THE THEAETETUS AND THEE: Rauch and Pinker cause us to dream!

MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 2021

But also, the Theaetetus: Over the weekend, we found ourselves reading the Theaetetus!

Rather, we found ourselves trying to read the Theaetetus. Soon, we found ourselves skimming the Theaetetus, desperately seeking relief. 

Before long, we sought the mercy of an overview of the ancient text.  Along the way, we found ourselves marveling at the Theaetetus—and at the apparent cast of thousands who continue to study it. 

Why were we skimming the Theaetetus? While we're at it, what is the Theaeteteus?

The backdrop goes like this:

Over the weekend, we watched a C-Span book event which actually filled us with hope for the nation's future. In the hour-long session, Steven Pinker joined Jonathan Rauch in a discussion of Rauch's new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Admittedly, "a defense of truth" makes for a strange battle cry. That said, the discussion briefly filled us with hope.

You can watch the full discussion here. Serving as Rauch's interlocutor, Pinker opens like this:

Welcome, everyone! My name is Steve Pinker. I am a cognitive scientist and a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and I am very excited to be able to talk to Jonathan Rauch about his forthcoming book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, a book that I had particular interest in and resonance with because I have written a couple of books with similar themes...

In perhaps the first half hour of the ensuing discussion, we'd say there's a fair amount of overthinking, with a dollop of excessive theorization thrown in.

Eventually, though, the rubber hits the road. Twenty-three minutes into the session, Pinker offers this overview of Rauch's book:

"I think your treatment both of trolling culture, primarily from the right, and cancel culture, primarily from the left, are both brilliant, timely, essential reading." 

"Every college president should read [the book]," Pinker soon adds. "They're the ones who actually need to read it, to be reminded of things that are all too often neglected on college campuses."

Steven Pinker is very high on Jonathan Rauch's new book. Quickly, let's add a key point:

Later in the discussion, Rauch says that he regards "trolling culture"—the assault on "the constitution of knowledge" which is primarily coming from the right—as a more serious threat at this time than "cancel culture"—the assault which is primarily coming from the left.

Pinker says he agrees with that assessment. At this point, the right is more dangerous—worse. Rauch and Pinker agree.

But Rauch says something else. He says that "cancel culture" is especially dangerous because of its effects within the academy. Pinker says he agrees with that assessment as well.

At any rate, ever so briefly, it happened! By the end of the hour, Rauch and Pinker had us imagining that intelligent responses to our blue tribe's current excesses are now being formed on the left. 

Pinker named some organizations which are being formed to push back against the dumber aspects of emerging blue tribe culture. For the briefest of moments, we were able to imagine a less dumb day ahead—a day with saner, sounder "daily logic."

As the weekend proceeded, our ability to harbor such thoughts began to fade away. But for the first time in a long while, we'd been able to imagine effective pushback starting to form against some of the impulses which now pervades our failing public discourse.

In this, the age of Donald J. Trump, the lunacy of much that has taken hold on the right is quite easy to spot. But alas! For denizens of our own blue tribe, the dumbness of some of our own emerging instincts are easy to ignore.

It has long been known that Professor Pinker is smart. Rauch, a former journalist turned author, offered a careful assessment of our failing intellectual culture as the discussion went on.

Briefly, we imagined pushback emerging within the academy—pushback built upon our crying need for an improved Daily Logic. But will that pushback come from our logicians—more generally, from our philosophy professors? 

Consider the nightmare we stumbled upon when we started to read Rauch's book.

After watching this C-Span event, we purchased Rauch's book and we commenced to reading. And right there, in his opening paragraphs, Rauch offers an admiring overview of that aforementioned ancient text.

That the heck is the Theaetetus? Rauch's book starts as shown:

In the public square of Athens, a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed  old man encounters a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed young man.  Hailing the young man and remarking on their resemblance, Socrates begins a conversation with Theaetetus and sets out to determine  whether they also resemble each other in their love of philosophy. Theaetetus protests that he is no great intellect; philosophical puzzles make him quite dizzy, “wondering whatever they can mean.” Ah! Then you are a philosopher: “This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher,” insists Socrates. “Philosophy indeed has no other origin.”

With that, in a conversation imagined by Plato 2,400 or so years ago, the old man commences to lead his new friend on an expedition into the densest thickets of epistemology. What is knowledge? What is error? How does error arise? Why is error even possible? Each question would seem to have an obvious answer, yet each obvious answer collapses upon examination.

Trust us! Nothing "collapses under examination" in the Theaetetus! But in the first few pages of his book, Rauch describes the wonder he felt when he read the book as a college freshman.

This inspired us to try to read the Theaetetus again. Before long, we were skimming hard, while suffering flashbacks of our own first year in college (though we were lucky to be there).

How do contemporary philosophy professors regard the Theaetetus? To our amazement, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy starts off exactly like this:

The Theaetetus, which probably dates from about 369 BC, is arguably Plato’s greatest work on epistemology. (Arguably, it is his greatest work on anything.) Plato (c.427–347 BC) has much to say about the nature of knowledge elsewhere. But only the Theaetetus offers a set-piece discussion of the question “What is knowledge?”

Arguably, the Theaetetus is Plato's greatest work! Or at least so the passage says, damning with faint praise. 

Meanwhile, the leading authority on the topic offers this overview of the antique text:

The Theaetetus is one of Plato's dialogues concerning the nature of knowledge, written circa 369 BCE.

In this dialogue set in a wrestling school, Socrates and Theaetetus discuss three definitions of knowledge: knowledge as nothing but perception, knowledge as true judgment, and, finally, knowledge as a true judgment with an account. Each of these definitions is shown to be unsatisfactory.

Socrates declares Theaetetus will have benefited from discovering what he does not know, and that he may be better able to approach the topic in the future. The conversation ends with Socrates' announcement that he has to go to court to face a criminal indictment.

Trust us! Nothing "is shown to be unsatisfactory" in the Theaetetus! Nor will anyone "be better able to approach the topic in the future" after perusing the text.

In truth, the Theaetetus is an unreadable mess, as anyone can discern simply by clicking this link. The text was produced at the dawn of the west. We'd say this fact very much shows.

Anyone can discern this fact—anyone except our modern-day philosophy professors. Those worthies continue to stage debates about the unreadable antique text. This help us see that we're basically on our own in our pursuit of an improved state of daily logic.

In the C-Span book event, a professor of psychology joined a former journalist in challenging the wayward tribal instincts which undermine our discourse. There were no logicians around!

Where have all the logicians gone? What are they doing wherever they're found? We'll continue discussing that question this week, even as we review the embarrassing ways our own blue tribe is currently inclined to misfire.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are inclined to reason rather poorly. In his own incoherent way, the later Wittgenstein tried to help—but according to Professor Horwich, the academy decided to throw him under the bus. Werewolves of London again!

Ever so briefly, Rauch and Pinker had us dreaming that the current state of play might somehow be improved. Then we began to review the Theaetetus. 

Within minutes, we were skimming. It may be Plato's greatest work, one source unreliably said.

Tomorrow: Professor McWhorter gets it right—but also, the Theaetetus!

WITTGENSTEIN IN THE WORLD: Today, we have the Gettier problem!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2021

But why would anyone care?: Today, we don't have naming of parts, though the poem is still sadly relevant.

