter one's expectations. By applying such a presumption, one fails to see what the practice of religion may offer individuals in a particular form of life. 

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself

From "Rohit Sharma: The Constant Underachiever" by Anjali Doshi of Wisden India Cricket News.

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"In this post-IPL era in Indian cricket, where fame and money are so easily accessible even to players with limited talent and experience, there are very few who stay grounded and appreciate how illusory the hype, celebrity, success and riches are. 'Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself', as the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said.

A very interesting observation based on events of late, and with that I refer to the events surrounding Lance Armstrong. It seems that sporting success gives rise to self-deception. For many, one's belief in his or her talent propels the individual to strive. For others, there are outsiders who feed the sense of talent. In fact, it would be difficult to achieve the heights of sporting success without succumbing in some way to the hyperbolic narrative of sporting prowess. 

Leading Captialism Out of the Bottle

From "10 Practical Pointers for Capitalists from 10 Moral Philosophers" by Dov Seidman in Forbes Magazine

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Note: Dov Seidman makes an insightful observation about the changing role of business. His effective use of a line from The Godfather establishes an outdated perspective of a business' relationship with clients, the public, consumers, etc. Seidman presents a clear example of how language games do change over time, and this requires that individuals and institutions work to adopt new perspectives and emerging modes of operating.

"The most famous line from the Godfather – “It’s not personal, it’s only business” – no longer qualifies as sound management advice.  That’s because we can no longer sustain separate, amoral spheres for our professional and personal lives.  Everything is now personal as the world is now not just interdependent, it is morally interdependent.  So much so that I consider moral philosophy to be the “killer application” of the 21st Century.

"Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein understood its power, when in 1953 he wrote, “What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Today, we, metaphorically speaking, as flies who find ourselves in an ever shrinking bottle, are in an even greater need of leadership and direction on how to navigate the interdependent world.

"I believe both can reliably come from moral philosophy.   Moral philosophers examine areas that modern-day domain experts too often ignore:  human values, core beliefs and character."