rlj (Nicole),

This is question appropriate for Philosophy Classes about traditional and Analytic
philosophies. eg., Quine:
". Although critical of its fundamental doctrines [learned from Carnap of the Vienna
Circle], Quine remained true to the underlying spirit of Logical Positivism. He shared the
commitment to empiricism and to the belief that philosophy should be pursued as part of
Science.'

There Is value in a contrast and comparison of Wittgenstein and Quine. Formost are the
contrasts.
"Since the sixties, Wittgenstein scholarship and interet in his work have flourished. But
the influence of Wittgenstein's thought on the mainstream of analytical philosophy has
waned. This is due partly to the dominance of Quine's scientific conception of philosophy
in the United States, and partly to the fact that the conception of language presented in
the Investigations has lost out to the Tractarian theories of meaning [Wittgenstein's earlier
ideas in the Tractatus, later rejected by him RP] complemented by Chompskian [Rationalist
RP] linguistics." (A Wittgenstein Dictionary by Hans-Johann Glock, p. 29)

Wittgenstein was totally against Frege's equating logic and mathematics as well as Frege's
acknowledged Platonism. The connection between traditional philosophy and modern
analytic philosophy is Frege's Platonism. That Platonism is like a recessive gene which
may or may not show up in members of the so-called Analytic school. It did show up in
Quine. Russell made explicit the call to make Philosophy 'scientific':

<<Ò . . . . the philosophers who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy . . .
. . have been rewarded by the discovery that many questions formerly obscured by the fog
of metaphysics, can be answered with precision, and by objective which introduce nothing
of the philosopherÕs temperament except the desire to understand. . . . . . . a method has
been discovered by which, as in science, we can make successive approximations to the
truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, of what has
gone before. (A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, pp. 835-6) >>

The connection historically between Wittgenstein and Quine as one exemplar of Analytic
philosophy of the 20th century is of course Gottleib Frege. The Mathematician and
philosopher of language, Michael Dummett, rightly considers Frege the founder of the
Analytical school. [see Origins of Analytic Philosophy] Dummett also credits Frege with
introducing the "linguistic turn" but developing an ambivalent attitude to it later on. [see
Ch. 2 pp. 4-14] If we see Frege a the Father of the Analytic Movement, we can understand
why those classified as Analytic philosophers often have little in common due to the
ambiguities in Frege.

"Frege's influence was such that many of the heirs of Husserl and Russell partisans of
phenomenology on the one hand and adherents of logical empiricism on the other, could
rightly claim in the person of Frege an ancestor through whom they were linked (although
sometimes they denied it) in a single line of sescent. For they were all Kantian critics of
Kant." (A History of Philosoophy in the Twentieth Century by Christian Delacampagne, p.
19)

Quine knew Carnap and Carnap was an influence on the young Quine:

"Attracted by the neutral monism that Rusell, following in the tradition of Mach and James,
had argued for in Our Knowledge of the External W. Carnap meant to carry out a project
that Russell envisaged only as a theoretical possibility, namely (in Quine's words) "The
derivation of our scienctific explanaation of the physical world on the basis of sensory
experience, by logical construction." (ibid., p. 99)

The immediate influences on Quine as a student at were one of his teachers, C. I. (Clarence
Irving) Lewis---a colleague of John Dewey---and Alfred North Whitehead, the
mathematician and Platonist, who worked with Bertrand Russell on the mathematized
Logical Symbolism in the three volume Principia Matematica.

"Together they made Harvard the first institution where the study of philosophy was
chiefly concerned with logic and the theory of science---a model that was gradually to be
imiated aafter the war by the majjority of American universities.
It was under Lewis and Whitehead, moreover, that the young W. V. (Willard Van Orman)
Quine (b. 1908) pursued his graduate studies, subsequently joining the faculty at Harvard
himself." (ibid. p.121)

I think the genealogy from Frege and Russell (2 of the original 3 voices of Linguistic
Analysis. What about the relation of Quine to the 3rd, Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote
Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus in 1918---a work admired even by Carnap---perhaps for
the wrong reasons. Since Wittgenstein himself rejected his first work after 1929 and
methodically went in a very different direction, I find no profit for myself doing more than I
have in a comparison of Quine and Wittgenstein. Someone with a favorable attitude to
Quine and Analytical philosophy might have an answer to your original queston. I don't.

Instead I would like to present some notes I made from an Afterword by the editor, D. Z.
Phillips of a book by Rush Rhees, a friend and student of Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's 'On
Ceertainty': There---Like Our Life.