Today, we have "the Gettier problem." We're going to give it a Wittgenstein hook, with a connection to our failing society's lack of daily logic.

Some may ask what "the Gettier problem" is. For the record, that question can mean different things.

Below, you see the capsule account given by the leading authority on the problem. Below, we'll simplify this account. The gods on Olympus have started to chuckle even as we type this:

The Gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem concerning the understanding of descriptive knowledge. Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier-type counterexamples (called "Gettier-cases") challenge the long-held justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge. 

The JTB account holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief; if all three conditions (justification, truth, and belief) are met of a given claim, then we have knowledge of that claim. In his 1963 three-page paper titled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", Gettier attempts to illustrate by means of two counterexamples that there are cases where individuals can have a justified, true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, turn out to be false. 

Thus, Gettier claims to have shown that the JTB account is inadequate because it does not account for all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.

At this point, some will ask what "epistemology" is. According to that same authority, epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.

As categorized there, epistemology is a subfield distinct from the subfield called logic. But it comes pretty close to that more familiar-sounding field.

Back to the Gettier problem. In somewhat simpler language, this is what's been said:

You can believe that some statement is true, and your belief can be accurate. You can even have a sensible reason which "justifies" your belief. (For example, you didn't just flip a coin.) 

You can believe it, and it can be true. You can even have a sensible reason for your belief. But that doesn't mean that you knew that the statement in question was true! That's what Gettier tried to show, thus creating "the Gettier problem."

A sensible person might ask at this point why anyone would care about this. In fact, there's an event in the news this very week which involves these basic elements, though we won't get there today.

Friend, are you intrigued at this point by the Gettier problem? If so, a bonus awaits.

As the leading authority offers additional background, two of those familiar names enter the picture again. One of them even devised the so-called "stopped clock case!"

The question of what constitutes "knowledge" is as old as philosophy itself. Early instances are found in Plato's dialogues, notably Meno and Theaetetus. Gettier himself was not actually the first to raise the problem named after him; its existence was acknowledged by both Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell, the latter of which discussed the problem in his book Human knowledge: Its scope and limits...

Russell's case, called the stopped clock case, goes as follows: 

Alice sees a clock that reads two o'clock and believes that the time is two o'clock. It is, in fact, two o'clock. There's a problem, however: unknown to Alice, the clock she's looking at stopped twelve hours ago. Alice thus has an accidentally true, justified belief...Gettier's formulation of the problem was important as it coincided with the rise of the sort of philosophical naturalism promoted by W. V. O. Quine and others, and was used as a justification for a shift towards externalist theories of justification.

Did Alice "know" it was two o'clock? Out here in the actual world, it's hard to imagine a circumstance in which the question would arise—in which anyone would waste their time debating so utterly pointless a point.

As such, this can feel like "Planet of the Toffs"—like academic rule by a gang of disconnected Brahmins who sit around the club conducting pseudo-discussions about topics which don't matter.

Inevitably, it was Russell—the third most important philosopher of the past two hundred years—who devised "the stopped clock case." Meanwhile, according to the leading authority, Gettier's formulation was important because of its connection to "the philosophical naturalism promoted by" Quine.

Quine was the fifth most important—and not only that! Gettier's formulation was also used as a justification for a shift towards externalist theories of justification! The kind of externalist theories which have never been mentioned, not even once, anywhere outside the club!

All roads seem to lead back to these fellows as they lounge about at the club! For a bit of comic relief, consider this account of Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), the fifth most important philosophy book of the 20th century:

Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica. Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

Principia Mathematica was the fifth most important philosophy book of the 20th century. That said, did Russell and Whitehead really spend 700 pages "reaching the conclusion" that 1 + 1 = 2?

We don't know how to score that claim, though it's certainly bruited a lot. That account comes from Stephen Budianksy's recent book, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, the latest attempt to make Gödel easy for general readers.

To his credit, Russell was deeply involved in the actual affairs of the world. Also, he was willing to see the humor in his philosophical work, as described in several passages in Budiansky's book—humorous passages concerning the mammoth size of the manuscript and its later lack of readers.

Did Russell's "philosophical" work ever make any sense at all? We can't answer that question. But there he was, in his typical way, devising the crucial "stopped clock case." 

Did we mention the fact that he was recently rated the third most important philosopher of the past two hundred years?

Why do we cite the Gettier problem today? With apologies, it's because we read an overview of the life of the late Robert Nozick in the past few days.

In our (limited) experience, Nozick was always a thoroughly good, decent person. He was also a star of the academic philosophy world. Especially given what follows, we can't stress those points strongly enough.

In the fall of our freshman year, we took the introductory philosophy course, Problems in Philosophy, as taught by Professor Nozick. We were 17 at the time. He himself was 26, and he may have looked younger.

This was the course which showed us freshmen (and, we're sure, some sophomores and juniors) what academic philosophy was all about. It was also the course which sent at least some of  us streaming toward the exits, deciding to major in just about anything else.

(We went to History & Lit for a year, then staged a triumphant return.)

It may be that the course, Phil 3, was taught extremely well. We recall the way our teaching assistant, NAME WITHHELD, tore at his hair and agonized as he stared out the window in Emerson Hall, wondering how he could possibly know that 7 + 5 = 12.

(For the record, Miss Cummings had told us in second grade—and we still believed her!)

How well was Phil 3 taught? We can't evaluate that question now. But as enrollees' disillusionment with the young professor became more and more clear, we thought we sere seeing a very nice young person whose career was coming undone.

In fact, he was soon the hottest thing in American academic philosophy. In this account of his life, we read about his approach to the Gettier problem.

As we did, we decided, once again, that we freshmen had maybe been right.

The world we've been describing this week is the world the early Wittgenstein entered in 1911. At age 22, he presented himself, unannounced, at Russell's rooms in Cambridge. Russell soon accepted him as an unmitigated genius.

Eventually, things went sideways between the two, then they went downhill. Along the way, the later Wittgenstein surfaced, and one of two things happened:

According to that survey in 1999, he produced the most important philosophy book of the 20th century—a work which helped establish him as the most important philosopher of the past two hundred years.

Either that happened, or this did:

According to Professor Horwich, his later work was largely thrown under the bus by the philosophy establishment. For ourselves, we suspect that Horwich may be right. In the weeks ahead, we'll return to what he has said.

Along the way this week, we've taken a look at the world Wittgenstein entered, at age 22. back in 1911. It hints of Planet of the Toffs. For today, we leave you with two questions:

Did "Alice" know what time it was? And why would anyone care?

Still coming: Examples of lapses in daily logic. Also, Wittgenstein made easy

WITTGENSTEIN IN THE WORLD: "Even the best" were still at Cambridge...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 26, 2021

...during the street-fighting '60s: When our near-neighbor Thoreau went into the woods, he found himself part of a vast interactive congress of sympathy. 

"Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath," he claimed at one point in the famous book he produced. 

As presented, that was a sympathy with, rather than a sympathy for. But whatever he may have meant by the term, the sympathy to which he referred seemed to move in two directions:

"Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me," he wrote in that same chapter, Solitude. But he also asked this: 

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" 

He also offered the following view, speaking of "the indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter:"

"Such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve."

That was his measure of the sympathy the sun and wind and the rain had with our (human) race.

