Cogency v2 n2

COGENCY Vol. 2, N0. 2, Spring 2010
Some “neurophilosophers” claim that such indeterminacy is a defect in
our psychological concepts – one threatening the very rationality our everyday
psychological judgments. 28 Their claim, we suggest, is based on the
dubious view that all cognitively significant judgments are propositions with
determinate sense (p v ~p), and that all results of a competently employed
method of judgment must agree (differences being, in principle, traceable
to a mistake).
Wittgenstein’s disagreement with such philosophers might be called a
“deep disagreement.” He tries to persuade them to see the “raggedness” of
our everyday (“folk”) psychological concepts as appropriate and desirable
rather than as a defect. This requires getting them to “think outside the box”
– the box of the only reasons they’re used to calling relevant.
Ben Tilghman (2001, pp. 248-49) provides a nice illustration of how such
a persuasion might go:
That there is only better and worse judgment about the genuineness of
human feeling is not a shortcoming, but is a feature of the concept of
genuineness. We must remember that it is not merely a fact about mathematics
that there is agreement in judgment about the results of calculation,
for that agreement is a constituent of our concept of mathematics.
If there were no such general agreement, then whatever it is that we are
doing with columns of figures would not be what we call adding and subtracting.
Similarly, if there were strict procedures to determine the correctness
of judgments about other people, then whatever it is that we
would be doing in thinking, for example, “I am sure she loves me,” is not
what we would call judging the genuineness of human feeling. At the
edge of materialism we reach one limit of language. Were we to venture
beyond the edge our lives would be unrecognizable. 29
Of course, not everyone will find Tilghman’s Wittgensteinian ‘persuasion’
persuasive. But is that a defect? Or shall we say: “If there were a strict
procedure for determining whether it’s really a defect, then applying it is
not what we would call doing philosophy (or investigating a deep question).”
28
For example, Paul Churchland (1988: 179-80).
29
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (TLP 5.6). “And to imagine
a language means to imagine a form of life” (PI § 19).
72