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How Old Are These Bones? Putnam, Wittgenstein and Verification

How Old Are These Bones? Putnam, Wittgenstein and Verification

HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? PUTNAM, WITTGENSTEIN AND VERIFICATION

Cora Diamond and Steven Gerrard

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ABSTRACT has argued against philosophical theories which tie the content of -claims closely to the available methods of investigation and verification. Such theories, he argues, threaten our of human communi- cation, which we take to be possible between people of different cultures and across periods of during which methods of investigation change dramati- cally. Putnam rejects any reading of Wittgenstein which takes him to make a close tie between and method of verification. What strands in Wittgen- stein’s appear to lend support to such a reading? Can we do to the role which method of verification does have for Wittgenstein while retaining our hold on the idea that communication between people is possible despite substantial differences in methods of verification and investigation? Thus it is as if the did not determine the sense of the proved; and yet as if it did determine it. But isn’t it like that with any verification of any proposition?1

I n this paper I consider a case invented by Hilary Putnam in the Icourse of his long-running philosophical debate with .2 Back in the seventeenth century, strange bones have been dug up at Whoozie, and someone wonders how old the bones are. We now know that they are over a million years old; we have used twentieth-century techniques to establish their age. In Newton’s time there were no such techniques. But suppose someone to have speculated about the age of the bones. Putnam says that if this person had entertained the idea that the bones

1. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978), pp. 312–313. 2. H. Putnam, ‘Newton in His Time and Ours: Richard Rorty Please Stand Up?’, unpublished. I refer to this article as NTO. 100 I—CORA DIAMOND were a million years old he would have been right, and if he had rejected it as absurd, he would have been wrong. (Since I refer to this speculator many , I have given him a name: Leibniz.) Putnam was responding to a suggestion by Rorty that we should redefine ‘true’ to ‘chime with’ Heidegger’s claim that Newton’s laws became true through Newton’s work, and that before Newton’s discovery they were neither true nor false.3 In developing Heidegger’s point, Rorty had said that, if the Latin which Newton used in the seventeenth century to state the of inertia had been uttered by someone in the tenth century, it would not then have been a truth- candidate.It became a candidate for true or false when there developed a of coherent and useful practices within which there could be embedded uses of that sentence to make assertions.4 So, if we follow Rorty’s recommendation, we should say that the sentence ‘The bones found at Whoozie are a million years old’ became a candidate for being true or false during the twentieth century; and it seems then that we should reject Putnam’s claim that, if Leibniz had said that the bones were a million years old, he got something right. Putnam recognizes that there is a reply that Rorty might make. If we say of the sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a million years old’, that it did not become true in the twentieth century but was true even back in Leibniz’s time, we are merely paying

3. R. Rorty, ‘Were Newton’s Laws True Before Newton?’, unpublished manuscript of 8͞7͞87. For a recent of related views, see Rorty, Truth and Progress (, 1998), pp. 136–137; for a recent statement of Rorty’s view of what is at stake in the debate with Putnam, see ‘Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace’, Truth and Progress, pp. 43–62. The disagreement with which I am concerned in the present essay is related closely to Rorty’s remark there (p. 60) that he can give no content to the idea of non-local correctness of assertion, without falling back into some form of metaphysical realism. Putnam has denied, throughout the debate, that the idea of non-local correctness makes sense only if we accept metaphysical realism; hence his claim that the seventeenth century speculator was right involves, as he sees it, no going back on his rejection of metaphysical realism. The material in NTO makes explicit the tie between the debate with Rorty and questions about Witt- genstein and verificationism. See also Putnam’s discussion of Wittgenstein and verifi- cationism, in ‘The Face of ’, the third of his Dewey Lectures, in Journal of , 111: 488–517 (1994). 4. Rorty modifies a first, and relatively simple, statement of his view to allow for translations, but he retains the idea that Newton’s sentence, uttered in the tenth century, would not at that point have been a truth-value candidate. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 101 a post-Leibnizian compliment to ourselves. But this, Putnam argues, will not do. He is concerned not just with our twentieth-century talk about the sentence but also with what it means for people to communicate with others, even across periods of time in which techniques of investigation change dramatically. The remark Putnam wants to make about Leib- niz, that he was right about the age of the bones, is then meant to go further than a mere compliment to Leibniz’s sentence (understood our way).5 What Leibniz thought, guessed, is what we now know to be so. (One might say that his guess and our meet.)

