Wittgenstein

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: , ,
North Sea

Essentialism and travelling concepts (continued)

A question that arises then is: what determines what are possible travelling concepts? One observation concerns the role played by `facts of nature’. These provide limits, by do not force a particular set of concepts on us, they determine a space of possibilities, different sets of concepts that we can employ practically. Now what is interesting to note is that, on the one hand, these limits set by nature are a given: reality (nature) is what it is, but that, on the other hand, we can imagine them to be different (think: science fiction) but not in a completely unlimited way. So there is a complex dynamics between what is the case and what we can think differently, and that is a dynamics that itself changes also.

That might suggest a very open space of speculative possibilities and possibilities to speculate, but as far as Wittgenstein is concerned there is third factor that plays a key role and that limits what makes sense to do with and in that space. It is the matter of `having a point’. A language game or practice needs to have practical value, and that applies both to the ones that we have as well as to the ones we can imagine. Now practical value itself is a very diverse concept. However, it does restrict what makes senses to do in this space of imaginative possibilities. Pure imaginability is not enough: any practice, be it factual or imaginable, need to have practical value, practical meaning for us to be a practice to begin with.

That might suggest a very open space of speculative possibilities and possibilities to speculate, but as far as Wittgenstein is concerned there is third factor that plays a key role and that limits what makes sense to do with and in that space. It is the matter of `having a point’. A language game or practice needs to have practical value, and that applies both to the ones that we have as well as to the ones we can imagine. Now practical value itself is a very diverse concept. However, it does restrict what makes senses to do in this space of imaginative possibilities. Pure imaginability is not enough: any practice, be it factual or imaginable, need to have practical value, practical meaning for us to be a practice to begin with.

To what extent Wittgenstein’s position here manages to avoid essentialism is I guess a moot point. It seems that Wittgenstein would consider that not a very interesting question, and that he is much more interested in how the space of possible practices is constituted and how it can change. The observation that such a plurality of such spaces exists, and that each of them changes over time, is what ultimately supports Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 20/07/2023

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
jc herman pottery

Essentialism and travelling concepts

A central question regarding Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imaginative capabilities (most prominently in in Philosophical Investigations, II xii, 365: “… we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes”) is whether, and if so how, he is still able to steer clear from the ‘craving for generality’ that he thinks is the main source of the wrong way of doing philosophy. It is clear that Wittgenstein thinks philosophical analysis differs from a scientific investigation by not being bound by the facts (in a broad sense, i.e., not just the facts about our actual practices of using a concept, but als facts of a historical or socio-cultural nature, i.e., facts about how we used the concept in the past or facts about the different ways in which others use it). But then the question is how a philosopher who makes free use of their imaginative capabilities with regard to ways concepts can be used can stay clear from essentialism?

That we are able to imagine different practices than we have is obvious, and it is equally obvious that our imaginative capabilities are a crucial factor in almost everything that we do. Imagination is not just key to literature and other aesthetic practices, it also plays a central rol in science, and is an essential ingredients of our everyday lives: planning and decision making depend on it. The question then is this: do the limits of our imaginative capabilities with regard to how a concept can be used coincide with what we would like to call the ‘essence’ of that concept? If the answer is positive, then it seems that Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imagination lands him in exactly the position that he wants to avoid.

At this juncture the crucial observation, I think, is this, that our imagination itself is a moving target in the sense that it, too, is determined by historical, social, cultural, … factors. If that is correct, then philosophical analysis in Wittgenstein’s sense, in which imagination plays a key role, does indeed occupy a position that differs both from that of scientific inquiry, which is factual in nature, and from that of traditional philosophical analysis, which aims at uncovering essences.

This is the difference between an investigation into ‘What is X?’ (factual, as in science, or essentialistic, as in traditional philosophy) and an investigation into ‘What is X-for-us?’: the concepts that a Wittgensteinian philosophy deals with are ‘travelling concepts’ and its method, too, has a ‘travelling’ dimension.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 19/07/2023

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Martin Stokhof Various, Wittgenstein Tags:
Beijing

Novelty (1): the conundrum

The aspect of the phenomenon of novelty that continues to puzzle me, is this: How does a new meaning occur to the creating individual? And how is it recognised as meaning by others? The social constitution of individuals that form a community in which meaning is constituted by shared rules for use, strictly speaking leaves no room for there to be a new meaning, a new way of use. After all, what counts as use is determined by the spatio-temporally extended behaviour of the community. Outside that, there is no such thing as meaning, no such thing as use that constitutes meaning.

It seems that the emphasis on social constitution forces Wittgenstein to resort to some ‘von Münchhausen trickery’. And note the same problem arises with the question how a group of individuals establishes itself as a rule-following community: the construction of the relevant concepts as being determined by such a community does not answer how such a community comes into existence in the first place. (At the individual level this is the problem of the solitary cave dweller.)

A similar tension, by the way, can be discerned with regard to the normativity of rule-following. Wittgenstein’s private language argument aims to show that the concept of normative self-determination does not make sense: no individual by themselves is able to constrain their behaviour in a normative way. (Cf., again, the problem of the cave dweller.) The kind of normative determination that comes with rule-following can be established only at the level of the interaction between an individual and a community of which they are part. So far, so good, one could say. But how do such communities come into existence? (The appeal to other, larger communities obviously does not help: that’s turtles all the way down …)

Thus the bootstrapping issue is this: if meaning is a social construct, then a radically new meaning cannot come into existence. For a new meaning cannot be recognised as a meaning, because, by assumption, it is new and thus not part of the meanings that the community recognises.

One possible way around this might be to claim that new meanings are never radically new, but rather variations/extensions of existing meanings. That might be a good move if the ways in which meanings can be varied and extended are shared in the community.

Another way out is to question the implicit assumption of complete homogeneity of a linguistic community, viz., that we all share exactly the same meanings. That is obviously not how linguistic communities operate. There is lots of variation, between subgroups, experts and laypersons, and so on. But here, too, it seems that one must assume shared mechanisms in order for these differences to be productive. If a difference cannot be overcome, there is no novelty.