In the presence of such sympathy, the seer said he never felt lonely. Eventually, he decided to take a type of sidelong shot at "Cambridge College," fair Harvard:

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men [sic] than when we stay in our chambers. A man [sic] thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man [sic] and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.

The diligent student in a crowded hive was every bit as solitary as Thoreau in his hut. At any rate, he found it tiresome to be in company, "even with the best."

To what type of "sympathy" was Thoreau referring in these various passages? Possibly not to the type of sympathy we felt this morning as we read these letters to the New York Times—letters from exhausted, badly overworked nurses during this trying time. 

With those letters, we take our leave of Thoreau and think instead of Louisa May Alcott, bravely nursing in D.C. during the Civil War. One current-day nurse, "betrayed and disrespected," offers this thought in the Times:

"Get your vaccines, wear a mask, wash your hands, stay home. Is it really so hard? I never realized how selfish Americans are until this pandemic."

She doesn't attempt to explain her use of the term "selfish." That said, we're all alive at a staggering time—at a time when the non-rational impulses of our species have been put on display in a way rarely seen in the past.

Thoreau's book has been remembered. The ten shown below have been lost:

The most important philosophy books of the 20th century:
1) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
2) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 
3) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5) Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
6) W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object
7) Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity
8) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
9) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
10) A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

No one knows what Professor Quine said. No one has ever heard of Kripke. 

Some will claim that Rawls' book—it appeared in 1971—has had some effect on the public discourse. This merely shows the vast extent to which we're willing to go as we deceive ourselves.

For what it's worth, there's a certain slightly inbred quality to that list. In 1924, Whitehead came to Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career. While there, he wrote the tenth most important book of the century. Also, he served at doctoral dissertation supervisor to Quine, who wrote the sixth most important. 

Kripke and Kuhn were also Harvard guys, along with Professor Rawls. Kripke's remarkable capsule biography runs exactly like this:

Kripke began his important work on the semantics of modal logic (the logic of modal notions such as necessity and possibility) while he was still a high-school student in Omaha, Nebraska. A groundbreaking paper from this period, “A Completeness Theorem for Modal Logic,” was published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1959, during Kripke’s freshman year at Harvard University. 

In 1962 he graduated from Harvard with the only non-honorary degree he ever received, a B.S. in mathematics. He remained at Harvard until 1968, first as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and then as a lecturer. During those years he continued a series of publications extending his original results in modal logic; he also published important papers in intuitionistic logic (the logic underlying the mathematical intuitionism of L.E.J. Brouwer), set theory, and the theory of transfinite recursion (see recursive function). 

Kripke taught logic and philosophy at Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1976 and at Princeton University, as McCosh Professor of Philosophy, from 1976 until his retirement in 1998.

When we were in college, our graduate student friends—they'd both served as Rhodes Scholars, after graduating in 1960 and 1964—used to talk about Kripke. Or are we thinking of Dreben? Given how way has led on to way, it's hard to be totally sure.

The Cambridge College connections hardly end at that point. Kuhn took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, then taught there until 1956. We studied his book—quite likely the sanest of the lot—when we took Philosophy of Science from Professor Putnam in the street-fighting year of 1967-68.

Professor Putnam, a very nice person, was the 18th most important philosopher of the last two hundred years, according to this survey. He was also the man who joined with Professor Quine to formulate the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, "an argument for the reality of mathematical entities," whatever that might mean.

This was the "Cambridge College" of the 1960s. Most remarkably, we were just two or three degrees of separation from Heidegger himself, depending on how you want to score it.

We only remember the heart-shaped pool. But why go into that?

We're trying to pose a question here as we offer these bits:

In a very famous book, Thoreau engaged in a type of sympathy with everything that lives. His book is still remembered, as is the most famous book of his neighbor, Alcott. 

By way of contrast, no one has ever heard of Word and Object, let alone of Naming and Necessity And no one has the slightest idea what "model logic" is.

The authors of those most important books form a branch of the best and the brightest; most are described as logicians The world they defined and inhabited is the world Wittgenstein entered in 1911, when he appeared unannounced at Russell's rooms, over there in the other Cambridge.

They're a branch of even the best and the brightest. Their raw intellectual brilliance can't sanely be questioned.

But what in the world were they talking about? Were they talking about anything at all? Also, could a different application of their skills have defeated the current insanity?

The current insanity is quite widespread. We see no obvious route of escape. 

How many of even our best logicians have ever even tried to address it? Go ahead! Until the Greenland ice sheet goes, you can take as much time as you need!

Tomorrow: Professor Nozick's theory

WITTGENSTEIN IN THE WORLD: As Professor Quine sat at his desk...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2021

...his thoughts turned to "sense data:" When our late neighbor Thoreau ventured into the woods, the whole woods seemed to respond.

We've posted the passage in question before. The fifth chapter of Walden—it's called Solitude—starts exactly like this:

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...

To peruse the whole book, click here.

All the elements were unusually congenial to Thoreau of a delicious evening. That included the way the bullfrogs trumped to usher in the night. 

"Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me," our Concord neighbor went on to report, later in that same chapter. 

Walden is one of the best-known American books of the 19th century. It wasn't a work of academic philosophy, though its author is often referred to as a philosopher in a less restrictive sense.

According to its author, on delicious evenings of the type described, the whole body "[was] one sense." Indeed, its author was inclined to sing the wonders and joys of his senses, or of his one unified sense.

His fourth chapter was simply called Sounds. But in that next chapter, Solitude, he came close to singing the body electric.

"I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object," he wrote in that same chapter. "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."

Indeed, these experiences, borne to him by his senses, had brought him up from the dead. "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses."

Walden isn't and wasn't a book of academic philosophy. It may be unfair to ask an academic philosopher to compete with its allures. 

That said, the author of Walden, a major American book, took meaning and pleasure from his senses as he lived in the woods. More than a hundred years later, Professor Quine published the sixth most important philosophy book of the 20th century. Its title was Word and Object.

As Word and Object opens, Quine sits at his "familiar desk," presumably in his study. In Quine's account, the familiar desk "manifests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes."

At this point, Quine turns to a different critter. In paragraphs 2 and 3, he's speaking, less about his senses, more about "sense data." This is the way his book starts:

This familiar desk manifests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes. Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help to induce at our sensory surfaces. Yet our common-sense talk of physical things goes forward without benefit of explanations in more intimately sensory terms. Entification begins at arm's length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses... 

Talk of subjective sense qualities comes mainly as a derivative idiom. When one tries to describe a particular sensory quality, he typically resorts to reference to public things—describing a color as orange or heliotrope, a smell as like that of rotten eggs. Just as one sees his nose best in a mirror, removed to half the optimum focal distance, so also he best identifies his sense data by reflecting them in external objects. 

Impressed with the fact that we know external things only mediately through our senses, philosophers from Berkeley onward have undertaken to strip away the physicalistic conjectures and bare the sense data. Yet even as we try to recapture the data, in all their innocence of interpretation, we find ourselves depending upon sidelong glances into natural science. We may hold, with Berkeley, that the momentary data of vision consist of colors disposed in a spatial manifold of two dimensions; but we come to this conclusion by reasoning from the bidimensionality of the ocular surface, or by noting the illusions which can be engendered by two-dimensional artifacts such as paintings and mirrors, or, more abstractly, simply by noting that the interception of light in space must necessarily take place along a surface...

