Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in honour of Rush Rhees (1905–89) PDF
Preview Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in honour of Rush Rhees (1905–89)
WITTGENSTEIN: ATTENTION TO PARTICULARS Rush Rhees (photograph by Michael Nedo) Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars Essays in honour of Rush Rhees (1905-89) Edited by D. Z. PHILLIPS and PETER WINCH Palgrave Macmillan UK ISBN 978-1-349-11199-2 ISBN 978-1-349-11197-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11197-8 ©D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-51237-1 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London Printed in Great Britain ISBN 978-0-312-03499-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wittgenstein: attention to particulars: essays in honour of Rush Rhees/edited by D.Z. Phillips and Peter Winch. p. em. "Rush Rhees, main publications": p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03499-3 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 2. Rhees, Rush. I. Rhees, Rush. II. Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) III. Winch, Peter. B3376.W564W557 1990 192-dc20 89-34718 CIP Contents Rush Rhees frontispiece Notes on the Contributors vii Introduction: Attention to Particulars 1 D. Z. Phillips 1 Rules: Looking in the Right Place 12 Cora Diamond 2 Language Game (2) 35 Norman Malcolm 3 Lusus Naturae 45. R. F. Holland 4 Anderson on Generality 61 H. 0. Mounce 5 Commitment to Persons 74 David Cockburn 6 'The Kind of Certainty is the Kind of Language Game' 92 Lars Hertzberg 7 Moral Judgement and Deception 112 ilham Dilman 8 The Personal in Ethics 124 Raimond Gaita 9 'He's to Blame!' 151 Peter Winch vi Contents 10 How Lucky Can You Get? 165 D. Z. Phillips 11 Learning to Theologise 194 Paul L. Holmer Rush Rhees: Main Publications 201 Index 203 Notes on the Contributors Cora Diamond Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia Norman Malcolm Visiting Professor, King's College, London; formerly Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philo- sophy, Cornell University H. 0. Mounce Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University Col- lege of Swansea Lars Hertzberg Professor of Philosophy, Abo Academy, Finland David Cockburn Lecturer in Philosophy, St David's University College, Lampeter ilham Oilman Professor of Philosophy, University College of Swansea Peter Winch Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign; formerly Professor of Philosophy, King's College, London Raimond Gaita Lecturer in Philosophy, King's College, London D. Z. Phillips Professor of Philosophy, University College of Swansea Paul L. Holmer formerly Noah Porter Professor of Philosophi- cal Theology, Yale Divinity School R. F. Holland formerly Professor of Philosophy, University of Leeds vii Introduction: Attention to Particulars D. Z. Phillips It is well known that Ludwig Wittgenstein thought the hold of many philosophical problems on us to be due to deep prejudices about the ways words have meaning in our commerce with each other. These prejudices have become enshrined in various theories of meaning. What we will not do, Wittgenstein tells us, is pay attention to particulars: to the particular ways in which words are interwoven in the various contexts of human life. Every student of twentieth-century philosophy will have been told these facts about Wittgenstein. As Cora Diamond points out in her paper 'Rules: Looking in the Right Place', the difficulty is to put Wittgen- stein' s observations into practice when we philosophise. It is this difficulty, to a large extent, which accounts for the hold of philo- sophical problems on us, and which makes them the kind of problems they are. Even philosophers who think they are expounding Wittgenstein sympathetically fall into the temptation of changing his profoundly anti-theoretical observations about language into theories concern- ing concepts and their meaning. These new theories are supposed to compete with the metaphysical theories Wittgenstein was criti- cising. They are said to give rise to a number of highly general, theoretical questions. For example: could a tribe have the same concept of pain or fear as we do, even though they do not speak of pain or fear as we do, and even though pain and fear do not occupy the same position in their lives that they do in ours? Is a regularity in agreement, where human reactions are concerned, only pragmatically necessary for the use of a concept, such that one could speak of the same concept being present without such agreement? Is linguistic commerce with others a necessary 1 2 Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars condition for following a rule, or could a rule be followed without such commerce? Cora Diamond argues that it is a mistake to think that these questions mean anything. Once we make that assumption, we shall naturally assume that they must be answered affirmatively or negatively. If we pay attention to the position actually occupied in our lives by the words which occasion our puzzles, then, instead of answering these general questions, we shall be freed of the urge to ask them. To isolate words from the position they occupy in our lives is to isolate them from their meaning. This is what Rush Rhees, in his well-known paper 'Wittgenstein's Builders', thought had happened in Wittgenstein' s example of the builders in his Philo sophical Investigations. Wittgenstein suggests that a few words, given as commands on a building site, could constitute the whole language of a tribe. What worries Rhees is not that this language has such a limited vocabulary. What worries him is that the orders on the site seem to be learned as signals which cannot be used in any other way. The signals do not seem to be related to the rest of the builders' lives. But it is in the context of such relations that we come to see what speaking, saying something, amounts to. Cut off from any position in human life, Rhees argues, the isolated words on the building site would not amount to the speaking of a language. These issues are the concern of Norman Malcolm in his paper 'Language Game (2)', which is a response to Rhees' 'Wittgenstein' s Builders'. He agrees that Wittgenstein does not provide an explicit account of the connections between the words used on the site and the rest of the builders' lives, but argues that there is enough in the example's background to show what such connections might amount to. The connections between the builders' words and their rudimentary behaviour show how the same words could have different functions on the site. There would also be connec- tions between these functions and the lives of the builders in a wider context. What emerges is a picture of a simple people lead- ing a simple life, for which, Malcolm argues, nothing like full- blown conversation is necessary. Whether one sides with Malcolm or Rhees on this issue, both agree that the weight which can be given to the claim that the builders' words could constitute the whole language of a people depends on the position these words occupy in their lives. The issue is not a general or abstract one. Attention to particulars is called for.
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