Martin Stokhof
from: Radical Discussion Board
date: spring 2021

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: , ,
Abbey church, Saint Polycarpe

Imagination and essence

A central question regarding Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imaginative capabilities (most prominently in in Philosophical Investigations, II~xii, 365: ‘… we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes’) is there, and if so how, he is still able to steer clear from the craving of generality’ that he thinks is the main source of the wrong way of doing philosophy. It is clear that Wittgenstein thinks philosophical analysis differs from a scientific investigation by not being bound by ‘the facts’ (in a broad sense, i.e., not just the facts about our actual practices of using a concept, but als facts of a historical or socio-cultural nature, i.e., facts about how we used the concept in the past or facts about the different ways in which others use it). But then the question is how a philosopher who makes free use of their imaginative capabilities with regard to ways concepts can be used can stay clear from essentialism?

That we are able to imagine different practices than we have is obvious, and it is equally obvious that our imaginative capabilities are a crucial factor in almost everything that we do. Imagination is not just key to literature and other aesthetic practices, it also plays a central rol in science, and is an essential ingredients of our everyday lives: planning and decision making depend on it. The question then is this: do the limits of our imaginative capabilities with regard to how a concept can be used coincide with what we would like to call the `essence’ of that concept? If the answer is positive, then it seems that Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imagination lands him in exactly the position that he wants to avoid.

At this juncture the crucial observation, I think, is this, viz., that our imagination itself is a `moving target’ in the sense that it, too, is determined by historical, social, cultural, … factors. If that is correct, then philosophical analysis in Wittgenstein’s sense, in which imagination plays a key role, does indeed occupy a position that differs both from that of scientific inquiry, which is factual in nature, and from that of traditional philosophical analysis, which aims at uncovering essences.

This is the difference between an investigation into ‘What is X?’ (factual, as in science, or essentialistic, as in traditional philosophy) and an investigation into ‘What is X-for-us?’: the concepts that a Wittgensteinian philosophy deals with are travelling concepts’ and its method, too, has a ‘travelling’ dimension.

A question that arises then is: what determines what are possible travelling concepts? One observation concerns the role played by ‘facts of nature’. These provide limits, by do not force a particular set of concepts on us, they determine a space of possibilities, different sets of concepts that we can employ practically. Now what is interesting to note is that, on the one hand, these limits set by nature are a given: reality (nature) is what it is, but that, on the other hand, we can imagine them to be different (think: science fiction) but not in a completely unlimited way. So there is a complex dynamics between what is the case and what we can think differently, and that is a dynamics that itself changes also.

That might suggest a very open space of speculative possibilities and possibilities to speculate, but as far as Wittgenstein is concerned there is third factor that plays a key role and that limits what makes sense to do with and in that space. It is the matter of `having a point’. A language game or practice needs to have practical value, and that applies both to the ones that we have as well as to the ones we can imagine. Now practical value itself is a very diverse concept. However, it does restrict what makes senses to do in this space of imaginative possibilities. Pure imaginability is not enough: any practice, be it factual or imaginable, need to have practical value, practical meaning for us to be a practice to begin with.

To what extent Wittgenstein’s position here manages to avoid essentialism is, I guess, a moot point. It seems that Wittgenstein would consider that not a very interesting question, and that he is much more interested in how the space of possible practices is constituted and how it can change. The observation that such a plurality of such spaces exist, and that each of time changes over time, is probably for him enough to support his anti-essentialism.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 19/20-07-2023

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Beijing Guozijian

On the scope of aesthetic judgements

In Lectures on Aesthetics Wittgenstein makes a curious distinction, between our appreciative judgements about, e.g., the proportions of a door, or the way a certain piece of music is performed, and our attitude towards such things as a Gothic cathedral or a Beethoven symphony. With regard to the latter, I think this is one of the points where Wittgenstein’s romanticist attitude comes to the fore. What he seems to be referring to is much like Kant’s notion of ‘das Erhabene’: the effect of art that connects us with the sublime, that which ultimately defies any form of expression or justification. (Cf., ‘The sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Book II, 27) Aesthetic judgements, on the other hand, although also not always capable of explicit expression, do form part of a system of rules and norms, a system that develops over time, and may be relative to a culture.

However, for Wittgenstein there is a connection between the two. As he states in Culture and Value, a culture is a way (one way, among many) of expressing value. Thus, a system of aesthetic judgement, such as that of Western classical music, is concerned with a particular way (or set of ways) of expressing value. Thus we can at the same time have (often very sophisticated) judgements about how to perform, say, a Beethoven symphony, judgements that may develop over time, yet at the same time be aware of what it is that music expresses, or, we should rather say, hints at: the value that transcends those (relative) system of judgements.

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: spring 2008

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags:
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Tractatus as manual

Tractatus 6.53 is a comment on the Tractatus-enterprise as such. Earlier, in 4.112, Wittgenstein has stated that the only task for philosophy is ‘the logical clarification of thought’. Strictly speaking this implies that an enterprise such as that of the Tractatus (with its ontology, meaning theory, logic, …) is not philosophy. What it does is define and describe the instruments that the philosopher can use, but that is not the same as actually applying those instruments. So, the Tractatus itself, ie., that definition and description, is ‘strictly speaking’ (which seems to be the right translation of ‘eigentlich’ here)  is not what the philosopher can and should be concerned with. In line with that, Wittgenstein indicates in the following (notorious) passage 6.54 how what he has done in writing the Tractatus (against his own better judgment, so to speak) should work: the Tractatus supplies the philosopher’s  instruments with an extensive manual, one that not only provides instructions for use but also outlines why the instruments should be used this way. But of course, once we have learned how to use the instruments we can discard the manual. And we should, is what Wittgenstein is saying here: we should not confuse reading and contemplating the manual with the actual employment of the instruments.  What holds for the gardener, the construction worker, for any  person who is using an instrument, applies to the philosopher as well: the skills that they need come from practice, not from studying the manual. 