This third paragraph of the sixth most important book continues along from there. But just consider the mouthful upon which we've decided to quit—the mouthful in which we're asked to ponder this possibility:

"We may hold, with Berkeley, that the momentary data of vision consist of colors disposed in a spatial manifold of two dimensions; but we come to this conclusion by reasoning from the bidimensionality of the ocular surface, or by noting the illusions which can be engendered by two-dimensional artifacts such as paintings and mirrors, or, more abstractly, simply by noting that the interception of light in space must necessarily take place along a surface."

At this point, we're in the third paragraph of the sixth book, with miles of tough sledding ahead. 

Word and Object was not intended for general readers. To cite one example, it instantly assumes familiarity with the technical term, "sense data." It was a professional work of academic philosophy—and the sixth most important work of the entire century.

Walden is one of the most famous of all American books. Word and Object was the sixth most important philosophy book of the 20th century.

The author of the more famous book was indebted to his senses. The author of the technical book instantly turned to "sense data."

Does anyone know what "sense data" are? Should anyone actually care? 

Are Quine's concerns in any way ours? For better or worse, the leading authority on "sense data" describes such "objects" in the following way:

The theory of sense data is a view in the philosophy of perception, popularly held in the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A. J. Ayer, and G. E. Moore. Sense data are taken to be mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are known directly to us in perception. These objects are unanalyzed experiences inside the mind, which appear to subsequent, more advanced mental operations exactly as they are. 

According to the theory of sense data, sense data are objects of a certain kind. Sense data are mind-dependent objects, or at least so we're told. 

On the other hand, these "objects" are actually experiences of a certain kind. They're unanalyzed experiences inside the mind, according to the theory. 

This theory took wing in the early 20th century, with Russell fingered for blame.  As of 1960, these mind-dependent objects were starring in paragraphs 2 and 3 of the sixth most important philosophy book, but the leading authority seems to suggest that they've fallen on difficult times:

Talk of sense-data has since been largely replaced by talk of the closely related qualia. The formulation the given is also closely related. None of these terms has a single coherent and widely agreed-upon definition, so their exact relationships are unclear. One of the greatest troubling aspects to 20th century theories of sense data is its unclear rubric nature.

Whitman once sang the body electric. Sitting at a familiar desk, Quine turned to the forerunners of qualia, though the formulation "the general" is also closely related. 

"One of the greatest troubling aspects to 20th century theories of sense data is its unclear rubric nature," the leading authority convincingly says in a somewhat unclear formulation.  For those who may be inclined to question the standing of that particular source, the more august Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy clears thing up as shown below, in a very recent report:

“Sense data," or “sense datum” in the singular, is a technical term in philosophy that means “what is given to sense." Sense data constitute what we, as perceiving subjects, are directly aware of in perceptual experience, prior to cognitive acts such as inferring, judging, or affirming that such-and-such objects or properties are present. In vision, sense data are typically described as patches exhibiting colors and shapes. For the other senses, they would manifest sounds, tastes, odors, and tactile qualities. Suppose that you are looking at a brown table with a white coaster on it; your sense data would be a patch of brown corresponding to the brown expanse in your field of view, along with a roundish-shaped white patch. Based on such data, you might come to affirm that a brown thing and a white thing, or a table and a coaster, are present before you.

After you become aware of your sense data, you might come to affirm that "a table" is present before you. Or perhaps a familiar desk.

Was something "wrong" with "the theory of sense data," a theory which is said to date to such figures as Russell? Have theories of "qualia" tended to clear things up? 

Is it possible that the successors to Russell and Quine have clarified this matter? On the other hand, is it possible that this sort of rumination never made any real sense at all?

At least for today, we aren't going to try to answer those valuable questions. But this is the world Wittgenstein entered when he arrived at Cambridge in 1911, presenting himself to Russell, unannounced, at the age of 22 years.

Wittgenstein was just 22 when he arrived on the scene. Russell soon concluded that he was a genius. Eventually, Wittgenstein turned against this somewhat peculiar world.

Next week, we plan to make the later Wittgenstein easy. For today, we offer you this:

In a major survey of philosophy professors, Russell was said to be have co-written the fifth most important philosophy book of the 20th century. Quine's most influential book was rated the sixth most important.

Were their concerns our concerns? Were their concerns anyone's concerns? Did their alleged concerns even make sense? 

Eventually, Wittgenstein seemed to say that they didn't. He seemed to say that in Philosophical Investigations (1953), the posthumous book which was judged to be the last century's most important.

Today, none of these books ever get discussed. They're part of no public discussion.

Except for Wittgenstein's book, it isn't clear that they should be discussed. In our view, Wittgenstein's book is in principle highly instructive, though it's also absurdly opaque.

In our view, the history we're reciting involves abdication of duty. In our view, we're describing the flight of the logicians—the refusal of a certain elite to serve, even perhaps to make clear sense, as they sit in familiar chairs in familiar clubs and conduct opaque discussions.

We badly need help with our daily logic. Have our logicians refused to serve? Would they even know how to serve? We're just asking questions!

According to the survey in question, Wittgenstein wrote the most important philosophy book of the 20th century. But none of those books ever get discussed, and there may be a reason for that.

Tomorrow: We return to our own freshman year

WITTGENSTEIN IN THE WORLD: As Bertrand Russell sat at his table...

TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2021

...he couldn't quite name its color: When the sixth most important book arrived, we greedily fell upon it. 

As you may recall from yesterday's session, the start of that book—Word and Object—finds its author, Professor Quine, sitting at a "familiar desk."

The desk was manifesting its presence. As we noted yesterday, the sixth most important philosophy book of the 20th century begins in the manner shown:

This familiar desk manifests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes. Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help to induce at our sensory surfaces. Yet our common-sense talk of physical things goes forward without benefit of explanations in more intimately sensory terms. Entification begins at arm's length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses... 

In the opening sentence of Word and Object, Professor Quine was at his familiar desk, discussing entification. 

The book was published in 1960. Forty-four years earlier, Bertrand Russell had been positioned in a similar way at the start of an earlier book.

That book was called The Problems of Philosophy. We've occasionally been moved to ask who such "problems" are problems for, but back in 1916, they were problems for Russell, an extraordinarily high-IQ person who was also deeply involved in the affairs of the world.

In 2009, Professor Quine was named in a survey as the fifth most important philosopher of the previous two hundred years. Russell, a bit of a polymath, was listed as third most important.

At the start of his earlier book, Russell seems to be sitting at a table rather than at a desk. But, before we learn that fact, he teases us with this, the start of his second paragraph:

In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong...

We're "very likely to be wrong," Russell seems to say, even about our own immediate experiences! Only after a great amount of thought should we feel entitled to say that we actually know the things we're inclined to believe. 

In some sense, something like that could even be true. But then, as this paragraph continues, we learn where Russell is as he makes these claims.

Rather, we learn where it seems to him that he is:

...It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth's rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.

We've now seen the whole of Russell's second paragraph. The specific example we've been asked to consider is this:

As Russell writes this early paragraph, it seems to him that he's sitting in a chair, positioned in front of a table. It seems to him that it's a table of a certain shape. 

He even believes that other people will see that same table and that same chair should they venture into his room. Presumably, this assumes that Russell is actually in his room.

