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Blurred Boundaries: an Exercise in Wittgenstein’S Method

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Blurred Boundaries: an Exercise in Wittgenstein’S Method Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2017 Blurred boundaries: an exercise in Wittgenstein’s method Wyss, Sebastian Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-204985 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Wyss, Sebastian. Blurred boundaries: an exercise in Wittgenstein’s method. 2017, University of Zurich, Vetsuisse Faculty. Thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Zurich for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Blurred Boundaries An Exercise in Wittgenstein’s Method by Sebastian Wyss Zurich, 2017 Accepted in the fall semester 2016 on the recommendation of the doctoral committee: Prof. Dr. H. J. Glock (main supervisor) Prof. Dr. H. Ben-Yami MCCOY: Oh, I know you, Mister Spock. You’ve never voiced it, but you’ve always thought that logic was the best basis on which to build command. Am I right? SPOCK: I am a logical man, Doctor. MCCOY: It’ll take more than logic to get us out of this. SPOCK: Perhaps, Doctor, but I know of no better way to begin. I realise command does have its fascinations, even under circumstances such as these. But I neither enjoy the idea of command, nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists. And I will do whatever logically needs to be done. Excuse me. Star Trek - The Galileo Seven Contents Introduction vii I. Methodological Considerations 1 1. Does Wittgenstein have a Method? 2 1.1. Continuity vs. discontinuity . 5 1.2. Schulte: “Little more than a skill” . 7 1.3. Remarks on the concept of method ..................... 10 1.4. Conant: “Methods, not a method” . 14 1.5. “Method” in the Investigations ....................... 18 2. Ordinary Use, Nonsense, and the Nature of Philosophy 23 2.1. Prevalent and standard use . 26 2.2. Metaphysical and actual use . 30 2.3. Philosophy as immanent critique . 33 2.4. Can philosophical problems be shared? . 36 iv Contents II. History and Exegesis 41 3. Frege, Vagueness, and the Demand for Sharpness 42 3.1. Current uses of “vagueness” . 43 3.2. Frege’s understanding of “concept with unsharp boundaries” . 45 3.3. Frege’s truth-nihilism . 50 3.4. Alternative interpretations of Frege . 53 4. The Demand for Determinacy in the Tractatus 61 4.1. The picture theory and deep-level analysis . 63 4.2. Determinacy of sense . 69 4.3. Epistemicism avant la lettre ......................... 75 5. The Middle Wittgenstein on Vagueness 84 5.1. Blurredness in the Philosophical Remarks . 85 5.2. The Problem of the Heap in the Big Typescript . 91 6. Vagueness in the Philosophical Investigations 98 6.1. The beginning of the book (§§ 1–64) . 100 6.2. Family resemblance and sorites-susceptibility . 104 6.3. The logical problem of blurred boundaries . 110 6.4. Two responses . 111 6.5. Abnormal cases . 114 6.6. Changing rules . 118 6.7. Logic, exactness, and natural language . 121 6.8. On the idea of a completely determinate language . 126 6.9. Borderline cases reconsidered . 130 v Contents III.The Not-a-Rule Approach to the Sorites Paradox 133 7. Tolerance as a Rule 134 7.1. The sorites paradox . 135 7.2. The not-a-rule approach . 140 7.3. Rules in a Wittgensteinian framework . 140 7.4. What is the status of Tolerance? . 146 7.5. Internal and external negation . 149 7.6. Is Tolerance a rule that we follow? . 152 8. Borderline Cases in Speech 163 8.1. Borderline cases . 165 8.2. Applying speech act theory . 170 8.3. Higher-order vagueness . 175 8.4. The forced-march sorites . 176 8.5. Compound statements and penumbral connections . 180 8.6. The conditional sorites . 185 8.7. Ben-Yami, or if not Tolerance, what else? . 189 8.8. The attraction of the sorites . 193 Endnote 198 Appendix: Varieties of Indeterminacy 203 vi Introduction They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pine- apples. And banana jam (illegally) after the fpo (Food Products Organiza- tion) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said. (Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 30) Jam and jelly can be found on any good breakfast table. They are ordinary things that are cooked, passed around, and stored in the fridge. In none of these interactions, the boundaries of the concept of jam or of jelly play any role. But it can come into view for special purposes. In this case, it is difficult to know what the lawmaker’s intentions were. In the best case, its ultimate purpose is consumer protection and information, and