Cogency v2 n2

Wittgenstein and the Logic of Deep Disagreement / D. M. GODDEN & W. H. BRENNER
6. Wittgenstein, Rationality and Deep Disagreements
At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Ludwig
Wittgenstein, OC §612)
Wittgenstein speaks of ‘persuasion’ where what is
put forward has the power to induce one’s interlocutor
to accept a new concept-formation, whether
doing so involves a change in the person, as in
moral and religious conversion, or does not do so,
as in the case of new mathematical proofs. (Dilman,
p. 17) 7
6.1. Training & Persuasion
Logically as well as temporally, enculturation into a Weltbild is prior to being
able to give reasons to justify or explain something; logically as well as
chronologically, being able to give and understand reasons is prior to what
Wittgenstein called “persuasion,” namely a sort of rhetoric in the service of
concept-formation. 8 As with the sort of training or pre-linguistic instruction
he talks about early in the Investigations, persuasion has to do not
with the (correct or incorrect, justified or unjustified) use of terms but with
“preparation for their use” (PI §§ 26, 49).
Persuasion and training have to do with introduction of new concepts,
and therefore with induction into new language games of judgment and an
expanded conception of what might count as a reasons or justification for a
judgment.
In giving reasons as premises of an argument we’re applying (or presupposing)
acknowledged concepts. Giving reasons in that sense is seeking to
justify a knowledge-claim.
Both training and persuasion are preparations for a (new) language game.
But while training is entirely pre-rational (pre-explanatory, pre-justificatory),
persuasion can involve reasoning of a kind – analogical and “dialectical,” rather
than demonstrative reasoning from commonly acknowledged principles and
matters of fact, or experimental (inductive) reasoning from “hard data.”
7
This section owes much to the collection of essays from which this passage is quoted. A
member of “the Swansea school,” the late Ilham Dilman was an outstanding philosopher
and Wittgenstein scholar.
8
Here we use “rhetoric” to mean “persuasive discourse” without any pejorative connotation.
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