It seems to Russell that he's in that chair and is perched in front of that table. But based upon this paragraph, much careful discussion will be required before he or we can be sure that he has stated these claims "in a form that is wholly true." It almost seems that statements like these are "very likely to be wrong!"

Is there anything "wrong" with this sort of thing? Not necessarily, no. In fairness, though, we have to say this:

By the time we get to paragraph 3, the third most important philosopher of the past two hundred years may almost seem to be pushing things, if only a tiny bit. Returning to the aforementioned table, Russell offers this about the table's color:

To return to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others. And we know that even from a given point of view the colour will seem different by artificial light, or to a colour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no colour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged. This colour is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When, in ordinary life, we speak of the colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.

To peruse the whole of Russell's book, you can just click here. 

Returning to the table. In the dark, we can't see it at all. So how can we say that it's brown? 

Also, the table might even appear to be red if we see it under a bright red light—and some people are "color-blind." To avoid favoritism, we're thereby compelled to deny that, "in itself," the table has any one particular color at all!

How can we say a table is brown when it can't be seen in the dark? Russell, the third most important philosopher of the past two hundred years, opened this book as shown. Forty-four years later, the fifth most important philosopher opened his most influential book in a similar manner.

Is there anything "wrong" with such musings? We're willing to tell you no. Meanwhile, though, children are drowning in the sea, or are being trampled to death on their way to an airport in Kabul. Many events will be taking place as we instruct teen-aged college students to reason, or to consider reasoning. in the somewhat peculiar way shown.

By any measure, Bertrand Russell was a brilliant scholar. He was also a devoted participant in the affairs of the wider world. Tomorrow, we'll offer an example—an example drawn from the last few weeks in Albert Einstein's remarkable life.

Russell was a brilliant scholar. But all through the last century, various toffs were arrayed at various tables and desks, comfortably seated in chairs at the club,  making claims as silly as those which appear at the start of Russell's book.

We refer to claims in which a table has no specific color because it can't be seen in the dark, or in which a quarter isn't really round because it looks a different way if you hold it on an angle. There's nothing "wrong" with musings like these—unless we think about the questions which go unexplored as these explorations take place.

That said:

Throughout the bulk of the twentieth century, scholars sat in comfortable chairs at the club and engaged in elaborate musings—elaborate musings which might seem somewhat odd. In 1916, Russell sat in front of a table whose color he couldn't necessarily state. 

Forty-four years later, Quine sat at a familiar desk and was soon discussing "sense data," whatever they are or were.

Viewed from one angle, this is the world Wittgenstein entered in October 1911, when he journeyed from his native Vienna to Trinity College in Cambridge and presented himself, unannounced, at Russell's rooms. 

We'd say there was, and still is, fault to be found with the world Wittgenstein entered. For today, we'll make our statement in the form of a question:

Have the logicians fled our world? Borrowing from Mariel Hemingway, how often are their concerns ours?

Tomorrow: Sitting at a familiar desk, Quine's thoughts turned to "sense data"

WITTGENSTEIN IN THE WORLD: The sixth greatest book arrived in the mail!

MONDAY, AUGUST 23, 2021

We hungrily fell upon it: Near the end of the week, our new book arrived in the mail. Hungrily, we fell upon it.

It was the sixth most important philosophy book of the twentieth century—and not only that! It had been written by the fifth most important philosopher of the past two hundred years!

The book in question was Word and Object. The philosopher was Willard Van Orman Quine, a Harvard professor of long standing and of unquestioned academic renown.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations had been published in 1953. In the surveys to which we've referred, it was rated the most important philosophy book of the twentieth century—and Wittgenstein himself had been rated the most important philosopher of those two hundred years.

Hungrily, though, we fell upon Word and Object, which appeared in 1960. At the beginning of Chapter One, this is what we found:

Chapter I. Language and Truth

1. Beginning with Ordinary Things

This familiar desk manifests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes. Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help to induce at our sensory surfaces. Yet our common-sense talk of physical things goes forward without benefit of explanations in more intimately sensory terms. Entification begins at arm's length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses. In this there is little cause for wonder. Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable mouthing of words under conspicuously intersubjective circumstances. Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

Talk of subjective sense qualities comes mainly as a derivative idiom. When one tries to describe a particular sensory quality, he typically resorts to reference to public things—describing a color as orange or heliotrope, a smell as like that of rotten eggs. Just as one sees his nose best in a mirror, removed to half the optimum focal distance, so also he best identifies his sense data by reflecting them in external objects. 

Reader, when's the last time you saw an account of the way "entification" begins? For us, it's been quite a while!

At any rate, so begins the sixth most important philosophy text of the twentieth century. By the end of paragraph 2 (and then again in paragraph 3), the reader has encountered a technical term—"sense data." 

Perhaps for that reason, a general reader will possibly feel that he or she has no idea what is under discussion at this point. That doesn't necessarily mean that this isn't a valuable book. 

Still, we'll offer this:

"Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name?" 

Dreaming a little, that general reader may start to "feel the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe," the tyranny of the scholastics. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings may seem things in some procession of the dead as Quine's language causes her to flash upon her Cummings:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, 
or which i cannot touch because they are too near 

For us, the opening of this book came as a bit of a surprise, but also brought a rush of unpleasant associations and memories. Inevitably, though, we struggled to be thoughtful and fair!

Because we felt ourselves to be somewhat distanced from the start of Chapter I,  it occurred to us that we probably should have started with Quine's preface. 

After flipping backward several pages, we found that it started like this:

Preface 

Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when. Hence there is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men's dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations. An effect of recognizing this limitation is that the enterprise of translation is found to be involved in a certain systematic indeterminacy; and this is the main theme of Chapter II. 

The indeterminacy of translation invests even the question what objects to construe a term as true of. Studies of the semantics of reference consequently turn out to make sense only when directed upon substantially our language, from within. But we do remain free to reflect, thus parochially, on the development and structure of our own referential apparatus; and this I do in ensuing chapters. In so doing one encounters various anomalies and conflicts that are implicit in this apparatus (Chapter IV), and is moved to adopt remedies in the spirit of modern logic (Chapters V and VI). ...

"The indeterminacy of translation invests even the question what objects to construe a term as true of?" That's what it actually says.  Meanwhile, we only made you skim that far to reach the reference to "the spirit of modern logic." 

It is that spirit, it seems to us, which may be in question here.

For unknown reasons, Quine started his preface by describing his theme for Chapter II. As the preface continues, Chapter I is never addressed. 

But in the first paragraph of the preface, it's clear that this is not a book for general readers. Meanwhile, the first two sentences of that second paragraph are hard to recognize as conventional English. 

Even earlier, in paragraph 1, we've been offered this:

"There is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men's dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations." 

No general reader will have any idea what the professor is talking about. It's sometimes said that the work of the later Wittgenstein, which began being published in 1953, raised a larger question:

Can people like the writer of Word and Object justify the claim that they know what they're talking about—or the claim that they're talking about anything at all? In the end, we won't be trying to settle that question, but we'll note that the question's been raised.

At any rate, what on earth—what in the world—is Word and Object about? It was the sixth most important book of the century. But what was it talking about?