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 26/03/2020

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Martin Stokhof Various, Wittgenstein Tags:
Dieppe

Logic and why it works

Proposition logic done in the usual manner with truth tables and Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus result in the same logic. So, why appeal to more than just truth tables? One answer is provided by Wittgenstein’s insistence (in 4.441) that T(rue) and F(alse) are not objects. That makes the usual way of stating the semantics or propositional logic an abstraction, i.e., something that itself requires philosophical explanation (foundation). Wittgenstein’s ‘situation semantics’ (association intended) in the Tractatus is exactly such an explanation (foundation), though not the only one possible. And therein resides its added value: it is not the logic per se, but the attempt to explain how it is possible, what it means, to do logic in this way, i.e., with T‘s and F‘s and truth tables. So, the Tractatus is best viewed as an answer (one answer, not the only one) to the question that is not asked often enough: ‘What is it that we are doing here? What makes it possible to define this logic in this particular way?’ And that means that the so-called ‘superfluousness’ of the Tractarian situation-ontology, and of the picture theory that is connected with it, is a formal superfluousness, one that goes only for the logic as a formal, abstract system, and which can be acknowledged only because we do not ask the pertinent philosophical question.  

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 12/10/1990

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags:
Oude Kerk, Amsterdam

On dream interpretation

Suppose you dream about your sister’s house being on fire. Take the case where you interpret the dream as somehow connected to your worries about your sister’s well-being. There are (at least) two ways of looking at that: a. having that dream is worrying about your sister; or  b. having that dream is caused by your worrying about your sister. Now the question is whether there is a difference between the b.-interpretation and the case of a connection with a previous sensory experience of having seen a house on fire combined with worries about your sister. 

Note that the first interpretation fits Wittgenstein’s general way of analysing emotion in terms of characteristic expression. The emotion of worry comes with various such characteristic expressions, and dreaming about the object of the worry in particular way, i.e., having dreams with a particular kind of content, may well be one such characteristic expression associated with the emotion. 

Cioffi (in ‘Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgenstein versus Freud’, Philosophia, 2009) makes a distinction between internal significance and external hypothetical causal relations. However, it is important to note that something having internal significance usually does rely on external factors, and an explication of the significance crucially involves reference to those external factors. And that makes the ‘internal – external’ distinction less clear/strict than the terminology might suggest.

Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Freud appear to be two-fold: a. that Freud gives what Cioffi calls ‘further description’ type interpretations that he then presents as causal explanations; and  b. that the causal explanation is mono-causal: all dreams have the same cause (at the type-level). Do note that this strict separation appears, minimally, difficult to apply (if not actually unfounded) in view of the earlier considerations about the role of external factors in both types of interpretation. 

Wittgenstein in Culture and Value:

[…] a picture is drawn on a big sheet of paper & the sheet is then folded in such way that pieces which do not belong together at all in the original picture collide in appearance & a new picture, which may make sense or may not, is formed (this would be the manifest dream, the first picture the ‘latent dream thought’). Now I could imagine that someone, who sees the unfolded picture, might exclaim ‘yes that is the solution, that is what I dreamed, but without gaps & distortions.’ It would then be this acknowledgement that made this solution the solution […]

Note that in this description the actual picture, i.e., the elements of which it consists and the way these are arranged in the picture, constrains the ‘presentation’, i.e., the dream. For example, an element of the actual picture can be obscured, but there cannot be something in the ‘presentation’, i.e., in the dream,  that is not there in the actual picture. This does suggest some kind of external connection that is not part of the dream but  plays a (co-)constitutive role. 

There is a remarkable analogy between assigning significance to dreams and treating certain events as miraculous. Recall Wittgenstein discussion of the bleeding statue in the Lectures on Religious Belief. The interesting case there was that of someone who said ‘Yes, it’s a fraud, it’s red ink, but stil … ‘ Isn’t assigning significance to dreams a similar kind of attitude? ‘I know that [follows a story about current cognitive neuroscience findings into what happens when we dream], but still …’ In both cases the causal aspect of the event drops out as irrelevant. That a complete and satisfactory causal explanation can be given (in the dream case), or in fact has been given (in the statue case), does not matter for the significance of the event as such. 

So there are in fact two gaps between the event of dreaming and the interpretation. First there is the gap between looking at the event solely from a causal perspective and not considering it as something interpretable, and looking at it as something that is up for interpretation and that calls for interpretation., And then there is the gap between looking at it as interpretable and being puzzled as to what the right interpretation might be and arriving at a satisfactory interpretation. The second gap is the one that is closed by dream interpretation. The first gap is not closed by any investigation or interpretation, it is closed by making a choice: to treat the event as potentially meaningful . Notice the resemblance with certainty: treating something as a certainty is a matter of choice, not the outcome of an investigation.  (This also puts Wittgenstein’s musings about dream language and how we treat doodles in Conversations on Freud in the right perspective.)

The analogy with certainty  suggests another way of looking at the folded/unfolded pictures metaphor Wittgenstein uses in Culture and Value.  As we noted above, the unfolded picture constrains the folded pictures that it can be transformed in. Can this be likened to the way in which ‘nature’ puts external constraints on possible certainties? That would also provide the means to deal what was said above about the role of external factors ‘inside’ dream interpretations. Even though it is a matter of choice to treat a dream event as having significance, that does not allow one to assign it any interpretation one likes: the space of possible interpretations is externally constrained, also by  those elements in the dream that have clear external reference. 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: Spring, 2020

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Curaçao

Wittgenstein and naturalism

The way in which Wittgenstein describes the nature of philosophical analysis in Philosophical Investigations. Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, section xiii, is reminiscent of the procedure that is employed in the Tractatus, in this respect that in both cases the nature of phenomena is investigated from within. In a sense, this is Wittgensteins’s  form of transcendentalism: to investigate the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon by looking at it from the inside, i.e., from the perspective of the phenomenon itself, by charting and investigating its manifestations and possibilities. 

What distinguishes the perspective of the Philosophical Investigations from that of the Tractatus are the added dimensions of naturalism and pluralism. Looking, as he suggests we do in section xiii, at imaginary, i.e., counterfactual situations, we stumble upon naturalistic constraints on what we can in fact imagine, given the concepts that we actually have. This is not an a priori reflection on what the concept is, so, pace Hacker and many others, it is not a purely conceptual analysis. Rather, it investigates what we are able and willing to do with the concept such as it is. The naturalistic constraints that we then come across may be fairly hard (cf., Philosophical Investigations 85, on the disappearing chair), but they may also be soft, in the sense that in some cases the results of empirical research may lead us to adopt a different kind of application of a concept than we had before. Note that, as On Certainty suggests, such a change in the application of a concept is hardly ever really forced upon us: we may always decide to stick to the original application, and cover the suggested extension or change in a different way: via a conceptual subdivision, the invention of a new concept, the relegation of the newly discovered phenomena to a different realm than the original concept applies to, etc.

