EN 0002 Bronzo on Context, Compositionality and Nonsense

# EN 0002

I promised way back in autumn of last year to comment on "Kripke's Frege". I hope I will do so, soon. In the meantime, however, something else came up.

A colleague of mine at the University of Granada did a work on the "New Wittgensteinians" and the relation between the so called principles of context and compositionality on one hand and the concepts of austere vs. substantial nonsense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, on the other. In his work my colleague relied heavily on the essay by Silver Bronzo quoted in the title of this commentary. I became curious; here is what I think about it:

http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2008/03/bronzo-contextcompnonsense-feb08.pdf

I will only deal here with one aspect of this article. What is really philosophically interesting in it, his proposal of disjunctivism as means to conciliate the two apparently incompatible principles, is only a vague promise; I'm looking forward to read  "Wittgenstein, Theories of Meaning, and Linguistic Disjunctivism" in the European Journal of Philosophy.

The article I am going to discuss here has several other problems I wont argue about: I have the strong impression, for example, that real life philosophers are charged severally with positions they don´t have or which at least don´t follow from the passages quoted, merely because these positions serve as points of contrast for the author's argument. I think here of some of the things said about some positions of Davidson, Dummett, Glock and maybe others. I might be wrong. But it would fit in with the general strategy of the article:

When we are introduced to the problems related to the principles of context and of compositionality, Bronzo remarks that "it would not be unnatural to assume" that these principles take on a respective form he calls contextualism and compositionalism; these "-isms" bear to each other necessarily the asymmetrical relation of being prior one to the other, and hence are incompatible. One must be either a fan of contextualism or of compositionalism, but nobody can be both.

The problem now seems to arise that Frege and Wittgenstein seem to commit such an atrocity as to be fans of both "-isms". Never mind that it takes Bronzo no more than one paragraph in each case to show that both "-isms" lead to paradoxical results. Throughout the article the reader is confronted with them, and sometimes it seems that even Bronzo does not always distinguish the principle clearly from its respective "-ism". 

Towards the end of the article Bronzo gives a hint of what he might mean by "not being unnatural" despite the paradoxical results that arise rather quickly in the case of "compositionalism": it is our "impulse to search for a reductive account of our linguistic capacity" (p. 24). I believe he is right about that. But there is more to it.

One major problem with analytic philosophy in general and how it deals with its own history in particular, as do, for example, Dummett or Peter Hacker even when they deal with the work of the "later Wittgenstein", is the insistence on philosophical truth being outside of time and space. If someone criticizes them for being anachronistic, they shoot back by saying that the other side is doing history of philosophy instead of philosophy. But the fundamental problem with this attitude is that if the truth of a statement or a system of statements depends upon some principle outside this system - as it must if it is to be independent of time and space, for language is a spaciotemporal phenomenon - it depends on some a priori truth that must be assumed. Science probably must work with models in order to explain reality. But philosophy must not do so, because philosophy is transcendental and it can assume nothing. Philosophy based on models of reality is either science in disguise or else a hoax.

It seems to me that Silver Bronzo does not see this to be the fundamental problem with the drive for both contextualism and compositionalism, as he defines these "-isms", because he has fallen pray to the same drive of a scientific explanation for what is a philosophical problem that can have no scientific explanation (because it is not about facts).