II How does Wittgenstein come in? Putnam explains his response to Rorty in part by a contrast between Wittgenstein’s views and those that were ascribed to Wittgenstein by . As Malcolm read him, Wittgenstein closely identified meaning with use in a -, and thought of language- as closed bodies of practices. On that sort of reading, every time a new way of verifying a sentence is invented, the sentence changes in meaning. So Wittgenstein is read as an extreme verificationist. From the Malcolmian point of view, the sentence ‘These bones are at least a million years old’ could not have been used in the seventeenth century to make the statement that we make when we use those today (see NTO, p. 3). There were then no practices of investigation within which the sen- tence was embedded. No seventeenth-century language-game, including those in which the dates of past events were deter- mined and the ages of different objects established, had a route to any sentence like the one about the bones being a million years old. Since, in our use of the sentence, we are playing quite a different language-game from any that existed in the

5. It is meant to be incompatible with the idea that Leibniz’s sentence, so far as it is a truth-value candidate, is so only in that we can use it (or a translation of it) to make an assertion. 102 I—CORA DIAMOND seventeenth century, the sentence now has a different meaning.6 That argument, Putnam says, rests on a tired pseudo-Witt- gensteinian ; Wittgenstein himself did not think that a in use, in techniques of investigation, implies that there must be a corresponding difference in meaning. Putnam uses the contrast between Wittgenstein’s views as he understands them and tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language to formulate his question to Rorty. If Rorty is not trying to return us to something like tired pseudo-Wittgenstein- ianism, if he is willing to allow meaning to be shared by people who do not necessarily share techniques of investigation, then what exactly can be the force of Rorty’s recommendation that we treat Newton’s laws as candidates for having a truth-value only through the work of Galileo and Newton? The recommendation would be tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism if it leads us to deny that we might agree with Leibniz about the bones, and leaves us instead merely taking Leibniz’s sentence and sticking on to it an honorific label of ‘true’ or ‘correct’ or ‘right’. Tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism would leave us and Leibniz speaking ‘incommensurable’ . But if Rorty is not a tired Wittgensteinian, then he will allow that sentences do not change in meaning with every change in technique of investigation. He will allow that we do not just recognize the seventeenth-century sentence as verbally coinciding with a sentence we call true; we understand it—uttered then—just as we understand it uttered today. Its truth-conditions have not changed; the change is merely that we now know that it was true. How does Rorty stop

6. There is a slight complication in the argument. I earlier spoke of Leibniz as specu- lating. That is, the sentence as he uses it expresses a conjecture or bet rather than a statement that something is so. In giving the Malcolmian view, I follow Putnam in speaking of the statement made in the seventeenth century by a use of the sentence about the age of the bones. If someone using the sentence in the seventeenth century were to be stating, as opposed to guessing, that the bones were a million years old, more conditions would need to be filled in. Perhaps the person takes himself to have been told the age of the bones by God in a dream; and so he now asserts ‘They are a million years old’. The ‘statement’ can be used in a more general way to cover a wide of uses of indicative sentences, or a wide class of such sentences them- selves. But the class in question can perhaps be delimited only through the use of notions, like ‘truth-value candidate’, that are at issue in the debate between Putnam and Rorty. These problems about statement-making can be avoided; the point Put- nam needs is simply that a conjecture made in the seventeenth century would have been correct. The issues about communication, central for Putnam, still arise, and can be formulated entirely in terms of the idea that Leibniz entertained or in terms of the question that he asked himself about the age of the bones. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 103 short of saying that, if he is not a tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian? And what can be meant by saying that the sentence was not then a truth-value candidate, if it is not meant to deny that under- standing of the situation?

III Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian? That is the question to which I now turn, because it may help us to understand the questions about meaning and raised by Putnam. In this section I discuss Putnam’s reasons for denying that Witt- genstein was a tired Wittgensteinian.7 Putnam appeals to one of Wittgenstein’s lectures on 8 as a basis for saying that Wittgenstein did not identify every differ- ence in the use of a word with a difference in meaning. The rel- evant passage in the lecture is a striking one, and not altogether straightforward. Of two people whose use of words in connection with the Last Judgment is very different, Wittgenstein says first that you might express that difference by saying that one of them means something altogether different from the other; and he then says that the difference might not show up in any explanation of the meaning. The explanation of the meaning would not, that is, be an explanation that was tied to one use rather than the other. Putnam reads this passage as one in which the first remark (the one that ‘you’ supposedly might make, about the two people not meaning the same) is made by an interlocutor, who is then reminded by Wittgenstein speaking in his own voice that that is not how we use the word ‘meaning’: the explanation of meaning is the same; so (this is the implication Putnam sees) we would say that the two people do mean the same. The lecture as a whole suggests a somewhat different reading. Wittgenstein argues that our ordinary ways of talking about meaning and understanding are no help to us in the kinds of

7. My account of Putnam’s reading of Wittgenstein draws on his ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief’, in On Community, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: Indiana, 1991), pp. 56–75; see especially pp. 63–64; a version of this material appears in Put- nam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992), pp. 134–157. 8. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on , and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966), pp. 53–59. 104 I—CORA DIAMOND cases being discussed in the lecture.9 He does not come down in favour of saying either that the two imagined speakers do or that they do not mean the same, just as, later in the lecture, he does not come down in favour of saying (in a similar case) either that two speakers do or that they do not understand one another. I suggest that, in the background of the passage to which Putnam refers, there is an important feature of the use of many expressions, namely, that if we are given an explanation of mean- ing, we go on to use the expression in much the same ways; we do not ride off in different directions. In the case Wittgenstein is describing, that normal response to the explanation of meaning is absent. And that is why we have the two contrasting reactions to the case: an inclination to say, if we think about the great difference in use, that the two people do not mean the same, and an inclination to say, if we note that there are not here two differ- ent explanations of meaning, that the meaning is the same. In a later lecture of the series,10 Wittgenstein spoke about the word ‘death’ and what it means to have an idea of death. What is commonly called ‘having an idea’ has a reference to the tech- nique of using the word. It is a public word, tied to a whole technique. If someone says that he has his own idea of death, and it is not tied to the public technique, Wittgenstein says that we might ask with what right he calls it an idea of death. What connection has it with our game? Here, and earlier in this lecture, Wittgenstein appears to be questioning whether we can speak of understanding a word or sentence when we detach the supposed understanding from the familiar techniques of our language. I do not think that these lectures of Wittgenstein’s on belief provide clear answers to the question whether or how far or in what sorts of context Wittgenstein rejected the Malcolmian view of language. The lectures are not easy to interpret; and they deal with cases of religious language, which might well be thought to differ significantly from the kinds of case at issue between Rorty and Putnam. That is, even if we suppose that the lectures are to

9. This point is indeed made clear by Putnam in ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief’, p. 64. But he does not use it to question, as I should, the reading of the passage about difference in meaning. 10. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, pp. 65– 72. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 105 be read as Putnam reads them, they settle at most that Witt- genstein did not then simply identify difference in meaning with difference in use in all cases. It would still be possible that he took such an identification to be helpful for a great range of cases. Putnam notes that his reading of the lectures can be seen to be connected with Philosophical Investigations §43, where Wittgenstein says that, for a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Whether or not the use of words in provides some of the exceptions Wittgenstein had in , there would still be a question about words like ‘gold’ and ‘water’, expressions like ‘how old this is’, and so on. Are such cases meant to be included in the large class of cases in which meaning can be explained as use in the lan- guage? If so, would it then follow, as it might seem to, that a shift in the use of such an expression would be a shift in its meaning? Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian with respect to those cases?