Slogan: “The later Wittgenstein? Kant, properly naturalised.”

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 10/04/2009

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Martin Stokhof Various, Wittgenstein Tags: , ,
Île de Sein

Science and humanities

A crucial element of Wittgensteins’s meta-philosophy is the specific form of naturalism that he employs. As he emphasises on many occasions, e.g., in the Lectures on Aesthetics with respect to aesthetic judgements, or in RPP withe respect to our psychological vocabulary, the meaning of these expressions/concepts cannot be identified with the underlying causal-nomological, physiological processes. Real as they are, and interesting as they are in their own right, these are not what explains the meanings that these concepts/expressions have for us. For that we need to look in another direction, viz., at the complex practices in which we use them. These practices are historically, socially, culturally determined, and they are contingent along these dimensions. Of course, these practices can also be investigated from an external perspective, one that aims to uncover whatever causal processes co-determine them. However, their role in establishing meaning is constitutive, not explanatory, and that requires an internal understanding, rather than an external explanation. 

This might be seen as pointing to a dichotomy between two types of phenomena, or, rather, between two ways of dealing with phenomena:  external causal explanation, and internal hermeneutic understanding, with no connections between the two. And that in its turn seems to suggest there is an ideological choice we need to make between reductionism, which takes only the first for real, and separationism, which claims independence of both.  However, our practices themselves provide lots of points at which the two interact. Our understanding of ourselves is not just a matter of the concepts we employ when we try to make sense of ourselves internally, it is also the outcome of what we find out when we investigate ourselves from an external perspective. Both co-determine our practices, in different ways, and along different temporal dimensions, but both are factors that shape and change our practices. In doing so, internal understanding and external explanation also influence each other, albeit often only indirectly and in complex ways that are often difficult to trace and understand. And note that the relationship goes both ways: how we understand ourselves hermeneutically determines  what we set out to explain, and the results of our explanatory understanding feed into the practices that determine our internal, hermeneutic understanding. 

It is in this way that a practice-based approach allows us to escape the false dichotomy between science and humanities. If we acknowledge that both are intrinsically tied to our practices, and that it is in both depending on and shaping those practices that the two meet, we can forego this forced and false choice.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 20/12/2015

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags:
Rotterdam

On the linguistic turn in Wittgenstein

On the linguistic turn. How should it be evaluated? On the one hand: the isomorphism of language and thought places the Tractatus squarely in the traditional, epistemologically inspired framework. (Cf., in connection with this, the first formulation of the aim of the book in the preface: ‘Das Buch will also dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen’.) On the other hand: the assignment to the principles of logic of the place that before that was reserved for the principles of thought (and perception) does constitute a fundamental step (one that is reflected in Wittgenstein’s characterisation of epistemology as ‘philosophy of psychology’ (4.1121)). For now the limits of thought are determined by something that is of a different nature than thought itself: logic. In the traditional framework there was the possibility of thought, including its limitations and fundamental principles, being its own subject matter. (A possibility left open by Kant, taken up with gusto by German idealists, to which Schopenhauer emphatically objected.) After the linguistic turn, thought appears to be forced into a more passive role. (Is it to emphasise this that the Tractatus assigns logical principles an ontological status?)

The resulting picture is mixed. What we see is a transition that potentially represent a fundamental break with the past, but the consequences of which are by and large not worked out. Locating the limits of thought outside thought itself opens up a space of possibilities. But bu opting for logic as the source not much of that space is actually explored, let alone exploited. For both, logic and thought, are essentially discursive (which is why it is possible for the Tractatus to regard them as isomorphic). It is only from the angle of language that it becomes visible what the limitation is: only the discursive (‘logical’) part of language is within the scope of the analysis that the Tractatus offers.

In the years following the Tractatus we see a shift from logic to grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense of the word), and concommittant with that attention for other functions of language than just the discursive one. One consequence of that shift is a relaxation of the concept of ‘limits of thought’: there are as many ways of thinking as there are different, autonomous languages games. Even stronger: the central role itself of thought (in both a positive and a negative sense) is being questioned.

It is only at this point that the consequences of the linguistic turn come into their own: the diversity and multiplicity of language, of grammar, shows that there cannot be such a thing as a determination of ‘the’ limits of thought ‘as such’, that thought itself is not a monolithic whole but rather consists of various practices, with various links between them and embedded in our ways of acting. In this sense, one can say that it is only in his later work that Wittgenstein fully and completely ‘takes the linguistic turn’, and that, by doing so, he finally brings about the radical break with the old ‘philosophy of consciousness’ that he was after.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 09/03/1992

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Amsterdam

On characteristic expression

That we do on occasion repress the characteristic expression of, say, an emotion, is definitely true. This may be on on an individual basis, but it may also be imposed on us by some social rule (‘Men don’t cry’, ‘Stiff upper lip and never say die’, that sort of thing). What makes this possible is that the characteristic expression usually consists of a variety of elements, in mixed proportions. Quite generally speaking, there seems to be a continuum of relevant criteria, ranging from pure behavioural responses (‘Ouch’; when being kicked in the sheens) to highly conventionalised verbal expressions (of, say, belief in a mathematical proposition). There are hardly any cases where there is just one criterion that makes up the characteristic expression, which is one reason, I guess, why cheaters usually can be found out. But the complexity of the characteristic expression, along with the nature of the criteria that it is composed of, seems a good indicator of what we can expect to be ‘suppressible’.

Martin Stokhof
from: PI Discussion Board
date: spring 2016

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Martin Stokhof Interpretation, Wittgenstein Tags: , ,
Tallin

Uninterpreted content

One question that keeps coming back is what a practice based approach (such as Wittgenstein’s and Schatzki’s) has to offer over and above what Davidson’s appeal to Charity accomplishes. And there are good reasons to ask this question, if only because the Charity principle does seem to lend itself to formal modelling, unlike a practice based view.

