Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

A dialogue.

-!- Euthyphro has joined #archon.

-!- Socrates has joined #archon.

Euthyphro: wtf

Euthyphro: What are you doing here, Socrates? Why’d you leave #lyceum? Surely you aren’t here to rant to the ops?

Socrates: Not rant, no. Someone’s been flaming me.

Euthyphro: Who’s that?

Socrates: Some dude on tumblr. I hardly know him. He’s called Meletus. Perhaps you’ve seen his site? He’s got long straight hair and an ugly beard in his profile pic.

Euthyphro: What’s he accusing you of?

Socrates: Oh, it’s serious business. He says he knows the youth are corrupted and he knows who’s corrupted them. I figure he must be really wise, and since I’m the reverse of wise, he’s found me out and he’s going to accuse me of corrupting his little friends. I’m steering the gullible away from great music and getting them to listen to all sorts of mainstream crap, he says. Of all the flamers, he seems to be the only one who’s starting the right way, by cultivating virtue in the noobs. Like any good mod he’s taking care of the newbies, and clearing out us trolls. That’s only the first step: afterwards he’ll have to attend to the veterans, the early adopters, and if he does as well as he’s started, he’s going to be a great benefactor.

Euthyphro: That’s total BS. I’m sure nothing will come of this.

Socrates: So what you doing here, Euthyphro?

Euthyphro: I came here to announce my scathing review I just posted.

Socrates: Who are you reviewing?

Euthyphro: You’re going to think I’m crazy if I tell you.

Socrates: Oh come on. Tell me.

Euthyphro: It’s my father’s new album.

Socrates: WHAT!

Socrates: Jeez. A man must know a lot about music before he could bring himself to do something like that.

Euthyphro: Indeed, Socrates, he must. But seriously, the music sucks. It’s like a combo of screeching cats and Britney Spears samples, on top of every sellout no-good indie band ever. Except with a hint of jazz.

Socrates: Good heavens, Euthyphro, you gotta know a lot about this stuff to be able to say it sucks with such certainty.

Socrates: I know what I’m gonna do! I don’t think I can do better than to become your follower. When Meletus comes on here, I’m gonna say: you, Meletus, acknowledge Euthyphro to be a great poster, and sound in his opinions; and if you approve of him you should approve of me, and retract your flames; and if you disapprove, you should begin by flaming the guy I follow, and who’ll be the ruin not of the noobs but of the veterans; I mean myself, being busy reblogging him, and his own father too.

Socrates: I’ve always been interested in music criticism, and in order to defend myself against Meletus’s flames, I’d be grateful if you could tell me what good music is, and what bad music is.

Euthyphro: Yeah sure, Socrates.

Socrates: So what’s good music, and what’s bad music?

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Re this and this: the internet made it unimaginably easier for strangers to connect and become each others’ audiences, especially across geography and social strata. It did not give you the superpower to instantly gain the awareness and respect of every admirable and influential person on the planet, even if you are the sort of person doing the sort of things these people would very much like to have in their lives.

Everyone, I think, has space for some awesome in their life, certainly in their online habits. None of us are so successful that our schedules are overfilled with awesome and there’s nothing or no one we could bump out in order to make room for great people doing great things. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything automatic or instantaneous about such people entering our lives. Even if we are actively looking for them, there’s so much noise that we can’t give absolutely every input equal treatment, and there’s always a risk that some of that input will be unfairly discarded. And we have no obligation to be fair to every input, either. These are our own lives, and those who happen to be influential have no greater obligation than the rest of us to divide their attention equally and fairly according to, I don’t know, the internet or the majority of the public. When Merlin Mann says scarcity is real, we ought to listen, not because he’s Merlin Mann but because he’s making a really obvious and true observation.

I have a moderately popular blog. Nowhere near Merlin’s level, but I have enough readers that I think my audience is significantly larger than most of the millions of blogs on Tumblr, which is not to say it’s very large in absolute terms, nor relative to really popular blogs. Far be it from me to give advice on popularity contests, but I’ve achieved some things and what I’ve learned is this: it takes patience. The tools I use are so great that I don’t have to do much active promoting; just by doing what I like and what feels natural and right for me and my existing audience, that audience grows. In the very beginning, I tried to interact with more popular blogs to get my name out there, but I learned that lesson fast: you don’t need to do that, or you can limit how much you do it, and if it feels weird or wrong it’s probably better for you in the long run if you don’t. It takes time, but if you consistently work on doing great stuff — while there’s still nothing automatic in the process — the chances grow, and grow, and grow that you will gain the audience and respect you seek. They grow with time. I don’t want to bask in any small glory I may have attained, but now, I have an audience of some size and some people I respect and admire know about me and what I do and have spoken favorably about it. Those are things to be proud of, and they came with time. I didn’t really have to do much actively promoting it: I only did what I felt was right, I spent time and effort trying to do great things, and I had lots of patience. 2+ years of chipping at it, and I’m where I am now; presumably, in a year or two or three I will be even closer to where I want to be (although I’m comfortable where I am at the moment).