IV I shall turn now to an earlier lecture of Wittgenstein’s, which seems quite verificationist in character. He described a case in which there are two chairs which look exactly the same. They are taken out of your sight and then returned; you are then asked ‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ He says of the question that in those circumstances it would have no answer, and that it would have no sense.11 He invited his audience to compare that case with the case of two rivers which flow into each other. Which river is it that goes on?

If a brook flows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say it is the Danube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose two rivers join and go on with a new name, then we can say: two have disappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people who would say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it is not, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be .

11. Lecture of 18th November 1935. All references to this lecture are to Margaret Macdonald’s notes to it (unpublished), relevant sections of which are included in the Appendix to this paper. 106 I—CORA DIAMOND

The point of the comparison is that, in the case of the chairs, as in the case of the rivers, if there is no criterion for having the same such-and-such, there is no sense in the question whether we have the same one. The comparison may strike one as utterly unconvincing. Consider an objection (A. D. Woozley’s) to Wittgenstein’s remark about the chair: It is ridiculous to say that, since we have no way of telling whether this is the same chair, there is no sense in asking whether it is. For we may go on to try to find a way of telling (e.g., training dogs capable of sniffing out which is the chair that was sat in by some- one, or developing techniques for microscopic examination of the upholstery). We understand perfectly well what it is we are trying to find a way to determine; otherwise we could not engage in these attempts to develop techniques for finding out which was the chair you sat in. It is precisely our understanding of the question ‘Which is the chair you sat in?’ that guides us in these attempts. So, to say that the question makes no sense is absurd.12 I shall not try to defend Wittgenstein’s remark about the chairs. I shall instead use it to lead into a discussion of an element in Wittgenstein’s thinking which is in a sense verificationist (in what sense exactly needs to be made clear). We tend to think that verificationism is what the logical positivists held; and so the idea that there is a verficationist element in Wittgenstein looks like the idea that his views can to some degree be identified with theirs. That is not what I am claiming, and perhaps it is best to speak of a ‘verificationist’ element in his thought. There are indeed similarities between some of Wittgenstein’s remarks dur- ing the 1930s and familiar expressions, by logical positivists, of their views.13 Even if we consider just those remarks of Wittgen- stein’s, there are important differences in both the expressed and the larger philosophical aims.14 More important

12. The objection was made in conversation; the formulation of the objection is mine. 13. There is a question how far the 1930s remarks make explicit ideas which are already present in the Tractatus. One might ask, for example, how far the Tractatus is committed to the idea that ‘He is angry’ means roughly ‘The behaviour of that body is similar to the behaviour of this (my) body when there is anger’. See Norman Malcolm, Wittgensteinian Themes (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 88–89; cf. also my ‘Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box? The Private Language Argument in the Tracta- tus’, in , eds. and , forthcoming. 14. See, for example, the conversation with , 9th December 1931, in and the Circle, ed B. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuinness (Oxford, 1979), pp. 182–186. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 107 still, we need to distinguish between those, as we might say, ‘veri- ficationist’ ideas in Wittgenstein’s writings of that period, and something else, which might also be regarded as a kind of ‘verifi- cationist element’ in his thought. What the ‘something else’ is I hope to make clear; it may seem to push us towards or into some familiar form of verificationism or anti-realism, but should not be taken to do so. So, I shall be trying to show what a ‘verifi- cationist element’ in philosophical thought can be, which is not identifiable either with the verificationism of the positivists or with the ‘verificationism’ of remarks like that about the chair. In Sections V and VI, I consider a reply, open to Wittgenstein, to Woozley’s objection. By a reply, I do not mean a defence of the original remark about the chairs but a response, drawing on things Wittgenstein says elsewhere, to the ideas expressed in Woozley’s objection.