The answer can be given in two ways (but it is basically the same answer): ‘uninterpreted content’, and ‘learning’. Participation in a practice originates from a point outside the practice, and a characterisation of what it  means to be a participant minimally has to allow for an account of how one becomes one. When the practice is linguistic, -one that involves interpretation-, this involves an account of the transition of the non-linguistic to the linguistic realm, and hence includes a specification of the role of uninterpreted content.

On both counts the Davidsonian approach does not seem to do well: the participants in radical interpretation are autonomous and fully competent, but how they became that way is left in the dark. (Meredith Williams in ‘Wittgenstein and Davidson on the sociality of language’ also voices for criticism along these lines.) In particular, the essentially linguistic nature (in the sense of being linguistically expressible) of what they bring to bear on the task (beliefs, desires, and other attitudes) seems to be an obstacle: there is no role for uninterpreted content here.

Another point that speaks in favour of the learning approach is that it suggests that it is not just the transition from the pre-verbal to the verbal stage that is at stake, but that learning is a continuous process. Hence, ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’ are really indications of functions, of roles, and even during our days as ‘competent’ speakers of a language we play both roles. If we encounter a new phrase, or one that is used in a new way, we may adopt the role of ‘pupil’ and try to learn what the new meaning is. Or we may adopt the ‘teacher’ role and try to correct the other’s usage. What role we choose depends on a number of factors: our concern with successful communication in this instance, our estimate of the abilities of the other language user, social relations, our emotional attitudes towards the other, and so on.

Martin Stokhof
from: Interpretation
date: fall 2009

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Martin Stokhof Interpretation, Wittgenstein Tags: , , ,
Traboule, Lyon

Certainties, truth and relativism

If we compare the picture that we can extract from On Certainty with Davidson’s view (as expounded in, e.g., ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’), the important difference seems to be this, that Wittgenstein introduces the layer of certainties in between our epistemological practices and external reality, whereas Davidson construes the relation between belief and reality much more directly. The fact that certainties are categorically different from beliefs and other epistemological entities (despite the fact that over time, and between communities and/or individuals,  what counts as what may change) in combination with the plurality of systems of certainties, makes room for a measure of (conceptual) relativism that Davidson seeks to avoid. His way of doing so is to take the core of our belief system to be as stable (over time, over communities and/or individuals) as is the causal influence of external reality on humans. (There is more room for differences in the ‘superstructure’ of complex beliefs that are not directly caused by our interactions with reality, but that is something that Davidson does not pay that much attention to). 

This has also consequences for how truth works in both perspectives. In On Certainty truth is first and foremost a concept that operates within a particular epistemological practice, that itself is made possible by a particular system of reference consisting of certainties. (That Wittgenstein construes it in more or less verificationistic terms is an additional,  independently motivated feature.) The relation between external reality and certainties is not one of determination, but of constraint. This is the source of plurality, and it also implies that certainties are not upheld because they are true. The fact that different certainties  can be upheld at the same time also testifies to that, of course. Nevertheless, certainties differ in terms of their entrenchment and some are so basic to our form of life that it does not seem that much of a stretch to call them ‘true’, admittedly in quite a different sense. In Davidson’s perspective we also have two distinct properties. ‘Mild correspondence’ is the notion of truth that links beliefs (and hence meaning) to the world. It is what  the causal influence of the world on us results in. Internally, i.e., within our actual epistemological practice, truth then takes on a different form, that of coherence. 

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 22/03/2012

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
New York

Imagination

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 398:

[…] Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. –Someone asks “Whose house is that?” – The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot, for example, step into his house.

A possible interpretation. Perhaps we should read Wittgenstein here as follows: Whenever we imagine something it is our responsibility to determine what it is that we are imagining. So, we can imagine a landscape, and a house, and a man sitting on the bench in front to the house. And it is we who can say: ‘That’s the owner of the house.’ (And not, say, the guy in the field in the distance who is also part of this imagined landscape.) Now what Wittgenstein might mean when he says ‘But then he can not for example enter his home’ is this: If that is going to happen, it is not because the man himself decides to do that, but because we imagine that as well. That is to say, everything about the picture, and in the picture, is the responsibility of the one who imagines it. (Which need not be the maker: if it is an actual picture, it could be anyone who is looking at it.) This way of reading the passage puts it more in line with the point that Wittgenstein makes in the same section, immediately before, viz., the lack of ‘ownership’ of the visual room. 

Martin Stokhof
from: PI Discussion Board
date: spring 2016

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Guanghua temple, Beijing

Religious belief and pictures

Concerning the role of ‘knowing the proper technique’ (Wittgenstein, Lectures on Religious Belief). The point of Wittgenstein’s  discussion in the Lecture II (Michelangelo’s picture of creation) and in Lecture III (the doodle-example, the woman-lying-on-her-bed picture) is two-fold. First of all, Wittgenstein emphasises that these pictures are not ordinary pictures, that our ordinary technique of using pictures (or phrases, or what have you) fails us here. (And, of course, that we go miserably astray if we do apply our ordinary technique in such cases.) However, and that is the second point, we do need some kind of connection with what we do in our everyday life. For without such a connection these ‘objects’ are meaningless, and our handling them an empty gesture. 

One question that arises is this: Why would the fact that pictures can be used to convey (communicate, express) a religious point of view imply that the categorical distinction between religious beliefs and ordinary, factual beliefs is discarded? I think that Wittgenstein, when discussing religious pictures, uses the word ‘picture’ in a special sense, at least not in the ordinary sense of something that depicts something that is independent of it and that it may depicts more or less accurately. Rather, this use of ‘picture’ is reminiscent of what in Philosophical Investigations he calls ‘a way of seeing’. It that is what Wittgenstein means here, then we can say, of course, that a religious picture conveys (communicates, expresses) something, but we should bear in mind that these verbs are then used in a special sense as well. I think that also in his early work Wittgenstein did not exclude the possibility of ethics/religion somehow being communicated. What he did insist upon is that this method of communication was not that of the use of ordinary meaningful language, as we use it in everyday life or science, in debates and discussions. But poetry, novels, the Gospels, music, architecture were always regarded by Wittgenstein as providing us with the possibility of expressing what is at stake here. 