As that "old catastrophe" crawled up through our souls, we decided to seek an overview from the leading authority on this book. At that site, this is the overview we found, referred to as a synopsis:

Synopsis

Quine emphasizes his naturalism, the doctrine that philosophy should be pursued as part of natural science. He argues in favor of naturalizing epistemology, supports physicalism over phenomenalism and mind-body dualism, and extensionality over intensionality, develops a behavioristic conception of sentence-meaning, theorizes about language learning, speculates on the ontogenesis of reference, explains various forms of ambiguity and vagueness, recommends measures for regimenting language to eliminate ambiguity and vagueness as well as to make perspicuous the logic and ontic commitments of theories, argues against quantified modal logic and the essentialism it presupposes, argues for Platonic realism in mathematics, rejects instrumentalism in favor of scientific realism, develops a view of philosophical analysis as explication, argues against analyticity and for holism, against countenancing propositions, and tries to show that the meanings of theoretical sentences are indeterminate and that the reference of terms is inscrutable.

Say what? That synopsis may make the book seem unnecessarily arch. 

With that in mind, we turned to Penguin Random House, a publisher of the book. When we did, we found this account of a 2013 edition:

ABOUT WORD AND OBJECT, NEW EDITION

A new edition of Quine’s most important work.

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, “Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when.” As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy’s turn away from metaphysics and what Churchland calls the “phony precision” of conceptual analysis.

In the course of his discussion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference, Quine considers the indeterminacy of translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language’s referential apparatus, clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects. In addition to Churchland’s foreword, this edition offers a new preface by Quine’s student and colleague Dagfinn Follesdal that describes the never-realized plans for a second edition of Word and Object, in which Quine would offer a more unified treatment of the public nature of meaning, modalities, and propositional attitudes.

The edition we purchased didn't include that foreword by Churchland—and surely, no one wants to encourage some sort of "phony precision." But we offer you this question:

Friend, do you feel that our failing public discourse has been suffering, down through the years, from the indeterminacy of translation, from the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language’s referential apparatus, from a need to clarify semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and has been in need of reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects?

Is that what's been ailing our discourse, friend? Is that where it's gone so wrong?

In the rumination we've begun in the past few months, we're basically considering "the flight of the logicians"—the failure of our high academic class to speak to the problems which ail us and our failed discourse.

(We're able to see no obvious way to recover from that failure.)

It's always possible that Quine's book—the sixth most important of the past century—actually performed that function, or something equally valuable. But we'll suggest that, ar least on its face, the allegedly "influential" book may carry a different feel.

The later Wittgenstein was bad enough; his work was extremely opaque. But at least it's said that he pushed back against this general sort of thing—and at some point, most likely next week, we're going to make Wittgenstein easy.

This week, let's consider Wittgenstein's place in the wider failing world. Let's consider the world within which the twentieth century's most important philosophy book was written, was fated to take its largely inscrutable form.

Tomorrow: Bertrand Russell, 1916, at that same "familiar desk"

WITTGENSTEIN MADE EASY: What were this other professor's concerns?

FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2021

Wittgenstein in the world: "Your concerns are my concerns," one character said to the other.

At the time, the critical world took the statement in stride. Later, the character's statement began to seem possibly somewhat odd.

The film was Manhattan (1979). The character as Tracy, a 17-year-old high school kid—though in fairness, a student at Dalton. 

When Tracy made the statement in question, she was addressing her 42-year-old, twice-divorced, television comedy writer boyfriend, Isaac Davis. In the free-living late 1970s, her statement, memorably delivered, had actually seemed to make sense. 

Later, noting the difference in age, some people began to wonder if her concerns really could have been his.

In the last few days, we've been asking about academic philosophy's concerns. More specifically, have its concerns been our concerns in any discernible way? Have they been the public's concerns?

Yesterday, we attempted to list the concerns of the late, extremely highly regarded Professor Willard Van Orman Quine.  Professor Quine was very highly regarded, presumably with good reason:

In a 1999 survey of philosophy professors, his otherwise unknown 1960 book, Word and Object, was rated the sixth most important philosophy text of the 20th century. 

Ten years later, he topped even that. Another survey of specialists rated him the fifth most important philosopher of the past two hundred years! 

Professor Quine was very highly regarded, presumably for good reason. But what exactly were his concerns, and to what extent were his concerns ours? 

Yesterday, we tried to puzzle those questions out. We met with little success.

Speaking more broadly, what exactly have been the concerns of modern academic philosophy? We ask this question to set the stage for our effort to make Wittgenstein easy, an undertaking we've postponed until next week.

Professor Horwich has said, we think correctly, that the later Wittgenstein's work undermined the traditional work being done in this field. That said, what were the methods and the concerns of the field as Wittgenstein found it?

Today, we apologize in advance for the way we'll tackle that question. We apologized in advance on Wednesday, and now we do so again.

We apologize because we're going to discuss the work of another extremely high-ranking professor. That would be the late David Lewis, whose name we met, three days ago, in the following context:

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908 – 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century." From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.

Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. Quine was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations...

[...]

At Harvard, Quine helped supervise the Harvard graduate theses of, among others, David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Hao Wang, Hugues LeBlanc, Henry Hiz and George Myro. 

We're skipping a lot of content today about Quine's many achievements and concerns. On the whole, that's the material we reviewed in yesterday's report. Today, we'll discuss a further bit of research we conducted, within the past week, when we first perused this material:

When we first perused this material, we were struck by the list of scholars whose graduate work Quine had supervised. Which concerns were their concerns? We found ourselves asking that question, and so we decided to click.

We clicked on (the late) David Lewis first. By all accounts, he was a thoroughly good, decent person—but what were his academic concerns? When we clicked, here's the thumbnail account we found: 

David Kellogg Lewis (1941 – 2001) was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.

Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. But Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) and Counterfactuals (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists along with a competing account from Robert Stalnaker; together the Stalnaker-Lewis theory of counterfactuals has become perhaps the most pervasive and influential account of its type in the philosophical and linguistic literature. His metaphysics incorporated seminal contributions to quantified modal logic, the development of counterpart theory, counterfactual causation, and the position called "Humean supervenience." Most comprehensively in On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis defended modal realism: the view that possible worlds exist as concrete entities in logical space, and that our world is one among many equally real possible ones.

That was the start of what we found. We had several reactions.

As before, so too here! For starters, we were struck by the fact that Professor Lewis "is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century."

We were struck by that fact for the following reason. As with the major philosophers on the lists to which we've referred, no one outside the field of academic philosophy has ever heard of Professor Lewis, despite his high rank within the field.

That isn't meant as a comment on the quality of his work, which by all accounts was very high. That said, it may be a comment on the nature of his concerns.

As a graduate student pursuing his doctorate, Quine was supervised by Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote the fifth and tenth most important philosophy books of the 20th century. Maintaining the tradition of excellence, Lewis was supervised by Quine, who wrote the sixth most important book. 

Lewis emerged as one of the last century's most important philosophers. But what did he write and speak about? What were his concerns?

For starters, we were struck by the vast array of fields in which it's said that Professor Lewis excelled. As the summary of his work begins, we're told that he made significant contributions in the following fields:

Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of probability
Epistemology
Philosophical logic
Aesthetics
Philosophy of mathematics
Philosophy of time
Philosophy of science

He made significant contributions in those eight fields, but no one in the general public has ever heard his name!

That doesn't mean that there was anything "wrong" with his work. But it may have something to say about his discipline's ongoing concerns.