For those who reject any kind of religious foundationalism, the link between our
experiences and the world is found in the nature of our constitution as human beings.
Some find the direct causal connection they seek between experience and the world in an
incorrigible sense experience. [as in Tractatus RP]
If no such grounds can be found, if we take Wittgenstein at his word when he says that our
language-games are unpredictable, does that mean that we do not care whether they are
grounded in reality or not? Can we say or do what we like? Surely not. Is it not what we
say governed by rules, by a logic which determines what can be said? But, once again, it
will be said, we need more than words. So we are led to enquire into the relation not only
of logic to language, but the relation of language to reality. These questions become
central in philosophy. They are WittgensteinÕs concerns from first to last.
Rhees argues that Wittgenstein addresses these issues by asking the following question:
what does it mean to say something? (WittgensteinÕs On Certainty, Rush Rhees, ed. D.Z.
Phillips, p. 135

Rhees tells us that around 1930, Wittgenstein began to feel dissatisfied with the way
philosophers talked about logical possibility and impossibility, and the implication that
logic determines what can and cannot be said. He is still wrestling with that
dissatisfaction in On Certainty. Where he is denying that there is a sharp distinction
between logical and empirical propositions, and where his is asking whether logic can be
described.

For a short period after the Tractatus, however, Wittgenstein entertained a very
different conception of logic. He thought that a certain kind of logical analysis could show
how language is grounded in the world. The analysis would culminate in immediately
experienced sense-dta whose sense is simply ÔgivenÕ. Thus an incorrigible link would
have been established between our experience and the world. In his later work,
Wittgenstein is bringing out the logical incoherence of a self-referential sign, whether that
sign is found in elementary propositions or primary data. He called tihis a magical view of
signs; the view that the meaning of a sign resides in the datum itself, in a mark, sound or
image. This is to be contrasted with a logical view of signs; the view that a sign has its
sense in the context in which it is used. Wittgenstein, Rhees argues, is not searching for
primary ÔultimatesÕ, he is not looking for anything like RussellÕs ultimate furniture of the
world, or QuineÕs ontology." (ibid. p.136)

Logical positivism is seen as another attempt to ground our experience in the world. That
is why the Positivists argued that such a ground is guaranteed in that they claimed to be
'pure observation' or 'pure seeing'. In a somewhat similar way, Moore worried about what
it means to say 'That's a tree'. He wanted to know what the 'that' refers to. In the
Investigations Wittgenstein shows the dream of 'pure observation' or 'pure seeing', as
conceived by the Positivists, is an empty one. He gains by addressing the context where it
might bethought that the Positivists conception has an obvious application, namely, seeing
colors.

. . . .Wittgenstein shows, we do not learn what 'red' is simply by looing at a red patch.
The misconception is in thinking that the meaning of 'red' is simply 'given' in a way that
cannnot be misunderstood. What fixes our concept of colour is the way we react to
colours, reactions which show an agreement IN our judgements. This not an agreement
we made with each other, or arrived at, but one that is shown in the judging itself.

It is tempting to thing that were this agreement in our judgements not present, one
person might say, 'This flower is red', while another might say of the same flower, 'This
flower is blue'. But, as Wittgenstein points out, whatever they are saying, they are not
using our notions of 'red' and 'blue'. These concepts are not arrived at by consensus. It is
not that every individual way the flower as some colour or other, and then the majority
perception prevailed. We have only to ask whatcolour the individual say. Without
agreement in our judgements, the individual would have no conception of colour.
Wittgenstein says: 'There is such a thing as colour-blindness and there aare ways of
establishing it. There is in general complete agreement in the judgements of colour made
by those who have been diaagnosed normal. This characterizes the concept of a
judgement of colour' (Investigations II: xi, p. 227). (ibid. p.137).

Wittgenstein explores the implications of recognizing that there is no primary datum of
ÒseeingÓ in Part One of the Investigations, but he does no especially in Part Two xi where
he discusses what he calls Ôseeing an aspectÕ. Given the array of examples Wittgenstein
provides, it is easy to forget the logical purpose, namely, to show how the PositivistsÕ
conception of pure ÔseeingÕ or Ôpure observation' cannot be used as the primary link
between ourselves and the world. Rhees expresses the logical purpose as follows:Õ ÔIf the
idea of ÒseeingÓ is not a unitary or simple as analysis in terms of sense data suggests---if
the concept of seeing itself stands in need of conceptual analysis---it does not have the
unquestioned character that seems to qualify it as the basis of all analysisÕ (p.8). Behind
this is the longer purpose of showing that nothing unitary or simple is going to be the
basis of Ôwhat is to be seenÕ in our world. (ibid. 138)

By Ôseeing an aspectÕ Wittgenstein means Ôseeing something as something. . . . . .But
WittgensteinÕs discussion of Ôseeing an aspectÕ is meant to show how Ôwhat it is to see
somethingÓ is a far more heterogeneous notion that a concentration on our agreement in
colour-judgements would suggest. . . . . .We would make little progress in understanding
Ôwhat it is to see something, and, therefore, in understanding our world, if we gave no
consideration to Ôseeing an aspect. (ibid., p138)

PARR



--- In Wittgentein-Language_Mathematics_and_Science@yahoogroups.com,
"reverendlovejoy75" <reverendlovejoy75@...> wrote:

>
> hola forum members:
>
> hope my new membership will encourage some needed discussions in this
> very interesting group. currently no pressing questions concerning
> language-mathematics-and science, but will continue thinking...
>
> here's something: if quine posits no distinction between the analytical-
> synthetic divide in terms of language's logic; what ramifications
> evolve from this assumption concerning the world of metaphysics?
>
> that's all..
> rlj
>