an exact classification is needed for those purposes. How thick can a jam be before it becomes a jelly? For ordinary, practical purposes, no answer to this question is required. But the increased standards of exactness of the purposes of lawmaking may require engaging with it. A difficulty that faces lawmakers is that the boundaries of ordinary concepts are blurred. The consistency of the fruit spread can be influenced by the amount of pectin, fruit, or water that is added, by the cooking duration and temperature, etc. Tampering with these factors slides the consistency of the fruit spread on a gradual scale; it can be thicker or thinner. But the characteristic of a predicative concept is to distinguish between those things that fall under it, and those things that do not; those things that are jams, and those things that are not jams. Predicative concepts are a yes-or-no affair. This does not mean that concepts are inapplicable to gradual scales; at the very least, one can impose an arbitrarily drawn sharp boundary. A pragmatic constraint for such a vii Introduction stipulation is that it should be easily measurable, which is problematic in the case of the consistency of jams and jellies. Nevertheless, the ordinary concept of jam does not neatly separate cases of jam from cases of not-jam by a sharp boundary. If no sharp boundary has been stipulated, it would be absurd to claim that the addition of a tiny crystal of pectin turns a jam into a jelly. Why should it be exactly that crystal, and not another? And there seems to be no way of finding out which one it is. However, if it is indeed the case that the ordinary concept of jelly is not sharply bounded, a paradox looms. The addition of a single crystal of pectin (and some stirring) does not turn a given pot of jam into a pot of jelly, we said. By this, we are not talking about a particular crystal; we generalise. The addition of any single crystal does not turn the jam into a jelly. But then, a whole series of adding single crystals of pectin will not turn the jam into jelly. But if so, we have in effect claimed that no amount of pectin turns jam into jelly, which is evidently false. This paradox can be succinctly stated with four statements and involves an argument which is valid in classical logic (see section 7.1). The main premise is the Tolerance principle, here formulated for the concept jam. Tolerance: If a fruit spread that contains n crystals of pectin is a jam, then a fruit spread that contains n + 1 crystals of pectin is a jam as well. This paradox was discussed by the ancient Greeks under the name of “sorites”, and relates directly to the blurred boundaries of concepts. The absence of a sharp boundary implies that a small change in a relevant similarity dimension (amount of pectin) does not warrant a change in the applicability of a concept (jam). Clearly, a great number of small changes add up to a large change in that similarity dimension. And if the large change is seen as a totality of small changes, a change in the applicability of the concept seems to be unwarranted. But of course the large change should warrant a change in the applicability of the concept. This phenomenon of blurred boundaries and the sorites paradox is discussed in con- temporary philosophy under the title of “vagueness”, and the concepts and statements concerned are called “vague”. The technical use of these words is different than its standard one in English. In the standard sense, a speaker who makes a vague utterance is usually being unspecific. The statement “Measures have been taken to bring the economy of Greece on a growing path.” could be criticised as being vague, on the basis that it is not specified which measures have been taken. Or vagueness can express unclarity viii as in “There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.” (Doyle, A Study of Scarlet, ch. 5). This unclarity is perhaps the strongest link to the philosophical sense. For vague concepts, not only is the boundary blurred, but there are also cases in the borderline region for which it is unclear whether they should be classified as F or as not-F. Regarding some fruit spreads in the transition zone between jams and jellies it is unclear whether they should be classified as jam or as jelly – their consistency is such that it would not be completely wrong to classify them as either. They are borderline cases of “jam” (or of “jelly”). (For more on unspecifity, see p. 62, for more on the technical use of vagueness, see section (3.1).) Vagueness is by no means a new problem.
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