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.In the sections that follow, I’ll briefly discuss and elaborate upon these two points.IIIn the first enumerated section of his paper, Bronzo6 lists his aims (p.88):to arrive at understandings of the context principle and the principle of compositionality respectively such that they are (1) compatible with one another, (2) compatible with the austere conception of nonsense, and thus (3) entail the falsity of the substantial conception of nonsense.Were he to have left off after (1) there is a chance that his therapy would succeed in achieving a kind of philosophical quietude (see Section IV below).However, having tied his resolution of these principles to privileging a conception of nonsense, he has made this philosophical investigation merely an initiation into another one from which an exit is not to be found.(Especially once he describes the substantial conception of nonsense as “false,” rather than nonsensical.) Thus the supposed philosophical quietude achieved—the result upon which the “philosophical superiority” of his reconciliation of them is made to rest—is only a liminality followed almost immediately by another state of philosophical perplexity: to borrow the Tractatus’s famous closing metaphor, it is an extending of the ladder, not a jettisoning of it.To reiterate: Bronzo’s establishment of coherent semantic principles might not lead to this perpetual state of philosophical perplexity were it not tied to a resolution of what nonsense in the Tractatus is, which, as he convincingly argues, is one of the key questions in the Tractatus wars that precede (and will most probably go on after) his essay.In essence, it is a proxy question for the more clearly philosophically problematic question of what the Tractatus means.There are several reasons why attributing a meaning to the Tractatus is a deeply problematic philosophical enterprise; chief among them is its dependence upon a mentalistic picture of “meaning,” that is to say one that ultimately requires one to hold that it is possible to know “what was in Wittgenstein’s mind” when he wrote that book (and that this can be determined by knowing what was in his mind when he wrote x, y, or z work, or made such and such remark marshaled as evidence, etc., etc.).7 And while it is natural for one philosophical question to lead to another, for Bronzo’s coherent principles to be philosophically superior to the mutually exclusive ones it contrasts against—using the idea of philosophical therapy as a model—any chain of philosophical conundra it initiates will have to actually terminate in quietude.But as the ongoing debate between resolutists and standard readers (in fact, the existence of this book!) suggests, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Tractatus interpretation.8Let me be clear, I am not advocating for some kind of dissolution of meaning here—I’m not saying, for instance, that anyone is justified in claiming that the Tractatus means whatever he wants it to mean.What I am saying is that trying to resolve what Wittgenstein intended for it to mean is unnecessary (and often an unhelpful distraction) in determining how to interface with it,9 and that, by hitching his conclusions to this task, Bronzo undercuts the ability to claim any philosophically therapeutic superiority for his analysis at all.By contrast, resolutism is at its best when freed from a narrow, textual conception of the Tractatus’s meaning; it suggests that the only necessary “meaning” we need to attach to it can be found in what we actually do “off of the ladder.”10IIIIn this section I will try to show that nothing philosophically superior is achieved even if we divorce the third of Bronzo’s aims from the first two.In fact, I suggest that there is nothing meaningful at all achieved by privileging austere nonsense over substantial nonsense absent the goal of privileging one reading of the Tractatus or another.Dissatisfaction with the substantial conception of nonsense is not surprising.By itself, substantial nonsense amounts to nothing; like any bit of language (if it were a bit of language), any bit of substantial nonsense matters for nothing if it is not “put into play” in the lived world.11 But my claim that it doesn’t amount to anything at all applies even if one tries to “put it into play”—if one takes up an ineffabalist position—precisely because it cannot be put into play.The idea that reference can be made to entities or conditions beyond our experience, but that they cannot fully enter into human discourse, is, frankly, bizarre.At most, ineffabalism is a delusion (though even this term may lend it too much psychological viability) that something beyond experience (as if that weren’t difficult enough to understand on its own) can be mutually tapped into by many people.12 At the least it is a wink and a nod, a “knowing” glance that individuals are sharing in something—for lack of a better word—magical [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]