L1.8 Lottie’s eighth lesson on concepts
On Wednesday morning, Hipparchus starts the lesson in a slightly different way to normal.
“Well, Lottie. We have now been talking about concepts for nearly a week and a half. We have three more lessons. What would you like to talk about? What is most puzzling you about concepts? How can I help?
Next week the topic will be cosmology and things will seem rather more straight forward. We will meet Sir Fred Hoyle with his cutting edge ‘steady state theory’ rather than the rather more historical figures of Russell and Frege! But let’s try to address your worries before we change topic.”
Lottie doesn’t immediately answer. It seems that sometimes, when one is confused, one is too confused to ask for help. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she does not know whether she is confused or not. She is confused about her confusion, or perhaps its lack.
“Well…” she begins. “I suppose that, despite your story about interpreting language from scratch, I’m not sure that that really answers my worry. Meaning, or concepts, or ‘the conceptual’ as you put it a bit pretentiously yesterday, all still seems a bit weird. pTravis seemed happy enough with the story of Davidson’s anthropologist – the Principle of Charity and all that – when I repeated it back to him. He compared using one’s own beliefs to make sense of the natives with holding a ruler up to his pipe to measure it. He seemed happy with that and said, for example, that there was no need to think of little millimetres as a bit like ants. I guess he was making fun of my worry about what or where thoughts or concepts are. But what you said yesterday about predicates just made it worse. How can I think about ‘the next person to visit the Potting Shed’ when, as you said, I don’t yet know who that is? How can I both think about, and not think about, someone at the same time?”
At times like this, Hipparchus rather regrets that he has never taken up the filthy habit of smoking a pipe – or even just pretending to smoke one as he suspects pTravis does – because it would give him something practical to do as he thinks.
“It is hard to know what will put you at your ease. I don’t have, for example, a theory of concepts. All I can do is remind you of things you know already. But let’s try.”
Singular thought as an example of how thought can make contact with the world
Suppose I say ‘Your football over there looks a little flat.’”
Lottie looks round, instantly worried. “No it isn’t!” She beams.
“It was just an example. But now we’re both looking at your football. Does it seem mysterious that we can both ‘have it in mind’?”
“Hmm. I suppose not. Well it’s very mysterious that we have minds at all. What are they? But given that we do, it doesn’t seem mysterious that I can have that thing there ‘in mind’ because I’m looking at it. ‘Having it in mind’ sounds a silly way to put it, if you don’t mind, because it’s just there. I’m simply paying attention to it.”
“Yes. Philosophers have found even that mysterious. Or rather, they’ve found ways to make it seem mysterious by imagining that our experience is like an iPad screen with the camera turned on. Suddenly that makes it seem that the image on the screen might not actually capture the world behind it. But let us not follow them down that rabbit hole if we can help it.
We are both now entertaining singular, or object-dependent, or demonstrative thoughts about your ball. In such thoughts, the ball itself plays a role. We register its presence. We can keep track of it and think of it as the same ball over time. So although, according to Evans, ‘the ball’ aspect of our whole thought – that conceptual element of the thought – is a Fregean sense we have, a way of thinking about that ball, still the ball itself helps make that possible. Do you follow?
Now I told you that Russell did not allow for this possibility because a singular thought about an actual object is vulnerable to things like illusions or hallucinations which would mean that we didn’t know what we were thinking. We’d be wrong about our own thoughts as well as about the world. But I have suggested that other philosophers such as Evans and John McDowell accept this – that is, they think that our minds are not always transparent to us – and suggest different ways to paraphrase what happens if one thinks one has a singular thought about what turns out to be a non-existent object. Anyway, you do not think that such thoughts are mysterious, because the football is actually there?”
“Nope. That’s all fine, Teach!”
“But not ‘the next visitor to the Potting Shed…’? One problem is that if we think about that thought as though it were a singular thought about a future happening – if such a thing is even conceivable – then we could not account for one form of falsehood: when there never is another visitor. We would be looking into the future and somehow seeing the visitor arrive which requires that some-such visitor does arrive. That is the quid pro quo of the difficulty of paraphrasing a failed singular thought. Whereas, we have no difficulty in construing a false prediction that there will be a visitor, when there isn’t. Russell’s Theory of Descriptions gives us a recipe.”
“Yes…” says Lottie, a little doubtfully.
“We face a kind of dilemma. It is possible to ease your worry about thought in the case that the thought simply puts us into contact with an actual happening. But that won’t permit falsehood.”
Wittgenstein on the harmony of thought and reality
Hipparchus reaches a book off one of his shelves an says: “Wittgenstein addresses this issue in the following paragraph:
§429. The agreement, the harmony, between thought and reality consists in this: that if I say falsely that something is red, then all the same, it is red that it isn’t. And in this: that if I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence “That is not red”, I do so by pointing to something that is red.”
For a moment it looks as though Lottie is trying to think how she can quickly dispatch her tutor. Death would be a kindness, surely. But he continues quickly reading out two more sections, a little later in the book.
“§444. One may have the feeling that in the sentence “I expect he is coming” one is using the words “he is coming” in a different sense from the one they have in the assertion “He is coming”. But if that were so, how could I say that my expectation had been fulfilled? If I wanted to explain the words “he” and “is coming”, say by means of ostensive explanations, the same explanations of these words would go for both sentences. But now one might ask: what does his coming look like? - The door opens, someone walks in, and so on. - What does my expecting him to come look like? - I walk up and down the room, look at the clock now and then, and so on. - But the one sequence of events has not the slightest similarity to the other! So how can one use the same words in describing them? - But then perhaps I say, as I walk up and down: “I expect he’ll come in.” - Now there is a similarity here. But of what kind?!
§445. It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.
“Let me try to summarise the idea here. Wittgenstein suggests that we should look at the descriptions we give both of expecting a visitor and in reporting their arrival. We use some of the very same words. So we individuate the fact and the mental state using related phrases. That’s the connection. And that connection also holds for falsehood. If I think falsely that something is red, I express my thought using that word or that concept. If I say that something is not red, I still use the word ‘red’ which I explain by pointing to red samples.
Creatures like us learn to ascribe to others but also ourselves thoughts whose description uses the same words as for describing worldly things. We ascribe the abstract calculus of thought, which pTravis – clever boy! – compared to a ruler, to ourselves. Don’t think of thought as difficult mental imagery. Don’t think of it as somehow seeing non-existent things. Look to the language. And then imagine that what an education enables is for youngsters like you to use this calculus to explain and predict others – to make rational sense of them – but also to self ascribe the very same kinds of state to yourself. You learn to think and to say that you expect the next visitor to the Potting Shed will be shorter than your distinguished tutor! And if they are, you know the phrase to report that fact, or the contrary fact if they are not.”
“But surely that just pushes the problem back a stage. We explain thoughts using language. But how does language connect to the world?”
“Well, I have already told you that story: Davidson’s anthropologist, washed up on a beach!”
Lottie wonders whether that really is the solution. “Who said this?”
“Wittgenstein!”