Meanwhile, we're told that those significant contributions  aren't what Professor Lewis is "most famous for." He's most famous for his work in three other fields (metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics), we're told—and we're also told this:

His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists along with a competing account from Robert Stalnaker; together the Stalnaker-Lewis theory of counterfactuals has become perhaps the most pervasive and influential account of its type in the philosophical and linguistic literature. His metaphysics incorporated seminal contributions to quantified modal logic, the development of counterpart theory, counterfactual causation, and the position called "Humean supervenience."

The account continues from there. We offer the following comments:

According to this account, Professor Lewis' works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists. 

He also made seminal contributions to  quantified modal logic, the development of counterpart theory, counterfactual causation, and the position called "Humean supervenience." But let's focus on the material we've set in bold.

Professor Lewis, a good, decent person, studied under the fifth most important philosopher of the past two hundred years. He himself is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, and he's principally famous—though only within the academy—for "his works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals."

At this point, we offer a confession. We have no idea what "counterfactual conditionals" are. We don't think we've ever heard the term. Neither has anyone else.

For that reason, our clicking continued. When we clicked again, here's part of what we found:

Counterfactual conditionals 

Counterfactual conditionals (also subjunctive or X-marked) are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.

Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where its antecedent holds. More recent formal analyses have treated them using tools such as causal models and dynamic semantics. Other research has addressed their metaphysical, psychological, and grammatical underpinnings, while applying some of the resultant insights to fields including history, marketing, and epidemiology.

Counterfactuals were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals. They're one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic.

We're reminded of a question we often ask concerning a set of concerns sometimes referred to, in course titles, as "Problems in Philosophy."

The question we sometimes ask is this:

Who exactly are these "problems" problems for? (With the proper delivery, it works.)

Let's say it again! We aren't attempting to doubt that quality of Lewis' work in these various fields. We aren't even saying that these problems have no particular utility, although we'll admit that we may have our doubts.

It may be that these pursuits have some significant social utility of which we're unaware. But no one in the general public has any idea what that overview means, and our society's crying need for help with our clownish "daily logic" has been wholly ignored by the giants who have patrolled this larger field.

Were Tracy's concerns really Isaac's concerns? Manhattan was a work of fiction. In the end, there's no way to answer that question. 

But how about the general field of academic philosophy? Have its concerns been our concerns? It should be possible to answer that alternate question.

Professor Quine was a giant in the field. Professor Lewis was widely regarded as a very important philosopher.

Out here where the people live, no one has ever heard their names. No one has the slightest idea what they spent their lives discussing and exploring.

Did their concerns have real utility, or were they the highly particular pseudo-concerns of a cosseted elite? It ought to be possible to answer that question, but this is the field the early Wittgenstein encountered when he journeyed to Cambridge and conquered Bertrand Russell—and this is the field he's sometimes said to have undermined with his later work.

Next week, we plan to make Wittgenstein easy. At some point, we'll even explain why such an undertaking might matter in the wider world.

For today, we'll end with one more brush with greatness, one involving Professor Putnam, he of "the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities" (whatever that might mean).

In the street-fighting autumn of '67, we took, or perhaps pretended to take, Professor Quine's course, Deductive Logic. Though in truth we earned an F, we were given a D.

We also took Professor Putnam's course, Philosophy of Science. In that 2009 survey, he was rated the 18th most important philosopher of the past two hundred years, with Wittgenstein ranked number one.

There was no sign of that from Hilary Putnam. His concerns were our concerns. He gave us the standard straight A!

Monday: Bertrand Russell, very first page, "The Problems of Philosophy"

WITTGENSTEIN MADE EASY: Do you know what modern philosophy does?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 19, 2021

We have no idea: We'll call it a brush with greatness.

In the street-fighting fall of 1967, there we sat, though leaving perhaps about ten minutes early, taking a course in Deductive Logic from Willard Van Orman Quine.

By all accounts, Quine was a giant in his field. (Also, we've never heard anyone say that he wasn't a good, decent person.)

Back in 1999, a survey of philosophy professors ranked Quine's 1960 book, Word and Object, the sixth most important philosophy text of the twentieth century.  

Ten years later, Quine topped even that. In a somewhat similar survey, he was named the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. This leads to a type of puzzle:

In a survey of philosophy specialists, Quine, who died in December 2000, was rated the fifth most important philosopher in the past two hundred years. But very few people in today's wider world have ever heard his name, and even fewer would have any idea what he said, did, demonstrated, proved, thought about or propounded.

Indeed, very few people could tell you much about any of the philosophers, or philosophy texts, which rose to the top in those two surveys. Very few people have any idea what this academic discipline is really all about.

What's modern (academic) philosophy about? Again, we'll offer a guess:

Very few non-specialists would have any real idea. This strikes us as a somewhat noteworthy state of affairs—and it leads us to further questions:

Does modern academic philosophy possess any social utility? Whatever the answer might be, what are these modern academics actually working on?

What is modern academic philosophy about? What are its possible accomplishments? What re its concerns? 

As we sit here typing today, we ourselves have no real idea. In the case of Professor Quine, we decided to review the basics of his (highly distinguished) career—and when we turned to the leading authority on that topic, this is what we found:

Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. Quine was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities [11]. However, he was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough" [12]. He led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" [13] and developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input" [13]. He also advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.

His major writings include the papers "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidated Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable," and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, undermining the then-popular logical positivism, advocating instead a form of semantic holism. They also include the books The Web of Belief, which advocates a kind of coherentism, and Word and Object (1960), which further developed these positions and introduced Quine's famous indeterminacy of translation thesis, advocating a behaviorist theory of meaning.

A 2009 poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries...

That overview starts with a statement which will likely sound familiar to the non-specialist:

"Quine was a teacher of logic," it says. That sounds like a subject with which the typical non-specialist will be familiar—but the illusion of familiarity is likely to end right there.

Quine was also a "teacher of set theory," we're told. Few non-specialists will feel that they know what that designation means. Beyond that, we're soon introduced to an array of "famous" statements and findings which very few non-specialists are likely to understand.

We're told that Quine developed "his own system of mathematics and set theory," a system which has its own name. We're told that he and Professor Putnam "developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument." It was "an argument for the reality of mathematical entities," whatever that might be taken to mean. 

We're told that Quine "developed an influential naturalized epistemology." Also, he "advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis."

He elucidated Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, offering a "famous dictum of ontological commitment" as he did. He advocated a form of semantic holism, undermining the more popular logical positivism.

In a way which seems almost Onionesque, we're also told that he "advocated a kind of coherentism"—a term which sounds like it might belong in somebody's famous quip.  He further developed his advocacy of coherentism in Word and Object, the book which introduced his famous "indeterminacy of translation thesis."

That stance was unveiled in Word and Object. According to one survey of specialists, it was the sixth most important philosophy book of the 20th century.

The average "educated person" will surely feel that he knows what "logic" is. That said, such people will likely have little idea what any of these other formulations mean, and the notion that Quine advocated a version of  something called "coherentism" may sound like something drawn directly from a college humor text.

What the heck is coherentism? Skillfully, we checked. 