I don’t want to appear to be giving advice on something I don’t know much about, but here goes: from someone who has gained what I’d call a respectable audience and the awareness and respect of some people he admires, to people who wish for but don’t feel they have those things: all it takes is some patience (and of course effort to be great). That’s it. Even I could do it, and in many ways I’m a total idiot. I don’t know about networking, for instance. You don’t need it, you just need patience, and you need to contact the people you want to have contact with in contexts you feel are natural, in ways you feel add value to both of your lives. All you need to do is have patience and put away any attitude that says you’re entitled to anything.

This strikes me as an ahistorical and overly reductive view of Wittgenstein. Ahistorical, because it refuses to place W. into a tradition which neither began nor ended with him; overly reductive, because it’s all or nothing, either you agree fully with W. or you can’t learn anything from him at all. He’s one of the greatest if not the great philosopher of the 20th century — but not everything he did supersedes everything that came before or after, and I think it’s absurd to interpret his philosophy in a way that implies that if it doesn’t completely supersede all earlier or later philosophy, there’s nothing left of it to salvage. Langer writes:

No, you’re not thinking at all like Wittgenstein! He never would have said that merely “a lot” of philosophy’s problems stem from the bewitchment of language, but all of them! (And, moreover, that philosophy does not stem from this bewitchment but is the battle against it.)

Most is a subset of all, and even if I don’t go quite as far as he did, it doesn’t follow that if I’m only 80 percent of the way, I’m nowhere near. Bewitchment by language is his diagnosis of previous philosophy, and this “battle against it” is what he prescribes (and attempts to do) in his own philosophy. When he says that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday, he’s diagnosing the usual approaches to philosophy, which get lost in language, especially when words and phrases are unwittingly lifted out of their proper language-games. Traditional philosophy being mostly an extended discussion of such problems, we don’t need to go far to reach the conclusion that philosophy is mostly based on this confusion.

I have to say, I chuckled a little bit at your suggestion that thousands of years of “philosophical error” had been righted by Wittgenstein, only to then hear you say that not all philosophical problems are language problems. Because when you cited the question of mind as an example of this it was like watching thousands of years of “philosophical error” come full-circle right back to square one only to land squarely at Plato’s feet in the Parmenides.

I don’t think thousands of years of philosophical error have been righted by W., but I think he has at least pointed us in the right direction. Some of the time.

First, Wittgenstein’s method in this case would have nothing to do with “analyzing the word ‘mind’”—this is precisely what he faulted other philosophers for doing! (Think of PI §116: “When philosophers use a word and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”) This is the man who exhorts us, “Don’t think, but look!” (PI §66), and certainly the last thing he’s going to advocate is that we all sit around navel-gazing our way towards a better understanding of “mind”. Wouldn’t he rather ask: what do you mean by mind? And: in what manner have you come to use this word and ask this question?

This is but analysis of the word in a different form. Analyzing its usage will clear up what we mean when we ask “are there other minds?”, but we will not thereby have answered the question. Some questions, when we reach a full understanding of exactly what they mean, turn out to be trivial, misguided or incoherent. These are questions that we can answer or dispel by analyzing language. But there are other questions, questions which rightly fall under the umbrella of philosophy, which turn out not to be simply confused, incoherent, or the obvious in disguise. Analyzing the meaning of a question and its use in discourse won’t help us answer the question. It answers a different question, namely, what does all that mean? Sometimes, it turns out that we don’t have a clear idea what it means, or what it means is self-contradictory, or to even ask the question turns out to be a category error. In those cases, the “answer” to the question is that there is no answer, we shouldn’t be asking the question at all, and in those cases, no further discussion is necessary. But when it turns out that the question is meaningful, we cannot be said to have answered it merely by knowing what it means. The reason I think some philosophical problems are trivial non-problems in disguise and others aren’t is that I think a careful analysis — or, if you prefer, careful looking at the question in its original and proper habitat — will reveal some questions to be these non-questions, based on misunderstandings, vaguely defined, incoherent or trivial; but this analysis will also reveal other problems not to be non-questions, nor obvious once we properly understand their meaning.

