Paul Horwich’s essay “Was Wittgenstein Right?” has just appeared in The Stone. It is a disappointingly light piece from a philosopher whose byline promises a good deal more.
First, it contains a “diagnosis” of why many professional philosophers think poorly of Wittgenstein:
Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless?
There isn’t much merit in this accusation. Most analytic philosophers reject Wittgenstein because his doctrines were fashioned in opposition to the sorts of views they hold. Nor is their attitude some kind of automatic defensive reflex: most of them were taught about Wittgenstein and then went on to take up views that he would have mocked and derided. Their views may or may not be “confused and pointless” by Wittgenstein’s lights, but they were taken up in full knowledge of Wittgenstein’s objections. What does this say about Wittgenstein’s posthumous powers of persuasion?
Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.
Horwich’s example is truth. Analytic philosophers treat of truth as if it were a definable concept, he says, but actually “the concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to serve as a device of generalization.”
It enables us to say such things as “Einstein’s last words were true,” and not be stuck with “If Einstein’s last words were that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and if his last words were that nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons should be banned; … and so on.”
The irony is that Horwich is actually indulging in a little analytic cleverness here. For first he asserts the disappearance theory of truth: “the attribution of truth to a statement is obviously equivalent to the statement itself — for example, “It’s true that E=mc2” is equivalent to “E=mc2”. And then he offers an analysis of “Einstein’s last words were true” that seemingly accords quite well with Russell’s Theory of Definite Descriptions. For here is how he apparently reads the target sentence: “There is a unique proposition p such that p was expressed by Einstein’s last words, and p is true.”
Horwich’s trickiness consists in alluding to the difficulty of eliminating ‘true’ from this last explication in any straightforward way. For if you say ““There is a unique proposition p such that p was expressed by Einstein’s last words, and p” (thus eliminating the phrase ‘is true’), then you commit the sin of referring to p and asserting it in the same sentence.
So here is what is going on. Horwich first uses very fancy theory—the kind that Wittgenstein would have scorned—to show that the disappearance theory of truth (which he endorses) cannot explicate the utterance, “Einstein’s last words were true.” And then he says that this vindicates a theory he attributes to Wittgenstein: that truth is a “device of generalization.”
Does this strike anybody other than me as too tricky by half?
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