Philosophical Investigation: eclectic, personal remarks

36. Und wir tun hier, was wir in tausend ähnlichen Fällen tun: Weil wir nicht eine körperliche Handlung angeben können, die wir das Zeigen auf die Form (im Gegensatz z. B. zur Farbe) nennen, so sagen wir, es entspreche diesen Worten eine geistige Tätigkeit.
     Wo unsere Sprache uns einen Körper vermuten lässt, und kein Körper ist, dort, möchten wir sagen, sei ein Geist.
      [Rechtschreibung leicht verändert]

36. And we do here what we do in a host of similar cases: because we cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the shape (as opposed to the colour, for example), we say that a mental, spiritual activity corresponds to these words.
     Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.
      [Translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, quoted from Wittgenstein, L.; Philosophical Investigations; The German text, with an English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; Revised 4th edition by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2009]

36. Y hacemos aquí lo que hacemos en miles de casos similares: Puesto que no podemos indicar una acción corporal que llamemos señalar la forma (en contraposición, por ejemplo, al color), decimos que corresponde a estas palabras una actividad espiritual.
     Donde nuestro lenguaje hace presumir un cuerpo y no hay un cuerpo, allí, quisiéramos decir, hay un espíritu.
   [Traducción de Alfonso García Suárez y Ulises Moulines]

(I will continue to comment in English, for convenience. I hope this isn't a problem)

I believe that it was this section that made me a wittgensteinian - probably for all the wrong reasons. If for the wrong reasons, then I must thank my luck.

I've been participating in philosophical small talk at a place called https://www.facebook.com/CafedieGalerie

To structure our talks a bit, we more or less tried to follow the book Think by Simon Blackburn. We didn't really advance a lot and didn't quite stick to the book.

While rereading it, I found a curious discussion of Saint Anselmo's and Descartes' Ontological Argument, in which Blackburn says that the real problem is the difficulty to compare the properties of imagined entities with real, not only imagined entities.

But the real difficulty for the argument is of course the one Kant says, followed up by Frege (and not, as Blackburn maintains, shown by quantification): What the fool gets by hearing about the most perfect being is the concept of such a being. But there is no way to conclude from there that there is an entity falling under such concept.

I can not imagine any way to get around this problem. So everything else strikes me only as a distraction from the main point. It´s hard to believe Blackburn shouldn't have seen that. What could be his point here?

New Start: What I'm up to.

I have not been able to make up my mind as to how to go on with this blog. I have not been able to keep up with a lot of things and I don´t foresee that this will change soon.

But I want to make a statement that I will be able to find later and from which I might be able to continue eventually. It goes something like this:

I am dedicated, as far as I am, to the exploration of Wittgenstein's philosophy and to the genesis of modern logic and semantics at the end of XIX and start of XX. All of this, because I live under the impression that it was there that we missed opportunities and because Wittgenstein is still the best guide to discover them - there are of course many other thinkers who see this similarly in one way or another, Hans Sluga, the "new wittgensteinians", "neofregeans", Jaakko Hintikka and many other bright thinkers close to his ideas, or Robert B. Brandom, to mention just a few.

So I hope, eventually my work through other means (my doctoral research at http://www.ugr.es/; my work as secretary of redaction at https://disputatio.eu/, occasional participation in congresses, conferences, workshops, talks, etc. mainly in Mexico) will spill over here and with time get feed back from my readers here.

So I do not promise any regularity, for the time being.

But I hope I will be able to offer some item of some interest on some occasions.

Your commentaries will always be welcome and appreciated.

Yours truly
K.

EN 006 Kripke's Frege: The "Frege Principle" (continuation)

The "Frege Principle" vs. principle of context

I promised myself that, if I can't publish every day a few lines, at least I will work every day a bit on my next message. But I can´t even keep that promise to myself. I apologize for being so unreliable...

Since it is so important, I will start out by stating the principle, that Kripke largely ignores, in Frege's own words. For translations to English I will largely rely on the translation by Black and Geach, in spite of my quarrels with some particular aspects of that translation, because most commentators use it, in particular in the present case Kripke. The passage I need now, however, has not been translated by Black and Geach, so I will use the translation by Michael Beaney. The passages appear all in Grundlagen der Arithmetik or The Foundations of Arithmetic from 1884:

In this investigation I have adhered to the following fundamental principles:

There must be a sharp separation of the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective;

The meaning of a word must be asked for in the context of a proposition, not in isolation;

 The distinction between concept and object must be kept in mind.