There are two questions that this view raises: Are there any pictures or other means of expression that are particularly suited for religious expression? And in so far as the technique of using such pictures connects them to individual experiences, is this technique not vulnerable for a private language type of argument? 

I don’t know what Wittgenstein’s  answers would have been, but as far as the first question is concerned, my guess is that the answer is, ultimately, ‘No’. For if there would be such pictures, then they would qualify as such on the basis of certain properties and that comes dangerously close to saying that religion is about content after all. The hedge ‘ultimately’ is needed to capture the fact that within a cultural community/historical period we can in fact identify certain pictures as unambiguously religious. But that is ‘just’ an historical fact. 

As for the second question, that actually touches on a more general issue, viz., the role of individual experience in our conceptual (linguistic) system. Here it is important to bear in mind, that although having an experience is an individual matter (and the form that it takes may be even quite idiosyncratic), that does not mean that therefore experiences cannot be intersubjective, shared, common to a group. External constraints play a crucial role here. (Think of what Wittgenstein says in Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ about the understanding of a ritual.) 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: fall 2002

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Amsterdam

Rules as attitudes

Viewing rules as certainties is viewing them as attitudes. (Cf., ethics and religious belief as attitudes.) Such a view resolves a certain tension, one that can be the ground for reductionist approaches. The tension comes from an opposition between a rule as norm and the application of a rule as fact. If we view both as belonging to the same ontological or epistemological category (because of monistic assumptions), the tendency to reduce the first to the second is hard to avoid: for what is a ‘normative fact’? How can a norm be a fact in the same way as the application is a fact? (Note that what is not at stake is the fact that something is a norm: that is a social fact, or the same order as factual applications.) But also if we do not assign norm and application to the same category, but make a categorial distinction between the two, a certain tension remains. To view norms as a separate, independent category of entities, distinct from the category of facts, raises the question how the category of norms and that of facts are related. A tendency to reductionism then might be motivated by ontological parsimony, or a need to come up with a hierarchical ordening of categories. And there is the issue that a categorial distinction raises the question how entities from one category, that of norms, are related, or can be related, to those in another category, that of facts.

To view a rule, not as fact of the same order as an application of it, nor as a fact of a different (higher) order that maintains a special relation with its application, but as an attitude towards certain actions, may help oppose the tendency to found or reduce rules.A rule is an attitude towards actions, a way of viewing them, of seeing them in a certain light. Thus viewed, a rule is the result of a decision to consider certain actions as correct and others as incorrect. (Cf., Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations 186: ‘ […] It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every point, but that a new decision was needed at every point.’) Only given that attitude do these actions become applications of a rule. Then there is no division, neither ontologically, nor epistemologically. There is not on the hand hand the rule, on the other its applications, there are actions that are viewed in a certain way, that are considered part of a particular network of actions.

Think of Wittgenstein’s wallpaper manufacturers (cf., Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, Lecture III). They perform the same actions as competent mathematicians. Yet, only the latter follow a rule, because only they have a normative attitude towards what they do.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 14/10/1993

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
New Cathedral, Salamanca

“Ethics and aesthetics are one”

The internal relation between ethics and aesthetics that Wittgenstein suggests in this statement is difficult to come to grips with. However, it is clear that whatever the commonality, there is also difference. 

To start with the latter, aesthetic judgements are expressible, in language, by means of gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice. But ethical judgments are not. Aesthetic judgments form a practice, a system of norms, actions, objects, that is shared by a community. With that comes relativism: over time, and also contemporaneously, over communities. But ethical values are universal. In these (and related) respects ethics and aesthetics are definitely not one. 

The counterpart of an aesthetic practice in the realm of ethics seems to be a moral practice. Moral judgements, too, are expressible, are based on norms that are shared in a community, and thus form a practice . And like aesthetic practices, moral practices, too, display relativism, over time and contemporaneously.

Now for the commonality. As we have argued elsewhere (World and Life as One, chapter 4), morality can be regarded as instrumental with respect to ethics: that is to say, moral norms are not expressions of absolute value, but are instruments that can be used to realise those values. If “being in harmony” with whatever way the world is constitutes the absolute ethical goal, then the moral norms of a community serve as the reflection of those contingent, but relatively stable aspects of the world that this community finds itself in that are morally relevant in that are conducive to the realisation of that ethical goal.

Could we construct a similar relationship in the domain of aesthetics between the absolute and the relative-instrumental? There are at least two reasons to think so. 

First of all, there is the short reference to the sublime in the Lectures on Aesthetics: the gothic cathedral, the Beethoven symphony. These are objects that transcend the rules of aesthetic practices, in much the same way as absolute ethical value transcends the rules of moral practices. It is the nature of the sublime, its absoluteness, that is responsible for that. From that angle, we can view an aesthetic practice as instrumental with respect to the sublime. Engaging in aesthetic practices is a way of preparing oneself for what transcends it, viz., the creation and experience of works that are sublime.  

Secondly, there is the discussion in Culture and Value of the expressive relation between civilisation (culture) and human value. A civilisation, Wittgenstein argues, is a contingent expression of absolute value, and the disappearance  of a particular such expression (much as we may regret it) leaves the absolute value untouched. What is important to note is that what Wittgenstein identifies as expressions of the sublime, of the absolute, are exactly that: expressions, not the thing itself. (Recall the finger pointing to the reflection of the moon.) 

Here we do well to recall Wittgenstein’s characterisation of his ethical experiences in A Lecture on Ethics: these, too,  are emphatically mere expressions, and not the values themselves. Thus, expressions may differ, and will differ, according to the moral or aesthetic practices that they are a part of. And the variation may even extend to the individual level. 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: spring 2020

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Suzhou

On foundationalist readings of On Certainty

What distinguishes the foundationalist reading from the constitutive (‘framework’) reading is that the latter acknowledges the interdependence of certainty and knowledge, whereas the former considers certainty to be independent.