V Suppose Wittgenstein asks us to consider two sentences: (1) ‘I wonder whether this is the same chair as the one you sat in yesterday’. (No one knows of any way of distinguishing it from the similar chair next to it.) (2) ‘I wonder whether Hannibal sneezed six times while cross- ing the Alps’. (I have no idea what it would be like to try to find a way to tell how many times this happened.) In reply to the Woozley point that the question about the chair must make sense, because our understanding of it guides our attempt to find a technique for answering it, Wittgenstein might say that it is the very fact that we do turn to such ways of looking for an answer as those mentioned (dogs and microscopic tech- niques) that is the question’s having sense. The question about Hannibal is different from the question about the chair precisely in that it has no location within our activities of looking-for- ways-of-establishing-things. The imaginary Wittgensteinian reply continues: We should not go on to say ‘And therefore the ques- tion about Hannibal is meaningless’, as if that were some further point, a conclusion to be drawn. It is rather that the two ques- tions are different in the respect just pointed out, and that is a 108 I—CORA DIAMOND respect to which we may give insufficient attention. We want to draw a conclusion about meaningfulness after we are clear about the difference in use. But, if we say that the first question has sense and the second does not, we are merely drawing attention to the difference. It is not essential to this reply that we say that the second sentence has no sense. Here is another way of putting the reply (based on material in the 1935 series of lectures quoted in Section IV). If someone says that we might wonder whether Hannibal sneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps, what such won- dering consists in is his saying ‘I wonder whether Hannibal sneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps’, and perhaps also having some state of mind; whereas, if someone says ‘I won- der whether this is the chair you sat in yesterday’, wondering in this case does not consist only in a state of mind and in saying ‘I wonder...’ etc. I might get in touch with a dog trainer who specializes in the use of dogs in forensic investigations. Our talk about which chair you sat in is then connected with practices in which scent discrimination by dogs is accepted as showing that one rather than another was touched by a particular per- son. Whether or not I find a way of telling, there is much that I do in this case besides saying ‘I wonder’.

VI We should look further at that reply. What implications has it for the question whether every change in our techniques of inves- tigation, every new test for the presence of something, results in a change in the meaning of our words? Putnam argues that such changes in tests and techniques of enquiry do not appear to us to change the meaning of our words. If we develop a new chemi- cal test for water, we still take ourselves to mean the same as we earlier did by the sentence ‘The stuff in this glass is water’ (NTO, p. 3). The Wittgensteinian reply that I imagined need have no quar- rel with that phenomenology, with what we are inclined to say. But we should note that the cases in which we may be inclined to say that the sense of some sentence is unchanged differ signifi- cantly among each other. We shall naturally be inclined to say HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 109 that sense is unchanged when we keep on applying our words on the basis of the same techniques we have been using; but some- times we may be inclined to say that sense is unchanged although we now are applying terms on the basis of newly developed tech- niques. Attention to phenomenology, to what we are inclined to say, may direct our attention away from such differences between the cases.15 That is not an argument that, whenever we develop a new test, meaning does change. The philosophical aim of drawing attention to the facts here (the fact that the phenomenological inclination to say ‘no change in sense’ can be present when there is a change in how words are applied and present also in other cases in which there is no such change) is to help break the hold of philosophical puzzlement concerning whether the sense has or has not changed. Say what you like; it may be that you will not want to go on saying that sense is unchanged when techniques of investigation change. In fact I think that we may well want to go on saying (in many of the cases in which there is change in techniques) that sense has not changed, for reasons that I shall come to. We need first to look at a different : the inadequacy of the reply I imagined Wittgenstein giving. The trouble with it is not so much what it says as what it leaves out. It does not make clear what in Wittgenstein’s thought leads towards exactly those views that Putnam thinks of as tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism. What reasons did Wittgenstein have for saying in many contexts and over many years such things as that sense depends on methods of enquiry, and that, where we have no idea how we would conduct an enquiry, we may indeed say the words ‘I won- der whether p’, but the question whether it is the case that p is nonsense or empty? And the reply fails to push far enough the reasons, which also surface in Wittgenstein’s writings, for not saying that sense depends on methods of enquiry.

