Wittgenstein and the Nonsense Predicament

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE NONSENSE PREDICAMENT CONRAD WALD 2016 Wittgenstein and the Nonsense Predicament Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn vorgelegt von Conrad Wald aus Bergisch-Gladbach Bonn 2016 Gedruckt mit der Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Zusammensetzung der Prüfungskommision: Vorsitzender der Prüfungskommision: Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Pieper Betreuer und Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Markus Gabriel Gutacher: Prof. Dr. James Conant Weiteres Prüfungsberechtigtes Mitglied: Prof. Dr. Michael Forster Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 02.09.2015 Abstract A single philosophical problem is developed, which will be called the nonsense predicament. The predicament arises because an argument from nonsense— which is an argument that aims to establish that some, or all, philosophical sentences are nonsense—cannot establish its conclusion, because of what will be called the nonsense paradox. This paradox has three parts, which establish that the argument from nonsense leads to (i) a regress, (ii) a contradiction, and (iii) the ineffability of nonsense. Insisting on the argument in the face of this paradox leads to the fallacy that one insists on the sense of nonsense. It is argued that this predicament is solvable only by rejecting the argument in the first place. i My propositions elucidate in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must overcome these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place which I really have to go is one that I must actually be already. Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value ii Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................. iv Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 1. An Argument From Nonsense ...................................................................................... 16 2. The Boundary Model ...................................................................................................... 73 3. The Nonsense Paradox ................................................................................................ 101 4. Limits of Thought .......................................................................................................... 130 5. Limits of Language ........................................................................................................ 167 6. Is Skepticism Nonsense?............................................................................................. 189 7. Neuroscience and the Bounds of Sense ................................................................. 233 8. Can Nonsense Communicate? ................................................................................... 254 9. The Dogma of Metaphilosophy ................................................................................ 281 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 294 References............................................................................................................................ 295 iii Acknowledgments First of all, I want to to thank my doctoral adviser Markus Gabriel for supervis- ing my thesis and giving me the opportunity to be part of his research team, which has proven to be a highly important part of my philosophical development. Parts of this thesis have been given as talks at the universities in Bonn, Bochum, and Wuppertal, and at the International Wittgenstein Symposium. Many thanks to the audiences for comments, questions, and remarks. Parts of chapter 9 have been published in the conference proceedings of the 37th Interna- tional Wittgenstein Symposium. I would like to thank the editors for letting me republish this material here. I would like to thank Marius Bartmann, Boris Brandhoff, Anthony Bruno, Silver Bronzo, Ed Dain, Cora Diamond, Marin Geier, Cory Merril, Frederik Otto, Dorothee Schmitt, Sarah Anna Szeltner, Jônadas Techio, and Hannes Worth- mann for helpful discussions and critical comments. Many thanks to Alastair Cheng for proofreading the final version of my dissertation. Most of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Jim Conant for his support and encouragement, as well as the invaluable insights he has con- veyed to me. iv Introduction 1. Aim One of the major achievements of early analytic philosophy, it has often been argued, is that it changes the framework of philosophy’s criticisms from truth and falsity to a framework based on sense and nonsense.1 However, a growing frustration with the self-refuting character of arguments based on this new dis- tinction led to a fast decline of the once-celebrated achievement. But this, quite obviously, does not mean that it is forgotten, and indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest in and hot debates about it.2 From enthusiasm to skepticism, the range of possible attitudes towards it is wide open. If the achievement were indeed an achievement, the character of philosophical arguments would change radically. Where one previously would have asked whether an argument was either true or false, one now would ask first whether it makes sense or not. If the argument makes sense, one could go on and ask further if it is true or false; but if the argument does not make sense, the question of truth and falsity does not even arise. The positive case seems fair enough. How could it not be a requisite that an argument would have to make sense in order to be true or false? However, the negative case isn’t as straight- forward. How can an apparent argument turn out to be nonsense? Isn’t there a sense in which we would first have to understand and explain why the argument doesn’t make sense? It would seem wildly unfair to reject an argument on the grounds that we simply don’t understand it. But nonsense, on the other hand, has literally no sense, so there is not a queer way in which one could explain that nonsense has a sense that is nonsense, so to speak. The negative case, then, is highly troubling. 1 A classic example of such a view is Baker and Hacker 1984. 2 An example is the debate between Hacker (Bennett and Hacker 2007) and Dennett (2007), which will be discussed in chapter 7 of this thesis. 1 This brings us to the main goal of this thesis, which is an investigation of a single philosophical problem, which I’ll call the nonsense predicament. The predicament, in short, is that the infamous line of philosophical criticism that ap- pears to lead to the conclusion that (some, most, or even all) philosophical sentences are nonsense—which I’ll call the argument from nonsense—is, as I hope to show, inherently paradoxical and ultimately fallacious. First, the argument from nonsense runs into a paradox that surrounds talk about nonsense. The paradox has three parts: (i) in order to say with a meaningful sentence q that p is nonsense, p has to be a part of q. But if q con- tains p, some parts of q have no meaning either, and hence q is nonsense. Thus the attempt to say that and why p is nonsense leads to further nonsense—the paradox of the regress of nonsense. Therefore, (ii) in order to say with q that p is nonsense, one would have to give a meaning to all of q’s constituents. Thus one could meaningfully say with q that p is nonsense only if p would not be nonsense (which would necessarily result in a false proposition)—the paradox of the sense of nonsense. And therefore, (iii) one cannot meaningfully say that p is nonsense if it is, because any attempt to do so would lead back to either (i) or (ii)—the paradox of the ineffability of nonsense. I’ll call this set of paradoxes the nonsense paradox. Second, while most philosophers have attempted to get around the predicament, insistence on the argument from nonsense in spite of its problematic nature leads, quite inevitably to a fallacy: because of the nonsense paradox, to argue for the rejection of p because it is nonsense cannot, in any case, achieve its argumentative aim (i.e. the rejection of p because of its alleged nonsensicality). I’ll call the insistence on the argument from nonsense in the face of this the nonsense fallacy. Thus, the predicament arises as a result of the argument from nonsense, but it has far reaching implications for talk about nonsense in philosophy. Most pressing of all, sentences that at some point contain parts said to be nonsensical are themselves nonsense, and therefore nonsense cannot be a part of any philosophical argument—this would only lead to further nonsense. 2 Although the nonsense predicament probably has a history that goes back much further, it is in the works of Frege where it is first clearly locatable. Frege, quite necessarily, is forced to lapse into nonsense. However, the nonsense

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