The second problem here is this distinction you make between “linguistic puzzles” and “substantive problems” (a terribly cavalier and reckless thing to do, I would argue, when it comes to later Wittgenstein). And you’ll have to forgive me if I’m putting words in your mouth, but I suspect that a large part of the reason why you wish to free the question of mind from Wittgenstein’s method (wrong! methods!) is because you subjectively consider this matter to be a “meaningful” or “weighty metaphysical question”. But if we remove our personal preference from the equation, how does the question “are there other minds?” differ in any meaningful respect from the question “does ‘red’ exist?” How would you go about answering either of them any differently from the other?

It’s more than a bit belittling to suggest that the only reason I consider some questions to be more significant than others is personal attachments to those questions. I used to think the question of universals and abstract objects was a weighty metaphysical issue. I wasted considerable time discussing and reading about this problem. I didn’t do that because I thought it wasn’t a weighty or important metaphysical issue. I thought I was discussing fundamental properties of reality, of how the world works. Lately I’ve become more and more convinced that I wasn’t. I wasn’t, and it wasn’t a personal flaw, because none of the professional philosophers I was reading were really discussing fundamental properties of reality either. The question was ill-formed, because we don’t know what it would mean for the world to be this way or that way; we cannot imagine a platonist world as distinct from a nominalist one; we cannot say in what sense abstract objects are truly existent, or what it would mean for them not to exist. We aren’t asking a question whose answer will tell us anything meaningful about reality. Now, whether you agree with my assessment or not, I think it should be obvious that if it’s correct, the question isn’t a weighty metaphysical issue. On the other hand, I think a similar assessment of the question of other minds would have to conclude that we are actually asking a question whose answer will tell us something meaningful about reality. And once again, whether you agree or not, if the assessment is correct, that implies the question is “metaphysically weightier” than the question of universals if the assessment of universals is also correct. I’m not coming at questions from a preconceived position: these are the questions I care about, so they’re significant; the rest are not. I come to this conclusion because I’m convinced that is the conclusion careful analysis of the questions demands.

And what of this inconsistency? You say that “linguistic confusion” is “tied to specific languages” (though as they say on the Wikipedia, “citation needed”!)—indicating there must be an answer outside of language (and thus outside of thought, or “universal”, considering that there is no thought prior to language)—at the same time that you dismiss universal arguments as a manner with which to “invest weighty metaphysical questions with anything resembling meaning”. Bewitchment of language, indeed!

In fact there is thought prior to language, and if W. says otherwise he’s wrong — which I don’t think is fatal to his philosophy, since a lot of it works perfectly well on language even if language isn’t prior to thought.

If you look at academic philosophy, a lot of it discusses tiny details of ordinary English phrases. Many of the nuances, and in some cases even seemingly important problems to which lots of literature attach, vanish if you look at similar sentences in other languages. A lot of those sentences philosophers discuss would never be spoken at all in other languages — instead, the speaker would say something different. This means that some of the linguistic confusion is specific to languages, and it tells me that when that is the case, the problem isn’t about reality, but about our descriptions of reality. I’m very interested in languages, and therefore in how it works and the ways we use language to describe reality; but there isn’t the same metaphysical urgency when we’re talking about the contingent ways humans describe the world as when we’re talking about the fundamentals of reality which are necessarily so.

As soon as you arbitrarily distinguish between objects that can be subject to analysis in terms of a language game and those which cannot you’ve already rendered the most valuable component of Wittgenstein’s thought fully impotent. Because it is this very belief—that there exists knowledge which cannot be democratically obtained through the inherent sociality of language—which allows for the exclusive determination and definition of knowledge by those already in command of the power to do so.

It isn’t so much a distinction between objects that can be subject to analysis in terms of a language game and ones that cannot. It’s more that the result of this analysis will in some cases clear away the problem by exposing it as trivial or misguided, while in others the analysis will reveal a trickier problem. The question of how to obtain secure, if not certain knowledge, is central to epistemology. It isn’t immune to analysis in terms of language games, but this analysis alone cannot answer or defuse the question. Even if we know exactly what we’re asking when we ask how to make sure our beliefs about the world are correct, or at least highly likely to be correct, we won’t thereby know the answer to the question. The question isn’t in itself linguistic: it could arise even without language. And even if it couldn’t, it’s about more than the meanings of things. The scientific method(s) do not lie dormant in the meaning of “knowledge” or “method”, and it’s absurd to suggest that Plato or Aristotle would have discovered it had they only known what the questions they were asking truly meant.

I have no idea what “it is this very belief—that there exists knowledge which cannot be democratically obtained through the inherent sociality of language—which allows for the exclusive determination and definition of knowledge by those already in command of the power to do so” means, but it sounds political, and I sure hope Langer isn’t accusing me of some kind of discrimination here.