(the emphasis is mine).

The second principle will be shown to be at work in the way Frege pretends to explain how we are given numbers in spite of the fact that we can have no intuition of them.

We'll see that the next time - for now I just ran out of time.

 

 

EN 005 Kripke's Frege: The "Frege Principle"

# EN 005
Kripke's Frege:

Once more I would like to reiterate the purpose of this particular thread of commentaries. I do not wish to maintain that what Kripke says is wrong, or that his observations lack worth, but I would like to draw attention to some of shortcomings of the direction in which he takes his inquiry.

I certainly know of some articles favorable and unfavorable to Kripke's proposal and it is clear that I am acquainted with only a tiny fraction of what has been written about it. So with few exceptons I will essentially ignore the literature dealing with "Kripke's Frege". What I pretend to do here is pick out a few topics that are important for understand the logic and philosophy of language of Frege and see how well Kripke's treatment of it allows the topic to still fit into Frege's general view of things.

One main hypothesis (against e.g. Dummett) in Kripke's exegetical remarks is that Frege's treatment of indirect discourse compels him to accept an infinite hierarchy of indirect senses. I will skip this point, at least for the moment, as this would be a consequence Frege himself clearly did not draw in his writings and hence is beyond the purpose of these observations.

One item which is well within our topic, however, and which stands out in Kripke's account is, what is frequently called─following Davidson, I believe─the "Frege Principle":

Krikpe attributes to Frege adherence to the following principles:

The first [principle] is that the referent of a whole is a function of (or is determined by) the
referents of its parts. 

The second principle analogously replaces “reference” by “sense”. (Kripke 2011, 269)

And he adds: "What these principles mean is that if in any piece of language one replaces some significant part by one with the same referent (sense), the referent (sense) of the whole is unchanged." (Kripke 2011, 269/70). Then he introduces─in the words of Dummett (1973)─a "reverse principle" to the two principles just mentioned [references for this thread are summarized in a separate post without number]:

The sense of a complex is compounded out of the senses of its constituents. (Dummett, 1973,
p. 152; original emphasis) [Quoted as per Kripke (2011, 270)]

There is another famous principle that stands out in Frege and which the logician from Wismar states himself in prominent places in Grundlagen der Arithmetik, though never again explicitly afterwards, a fact that has led to some controversy as to whether Frege adhered to it after introducing the distinction between sense and reference (or rather meaning) in his original doctrine about judgeable contents. The principle I refer to is the "Context Principle". Kripke is largely mum on this other principle.

But since I believe that it is impossible to reach a correct understanding of Frege's treatment of compositionality while ignoring the importance of contextuality, we will have to view Kripke's discussion of the topic largely under the light of an aspect which he largely ignores or deals with lightly.

References for "Kripke's Frege"

References for the thread "Kripke's Frege"

This list of references will grow as my use of references does. I hope, though, it stays on top of the entire thread under this title. I'll try to keep it in alphabetical order - I do not promise that it will have a uniform layout - I'll rather copy the references from wherever I take them the same way they appear there.

* * * * *

• Dummett, M. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.
• Frege, Gottlob (1952) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege; Max Black y Peter Geach tr.; New York: Philosophical Library
• Frege, Gottlob (1997) The Frege Reader; Ed. Michael Beany. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell
• Krikpe, S. A. (2008) "Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference: Some exegetical notes". Theoria Volume 74, Issue 3 September 2008 Pages 181–218. Republished in 
• Kripke, S. A. (2011) Philosophical Troubles. Oxford: University Press, p. 254-291

Personal notes for later:
I'll put here some notes as reminders for my later use: 

Tarski-type truth definition relies on context independent compositionality (See Hintikka, etc.)

Does Kripke's account of compositionality (Frege's principle) amount to en Inside-Out Principle? Did Frege stick to it? (requires semantic context independence).

Anuncio general - general notice - allgemeiner Hinweis

Para que sea más fácil seguir los diversos hilos de discusión, de aquí en adelante las contribuciones en español serán publicadas aquí:

http://wittgensteinencastellano.blogspot.mx/

Postings in English will continue to appear here.

Deutsche Mitteilungen werden in Zukunft in einem neuen Blog unter dem Titel "Wittgenstein&ianismus" veröffentlicht.

Ich hoffe dies erleichtert die Lektüre.