We're not real sure we should have. After a muddy attempt at an overview, we were handed this:

Definition

As a theory of truth, coherentism restricts true sentences to those that cohere with some specified set of sentences. Someone's belief is true if and only if it is coherent with all or most of his or her other (true) beliefs. The terminology of coherence is then said to correlate with truth via some concept of what qualifies all truth, such as absoluteness or universalism. These further terms become the qualifiers of what is meant by a truth statement, and the truth-statements then decide what is meant by a true belief. Usually, coherence is taken to imply something stronger than mere consistency. Statements that are comprehensive and meet the requirements of Occam's razor are usually to be preferred.

As an illustration of the principle, if people lived in a virtual reality universe, they could see birds in the trees that aren't really there. Not only are the birds not really there, but the trees aren't really there either. The people may or may not know that the bird and the tree are there, but in either case there is a coherence between the virtual world and the real one, expressed in terms of true beliefs within available experience. Coherence is a way of explicating truth values while circumventing beliefs that might be false in any way. More traditional critics from the correspondence theory of truth have said that it cannot have contents and proofs at the same time, unless the contents are infinite, or unless the contents somehow exist in the form of proof. Such a form of 'existing proof' might seem ridiculous, but coherentists tend to think it is non-problematic. It therefore falls into a group of theories that are sometimes deemed excessively generalistic, what Gabor Forrai calls 'blob realism'.

Intriguing! As a theory of truth, coherentism restricts true sentences to those that cohere with some specified set of sentences. 

By way of contrast, more traditional critics from the correspondence theory of truth have said that it cannot have contents and proofs at the same time, unless the contents are infinite, or unless the contents somehow exist in the form of proof!  So it went as the leading authority unspooled these philosophical concepts!

Each word in that passage is part of the English language. We're not sure that that can be said of the passage as a whole.

None of this has made it easier for us to answer the questions we've posed today. In closing for the day, we will mention this:

Within our gruesome national discourse, we've long had a crying daily need for help with our daily logic. Professor Quine was an undisputed giant in his field—but was his field connected in any way to our daily needs?

Failed logic is found wherever you look as our failing nation slides toward the sea. Have the giants of this field ever noticed this small, minor problem?

Tomorrow: The interests of those he advised

WITTGENSTEIN MADE EASY: The most important book of the 20th century...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18, 2021

...leaves observers befuddled: If memory serves, this was the week when we were going to make Wittgenstein easy. 

We often think of Wittgenstein's later work when we read books, or watch PBS programs, designed to make Einstein (or Gödel) easy. We thought we'd just go ahead and make Wittgenstein easy, thereby facilitating a later approach to the Einstein-made-easy books.

A bit later on, we would explain why normal people might imaginably care about any of this. This would have involved, and still will involve, a discussion of "the flight of the logicians"—the process by which our failing nation's many logicians have walked away from their posts. 

As it turns out, we're not going to make Wittgenstein easy until this time next week. As described in our past two reports, our attention has been waylaid by a pair of surveys in which groups of philosophy professors, or their near approximations, have identified Wittgenstein as the most important philosopher of the past several centuries.

In the first of these surveys, 414 philosophy teachers responded to a questionnaire which asked them to name the most important philosophy text of the 20th century. As you may recall, this top ten list emerged:

The most important philosophy books of the 20th century:
1) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
2) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 
3) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5) Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
6) W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object
7) Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity
8) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
9) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
10) A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

There you see the ten most important books. As you may recall, we had a certain reaction to that list. 

Those volumes had been selected as the most important philosophy texts of the 20th century. We were struck by the fact that very few "general readers" would have any idea who those authors were, or would know what they had said in their important books.

We see no Silent Spring on that list—no book which affected the public discussion in a way many people could (at least broadly) describe. In the main, we see a list of books which originated inside the academy and basically managed to stay there.

That doesn't mean that something is "wrong" with those books, although, in many cases, something most likely is. For example, the book which was chosen as most important is spectacularly opaque—is very hard to read and understand.

In his preface to Philosophical Investigation, Wittgenstein apologizes for his failure to produce a more readable book. The beginning and end of that preface can be seen right here:

The thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another.—It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.——And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.

[...]

I make [my remarks] public with misgivings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

I should have liked to produce a good book. It has not turned out that way, but the time is past in which I could improve it.

Cambridge, January 1945

From that account, it isn't clear  how the format of the published text differs from the format its author had originally pictured. 

But as he closes, the author says that he hasn't "produced a good book." He says he would have liked to produce a better result, but that the time was past in which he could hope to do so.

Was that merely the modesty of an intellectual giant? Everything is possible, but for various reasons, this most important book of the century is quite hard to read. 

Given the way these matters work, commenters will insist that they understand the book perfectly. They will suggest that we should find an easier book, one so simple that even we can understand it.

With that in mind, we'll offer a passage from Professor Klagge's 2020 book, Simply Wittgenstein—a passage in which Klagge explains that the book in question is just intrinsically hard:

Wittgenstein’s writings create a certain fascination among readers or would-be readers. The one book that he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was cryptic, oracular, and obscure; thus, it seems profound even if it is not understood. A second book, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published shortly after his death, was more extensive and wide-ranging, but without a clear point. It could be, and was, put to a wide range of uses, both inside philosophy and outside. Figures as diverse as Stanley Hauerwas in theology, Marjorie Perloff in literary criticism, Steve Reich in music composition, and the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, have drawn on Wittgenstein’s work for guidance or inspiration.

But as important as Wittgenstein is taken to be, I have not met a person who has tried to read either of his two great books and come away without a feeling of deep frustration. This is especially true of readers with little background in philosophy, but it is even true of those with a good deal of background and experience in philosophy. Invariably, the problem is that the context is missing.

It is most common to put the book down after several pages and wonder what Wittgenstein could be talking about. Unfortunately, he gives us almost no guidance, and it is difficult to guess for ourselves. So, it is best to read the books in the company of a guide. That is the purpose of Simply Wittgenstein...

According to Professor Klagge, he's never met anyone who tried to read Philosophical Investigations "without a feeling of deep frustration."  

According to Klagge, it's hard to discern what Wittgenstein is talking about, and he gives readers almost no guidance! Borrowing from an old joke, this is what philosophers say about the books in their field which are most important! 

As a general matter, we agree with Professor Klagge's assessment of the maddening inscrutability of Wittgenstein's book. Oddly enough, we also think that Philosophical Investigations can serve an invaluable source of badly needed cogency / clarity skills—types of skills which are badly needed "in the darkness of this time."

Still and all, we return to our point. Very few people have any idea who Ludwig Wittgenstein was. Very few people have any idea what he said in his two major books—in the two books which were chosen as the first and fourth most important philosophy texts of the 20th century!

As with Wittgenstein, so with the others on that list. In its face, this strikes us as a peculiar state of affairs. 

Next week, we'll go ahead and make Wittgenstein easy. In the last two days of this week, we'll undertake an uncomfortable task, one for which we apologize in advance:

We'll suggest that something may be slightly odd about the work of several major figures in 20th century philosophy.

Stating the obvious, these major figures are enormously bright. It may even be that their work in the field had or has some sort of public utility.

That said, we're going to suggest that, viewed from the outside, there's a bit of an Onionesque quality to standard descriptions of their work. 

Has philosophy left daily conerns behind? With apologies for our tone, we'll consider that question in the days ahead.

Tomorrow: In essence, a private language