Some, e.g., Robert Brice, make a distinction between  ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘homogeneous foundationalism’, arguing that  the former position is the one  Wittgenstein takes in On Certainty, whereas the latter is the traditional position, that is incapable of fending off the attack by the radical sceptic. The distinction between these two positions as such is clear, and important. But why exactly would one want to call them both ‘foundationalism’? That suggests that besides the difference there is also something they have in common. But what might that be?  A constitutive relation is not a founding relation, the former involves an essential dependency that the latter lacks. What constitutes and what is constituted depend on one another, one cannot consists without the other. But what is founded and what founds are not in that way dependent: one can clear what is founded and be left with the foundations. 

Moyal-Sharrock  argues that the fundamental difference between what she considers Wittgenstein’s foundationalism and traditional foundationalism that the latter, but not the former, is propositional. This raises an interesting question. Is Descartes cogito propositional, or is it Descartes’ exposition of it that is propositional? The latter is certainly true, but does that entail the former?  Or consider forms  of foundationalism that consider sensory experience as foundation. Any exposition of this position will have to resort to descriptions of sensory experience, and these descriptions are, of course, propositional. But does it make sense to say that the sensory experiences themselves are necessarily also propositional? That seems not to follow, at least not without additional premisses. 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: March 2020

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags:
La chapelle, Saint Polycarpe

Religious belief

Religious beliefs as colouring, rather than as separate language games or as distinct frameworks of certainties. A language game is like a stage set: actors, props, decor. Religious beliefs are the stage lights: they don’t change the stage set, they do not add or remove anything, yet by colouring it they can make it appear completely different.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 20/11/2002

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Avignon

Pluralism and the possibility of philosophy

In a sense one might regard the transition from monism to pluralism, as exemplified in the contrast between Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, as a move that rescues the possibility of philosophy. In the monistic (absolutistic) approach of the Tractatus (but that applies to many others; cf., e.g., Being and Time) philosophy is doomed by the ineffability of any kind of analysis that leads to non-contingent answers. In a pluralistic setting, such as the one explored in Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty, however, there is at least the possibility of reflection from within one framework on another framework. (But additional  conditions have to be met, of course.) Interestingly, the result of such a reflection is not descriptive, but conceptual. And to the extent that it is possible, one might regard it as a kind of reflective investigation of imagination.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 16/10/2002

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: ,
Saint-Sernin, Toulouse

Wittgenstein and Frazer

Description itself is never neutral or objective, there is no Archimedean point that allows us to ‘just describe the facts’. But that does not necessarily imply that description and explanation are alike. An explanation, unlike a description, presupposes a theoretical framework, of general principles, inferential relations (causal or otherwise). An explanation typically presents an individual event as an instance of something more general, a law, a pattern, and in doing so links it to other events that are supposed to be similar. Description, though not objective, remains level with what is described, so to speak. It does not generalise, and respects, you might say, the individuality, the uniqueness of what it describes. Of course, description, too, is possible only within a framework, but it functions quite differently. 

[The rain king] What Wittgenstein opposes in Frazer is that the latter attributes some kind of naive proto-science to these people; according to him they are simply wrong (and we are right) about the causal antecedents of the annual rains. That the difference of opinion between Wittgenstein and Frazer itself is like a scientific debate (of sorts) is true but, as far as I can see, that has no direct bearing on the adequacy of Wittgenstein’s  criticism. For Wittgenstein, the essential point is that they do not conceive of the relationship between the Rain-King (and what he does) and the coming of the rains as a causal relationship. Q.E.D., as far as Wittgenstein is concerned: for that is exactly what he holds against Frazer, viz., that he (Frazer) does ascribe to them a kind of naive scientific theory that attempts to explain, in causal terms, the coming of the rains.

[The fire-festival] If to understand the meaning of the ritual means to experience its depth, the terror its enactment brings about, then to laugh at the description would be to show a thorough lack of understanding. That applies to the specific examples Frazer and Wittgenstein are concerned with, and it does not mean, I gather, that there couldn’t be rituals for which to laugh would be the hallmark of understanding. But in these particular cases, to laugh, to ridicule the ‘savages’, is to show that one does not understand. 

[Kissing a portrait] One important characteristic that Wittgenstein mentions, and that seems what is needed to distinguish the kissing of a portrait from doing the dishes, is that in a ritual means and ends coincide. An ordinary action aims at something: we do the dishes because we want to dine from clean ones, because we want to prevent bacteria from growing in the kitchen sink, because we want to impress someone, and so on. Here the action is a means to an end. A ritual is not like that, a ritual is not performed with an eye to its effects (although it may, of course, have effects, and some of these we might find agreeable). Rather, a ritual is performed for it own sake: “…  it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied.” 

One important consequence of this is that whether an act is ritualistic or not (in Wittgenstein’s  sense) does not depend (at least not solely) on the nature of the act. (So doing the dishes can be a ritual as well.) And as far as I can see it also means that we can not say that rituals are either private or social, they can be either, and both.

As for the question whether science itself is a ritual, my guess is that Wittgenstein would acknowledge that many people have indeed replaced their reliance on some religious system by a reliance on science. However, he also quite emphatically states that this is a misunderstanding of what science is and what it can do. (Recall Tractatus 6.371-6.372; cf. also the foreword to Philosophical Remarks in Culture and Value) A proper view on science has no place for ritual, since science is about external, causal relationships between (types) of events, whereas ritual is concerned with the internal significance of an event or act. 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: fall 2002

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags: , ,
East Goodwin

On belief and introspection

Wittgenstein claims that belief (like doubt, expectation, etc.) is ‘introspectively accessible”: if we believe that p, we know that we believe that p. Hence, we cannot say, Wittgenstein claims, that we thought we believed something, but actually did not believe it. Knowledge is not like that: we can think that we know something, only to find out that we didn’t. The reason is (presumably, but Wittgenstein does not discuss this explicitly) that belief concerns a certain state or disposition, whereas knowledge in addition involves a particular relation to the world (this is where truth comes in). 

Does this hold up if what a person believes ultimately must show itself in his or her actions, i.e., if belief is a disposition to act in a certain way? That is a view that Wittgenstein seems to endorse as well, so the issue at hand can also be formulated as follows: does it make sense to say that one can somehow be mistaken about what it is one is doing, or is disposed to do? 

