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Philosophical Clarification, Its Possibility and Point

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Abstract

It is possible to pursue philosophy with a clarificatory end in mind. Doing philosophy in this mode neither reduces to simply engaging in therapy or theorizing. This paper defends the possibility of this distinctive kind of philosophical activity and gives an account of its product—non-theoretical insights—in an attempt to show that there exists a third, ‘live’ option for understanding what philosophy has to offer. It responds to criticisms leveled at elucidatory philosophy by defenders of extreme therapeutic readings and clearly demonstrates that in rejecting the latter one cannot assume Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy was theoretically based by default.

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Notes

  1. Kripke (1982) and Carruthers (1989, 1990) provide particularly clear examples of this tendency, but it is widespread.

  2. One obvious problem with ‘theory-based’ readings, that dominate the reception of Wittgenstein’s work in the analytic tradition, is that they overly restrict our interests by encouraging us to focus on just two periods of Wittgenstein’s work – and then to focus on only selected aspects of the work done in those periods (i.e. those that purportedly relate to the articulation and defense of one or other of these ‘theories of language’). This is why Moyal-Sharrock’s (2004) work is of such great importance; she emphasises the need to examine the work of the late, late Wittgenstein. When I argued against the need to identify a third Wittgenstein in an earlier paper (Hutto 2004) it was in the spirit of tracing certain constant themes of his thought, while noting changes across his development. That is I was (and am) keen to regard him as a thinker who was always seeking for clarification, and struggling to convey what that task involves. With that criterion in mind the headcount of Wittgensteins should come to just one. My initial thought on this was that if we reject ‘theory-based’ interpretations of his work there is no interesting basis for making the standard sharp divisions between the ‘early’ and the ‘late’ Wittgenstein. But in line with main proposal of this paper (and based on further discussions with Moyal-Sharrock) I now appreciate that we can mark out Wittgenstein offerings at different points in his career by focusing on their specific content without assuming that such offerings are theory-based. As Moyal-Sharrock has stressed to me, this is because the results of his elucidations (or attempts at such) differed in different periods. To understand Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy properly and to benefit from the full range of his insights on fundamental topics we need to extend our interests beyond the Philosophical Investigations to his last writings. These undoubtedly contain important new developments.

  3. I have raised concerns about the internal coherence of such readings and have argued against them in various other ways in earlier publications (Hutto 2003, 2006, 2007).

  4. Interestingly, it appears that even a founding father of resolute readings is partial to elucidatory interpretations. For instance, Conant has lately observed that “resolute readers will hold [that there exists] a genuine (if limited) continuity in the conception of the activity pursued in the two books … namely, the aspiration to practice philosophy in such a way that it does not issue in a doctrine or a theory, but rather in the practice of an activity” (2007, 68). As long as activity is read as ‘therapeutic’ activity, this might seem to be in tune with what is claimed by the New Wittgensteinians. But Conant goes on to note that even though Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical activity received different formulations during his early and late periods, his focus throughout his career was steadfastly on the end of philosophical clarification.

  5. Hutchinson remarks, for example, that “Hutto and McGinn could be fruitfully seen to be on the fringes of the elucidatory camp … [For although] they both show more sensitivity to the therapeutic nature of the work … they both, crucially, hold on to the thought that there must be something more” (Hutchinson 2007, 704).

  6. Thus Wittgenstein tells us “One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word ‘imagination’ is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question of the nature of imagination is as much about the word ‘imagination’ as my question is” (PI §370).

  7. For a fuller discussion of this point see Hutto 2003, 112-114, 120, ch. 5.

  8. Perhaps it is because I make such claims that Hutchinson acknowledges that “Hutto (2003) has argued for a delimited (one might say, less Rylean form of elucidatory reading” (2007, 698).

  9. The clarificatory conception of the end of philosophy became crystallized in the crucial observations of PI §122, those which regard achieving philosophical clarity as taking the form of ‘seeing connexions’. This idea is replanted and “transformed from a comment on anthropological hermeneutics into one on philosophical method” (Hacker 2001b, 75). And we see the prominent influence of these musings elsewhere too – for example, it is clear in the emphasis on description alone in contrast to the attempt to provide hypothetical explanations in PI §109. This famous injunction has its roots in the remark: “Here one can only describe” (GB §63 – see also PI §496).

  10. To capture this, Hacker stresses the need to understand that “ritual action is expressive rather than instrumental. Hence puzzling alien rites cannot be made intelligible by an empirical inquiry into their genesis, which might at best explain the false beliefs about the instrumentality of actions, but only by associating them with impulses familiar to us, such as kissing the picture of a loved one or striking an inanimate object in rage” (Hacker 2001b, 77).

