Buckley’s Mix

Analytic Philosophy: A Wittgenstinian Joke

Posted January 24, 2009, 19:01 ET Comments Off

When I talk to natural lawyers, I feel like a man who has been thrown up on a strange beach, where he understands only one in three words spoken to him. One reason for this is that, as an undergraduate, I studied analytic philosophy–the ordinary language philosophy that dominated the philosophy world 40 years ago.

Since then analytic philosophy has come into ridicule, for its want of concern for “real world” problems. When you see what modern philosophers have to say about such problems, that may be no bad thing. But of that later…

When analytic philosophy was mocked, few things attracted more ridicule that Wittgenstein’s claim that it is meaningless for a person to say that he knows what he is thinking. I can say “I am thinking about baseball,” but not “I know that I am thinking about baseball.”

Wittgenstein thought that this could be understood only as a joke, and that seems right. Otherwise we could take it to a higher level, and say “I know that I know that I am thinking about baseball”—and that is a joke.

This seems paradoxical, because of the two senses in which a person has knowledge of anything. The first sense is as the product of rational deliberation, and that doesn’t describe how we think or feel about something–we just think or feel.

Second, self-knowledge might be understood in an evidentiary sense. A person knows what he is thinking in the sense that he is the best witness thereof. We might say “I think John is thinking about baseball but I’m not sure—let’s ask him.” People obviously know what they are thinking in this sense. Similarly, if a doctor wants to know whether a patient is in pain, what he’ll do is ask him. Even if people sometimes lie, even if their blushes might betray them, they are ordinarily the best witnesses of what they are thinking or feeling.

So the paradox disappears.

Is that a useless exercise? Not if it produces a cast of mind that instinctively rejects cant.

Category: jokes

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