Stepping back: is there at this particular point a difference between belief in the ordinary, epistemological sense, and religious beliefs and ethical convictions? If we grant Wittgenstein that, indeed, it does not seem to make sense to say “I think I believe that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t believe that”, are we then forced to also hold that it does not make sense to answer “I don’t know” if someone asks us “Do you believe in an after-life (transubstantiation, Last Judgement, …)”, and that we cannot meaningfully express doubt concerning an ethical prescription, as in “I’m not sure I believe that one should always respect the right to bodily integrity” ? It would be interesting to try to construct different cases and see whether doubt concerning belief is possible, and if so, what it means to express it. In that way we might also get a better picture of how various kinds of beliefs are related to action, on the one hand, and reality on the other (cf. above, concerning knowledge) 

It is true that what people say and what they do all too often diverges, but that does not mean that what they believe and what they do diverges as well. For saying something is one thing, believing it is another. It is only a sincere utterance that allows an inference to a belief (cf., Grice’s Maxim of Quality). This is the gist of what is known as “Moore’s Paradox” (which Wittgenstein regarded as Moore’s most important contribution to philosophy): an utterance of the form “p but I don’t believe that p” may very well be true, but it cannot be sincere. 

So, the crux of examples about a person saying one thing and doing another concerns that person’s sincerity : that cannot be taken for granted, but has to be argued for. 

That many (most) of our beliefs are unreflected, unanalysed, is an important here: in fact, explicitly held beliefs seem to be the exception, rather than the rule. And that seems to make the way a person acts the primary source for belief-ascriptions. 

This observation itself raises some other questions: Can we as outside observers always derive distinct beliefs from the way a person acts? Can a person himself do this? What kinds of beliefs lend themselves to such investigation? Aren’t these more like certainties, rather than cognitive beliefs? What about the requirement that it should always be possible to explicate a belief derived from a way of acting? 

Consider the case of the egalitarian who does not act upon his beliefs: would that be a case of a person being wrong about what he believes (he thinks he believes in equal rights, yet his failure to act shows that he does not), or is it rather a case of failing to act upon one’s beliefs? Given his beliefs the egalitarian also believes that he should act in a particular way in particular situations. That he does not, might also be attributed to weakness in character, or some other circumstance, and not to a mistake about the beliefs he holds. Of course, if he consistently acts in opposition to what we would expect on the basis of the beliefs he confesses to, we would start to doubt. And his sincerity would be the first thing we would doubt. 

Note finally that the phrase “I believe” itself can be used in a variety of ways: as a statement of a firmly held conviction; but also as a way of indicating that we are not sure (yet), that we actually leave room for the opposite. “I think” is more like “I believe” in the latter sense than in the former. And for Wittgenstein’s  argument we do indeed need the former sense. 

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: October 2002

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Martin Stokhof Wittgenstein Tags:
North Sea

On natural phenomena as aesthetic objects

Are natural phenomena (objects, events) aesthetic objects in the Wittgensteinian sense? There is no doubt that we apply  adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ to things like sunsets, landscapes, people. But what does that mean? Are there norms that we apply?  Do we compare one phenomenon with another? Last night’s sunset with this one? The landscape before our eyes with the one we saw in a movie? This person’s face with that of our favourite movie star? 

In the last case it seems that we do indeed compare and also that we are able to express the reasons for our evaluations to some extent. In the case of sunsets this is far less obvious. Is there a sense in which this sunset is more beautiful than last night’s? More spectacular perhaps, yes. But more beautiful? And if we compare landscapes, aren’t we just  expressing preferences? (“I hate woods, give me open skies any day.”)  

We can sharpen the issue somewhat by asking about the role of two key features of aesthetic practices in Wittgenstein’s sense: training and expertise, and directed discontent. 

As for training and expertise, we have no problem in acknowledging that some people are better than we are in judging the quality of a musical performance, or that of a painting, or a sculpture. That is why we seek to learn from them and so develop our own skills and our own appreciation of a given kind of aesthetic objects. Does the same happen in ‘evaluating’ a sunset? Do we ask an expert to tell us whether this sunset is better than the one we saw yesterday, and if so, to explain to us in what way? If we ask someone whether he prefers a rugged mountainous landscape to an ocean view, do we seek to learn anything over and above his preferences, something that will help us make a more informed judgment ourselves? And if someone declares that she thinks her husband is more beautiful than the man just voted ‘sexiest man alive’, do we take her to task for not agreeing with ‘the experts’? 

It appears that although the answers may not be the same in each of these cases, there is a marked difference with how training and expertise work in aesthetic practices that are concerned with non-natural phenomena, with artefacts, performances, and the like. This relates to the second feature, directed discontent.

Directed discontent typically involves judgments about objects according to norms with an aim to improvement. We look at the object (or performance, that’s basically the same in this regard), apply a relevant norm, and judge that the object does not qualify unreservedly, that there is room for improvement. Typically, improvement presupposes control, at least in principle. Hence, a key feature of aesthetic objects is that they lend themselves to manipulation, to change and be changed. 

Now, natural phenomena are not disqualified  by this requirement per se. But it does place restrictions on when natural phenomena can be regarded as proper aesthetic objects. First of all, there has to be some element of control. Since sunsets are typically not man-made, they equally typically are not aesthetic objects: there is no aesthetic practice that aims at producing sunsets according to certain shared norms. Landscapes are an in-between case: think of landscape architecture, garden design. Here there is enough control to start an aesthetic practice. But we don’t go about designing and producing mountain ranges. (At least, not yet. Notice how all this is conditional on human ability, and hence human technology.) What about people? A human face becomes a proper aesthetic object in the context of, e.g., plastic surgery. We can well imagine two people judging the result of an operation and one of them expressing directed discontent; “Nice result, but the left cheek is not quite what it should be … Let me see, a bit more like this, perhaps?”

And this immediately reveals the second  conditio sine qua non for something to be an aesthetic object, viz., that there has to be a set of shared norms. 

So we see why on the one hand natural phenomena do not automatically qualify as aesthetic objects and why on the other hand most of our aesthetic practices involve pure artefacts: control is needed for a practicable application of norms.

Martin Stokhof
from: EOL Discussion Board
date: 27/02/2020