  11. Hence “The meaning of this has nothing hypothetical about it, and as a result it does not depend on any historical hypothesis whatsoever” (Bouveresse 2008, 9).

  12. Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer applies perfectly well here: the “desire to find a causal explanation for what he is describing has simply made him blind to precisely those features that are … the most significant ones” (Bouveresse 2008, 6).

  13. That view is widely accepted. It is certainly true that Wittgenstein’s approach looks unsystematic. But it will only be considered so if our model of what it is to operate systematically is that of advancing and defending a theory by means of well-oiled argument. Wittgenstein’s recovery of elusive insights by giving each topic its own, specialized and complex treatment might look unsystematic if we compare one such treatment to that of another. But that is, of course, consistent with there being method to his approach in dealing with such cases even if he had no one-size-fits all template.

  14. Williamson, for example, seems inclined to think that all philosophical saying reduces to a kind of theorizing. He makes this evident while defending his views about what he believes is required for the resolution of philosophical problems (which he maintains requires straight solutions to be provided through sustained meta-logical graft). He writes: “Some philosophers under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, deny the relevance of formal semantic theories to vague natural languages … This attitude suggests a premature and slightly facile pessimism. No doubt formal semantics has not described any natural language with perfect accuracy; what has not been made plausible is that it provides no deep insights into natural language. In particular, it has not been made plausible that the main semantic effects of vagueness are not susceptible to systematic formal analysis. In any case, for present purposes the claim that there can be no systematic theory of vagueness, is just one more theory of vagueness, although – unless it is self-refuting – not a systematic one (2007, 37, emphasis mine).

  15. This remark is from Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. It derives from a personal email correspondence we had in discussing these issues during the preparation of this paper.

  16. Brandom goes on to note that this is, at best, a “template for arguing against metaphysical programs, rather than an argument as such” (2006, 223).

  17. If this is all there is to being a philosophical theory then the immediate (and legitimate) worry would be that without the appropriate training in theory-building philosophers would probably just be doing science badly.

  18. There is interesting work underway to examine this very problem. For example, the Arché centre at St. Andrews is currently running an AHRC funded project on Philosophical Methodology (2008-2012), led by Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen. Still, it is not yet obvious what the outcome will be.

  19. For a similar diagnosis, with direct reference to Wittgenstein, see Brandom 2006, 210.

  20. Indeed, Williamson, himself, is not adverse to philosophical clarification by means of the eradication of false or misleading pictures. For example, he writes: “appeals in epistemology to a metaphysical conception of analyticity tend to rely on a picture of analytic truths as imposing no genuine constraint on the world, in order to explain the supposed fact that knowing them poses no serious cognitive challenge. If that account could be made good, it would provide a useful sense for ‘insubstantial,’ which would refer to the pictured property, epistemological not in its nature but in its explanatory power. Substantial truths would be the ones that lacked this property. But the account cannot be made good. The metaphysical picture cannot be filled out so as to have the required explanatory power in epistemology. Thus ‘substantial’ and ‘insubstantial’ are not provided with useful senses. The negation of a picture is not itself a picture” (2007, 54).

  21. Brandom’s own version of analytic pragmatism gets its inspiration from Sellars and takes seriously the important, indeed seemingly fatal, challenges raised by Wittgenstein for traditional approaches in analytic philosophy.

  22. The ‘theories’ Brandom describes do not, however, appear to be explanatory in any clear sense – i.e. they do not advance hypotheses but only descriptively chart features underlying certain kinds of talk. If so the theory/description contrast looks in danger of collapse.

  23. It is easy to speculate that this way of thinking gains support from a more pervasive acceptance of scientism – one that has a venerable origin, having prevailed ever since Newton’s work was “taken as a paradigm not only in the developing sciences, but even in what we would now call the humanities … [This occurred because] to take Newton’s work as a paradigm for science was ipso facto to take it as a paradigm for knowledge as such” (Preston 2007, 136-7, see also Brandom 2006, 209).

  24. I confess to finding Hutchinson’s remark more than a little ironic given the reception that therapeutic readings get from the analytic mainstream. When it comes to assessing the value of Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy, the attitude seems to be roughly this: ‘If all Wittgenstein’s philosophy has to offer is therapy with a negative goal, so much the worse for Wittgenstein’s philosophy. And from this we can deduce, should Wittgenstein be right about what philosophy has to offer in general, i.e. if all philosophy has to offer is therapy with a negative goal, then so much the worse for philosophy. Thank God he was wrong. Back to theorizing’.

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Hutto, D.D. Philosophical Clarification, Its Possibility and Point. Philosophia 37, 629–652 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9196-2

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