15. There are, I think, substantial differences between Wittgenstein and some philos- ophers influenced by him, including John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, over the significance of what the latter refer to as phenomenology. Thus, for example, McDowell accepts John Mackie’s of the phenomenology of our experi- ence of value, that it ‘presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the ’ Mind, Value, and (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998), p. 131. Remarks of that sort (in the context of mathematics) are spoken of by Wittgenstein as the ‘raw mater- ial’ of philosophy, something for philosophical treatment (Philosophical Investi- gations, §254). But I shall not here do more than note this disagreement. 110 I—CORA DIAMOND

These problems come up for Wittgenstein in a variety of forms. The things we wonder about may be empirical, like whether the chair you sat in was that chair there or this similar one. Or they may be mathematical: before there was a proof that there was no greatest prime number, we might have wondered how many prime numbers there were. We may nowadays wonder whether every even number is the sum of two primes. The ten- sions within Wittgenstein’s thought about the mathematical cases are similar to those in his thought about the empirical cases (as is clear in the epigraph to this paper). In Section VII, I turn to the mathematical cases, and argue further that my imagined Wittgensteinian reply to Woozley does not go far enough.

VII Wittgenstein said repeatedly that the sense of what is proved in mathematics is given by the proof. This has, as he recognized, an apparently paradoxical consequence. If I ask, before there is a proof, whether all even numbers are the sum of two primes, then when the proof is given what it proves is not that a certain answer to my original question is correct. That is, when (before I had a proof) I said ‘I wonder whether p’, my sentence ‘p’ does not mean what the sentence ‘p’ at the end of the proof means. There’s incommensurability for you! That the meaning of a theorem is given by the proof is stated most uncompromisingly by Witt- genstein during the early 1930s (see, e.g., Philosophical Remarks, pp. 188–189), but he continued to express the view long after that. What there is to be said on the opposite side is brought out clearly by Wittgenstein in a discussion of Fermat’s last theorem.16 Now isn’t it absurd to say that one doesn’t understand the sense of Fermat’s last theorem?—Well, one might reply: the mathema- ticians are not completely blank and helpless when they are con- fronted by this proposition. After all, they try certain methods of proving it; and, so far as they try methods, so far do they under- stand the proposition.—But is that correct? Don’t they understand it just as completely as one can possibly understand it?

16. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978). The passage (pp. 314–315) comes from some time between 1941 and 1944. I have altered the punc- tuation of one of the quoted remarks to make it correspond more closely to the German. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 111

Some further remarks from the same context are also helpful here: But, if I am to know what a proposition like Fermat’s last theorem says, must I not know what the criterion is, for the proposition to be true? And I am of course acquainted with criteria for the truth of similar , but not with any criterion for the truth of this proposition. ‘Understanding’: a vague !... ‘I am going to shew you how there are infinitely many prime num- bers’ presupposes a condition in which the proposition that there are infinitely many prime numbers had no, or only the vaguest, meaning. It might have been merely a joke to him, or a paradox. In those remarks we can see that the problems about under- standing a mathematical proposition before we have a proof are quite similar to the problems about talk of the age of the bones at Whoozie, before we have any method of dating the bones.17 The passage also suggests that my proposed Wittgensteinian reply to Woozley’s argument does not go far enough. To ask whether mathematicians do not understand Fermat’s proposition as completely as one can possibly understand it (i.e., as com- pletely as they will if they discover a proof), is to call into ques- tion the sort of approach that says that what ‘understanding it’ comes to can be seen in what mathematicians do, and that what they now do is try various methods of proving it. That is different from what they will do with it once there have been developments in mathematics (perhaps including unforeseeable shifts in what are recognized as techniques of proof), and they come to have what they recognize as a proof. (I cannot here discuss the question whether we should identify any of the remarks in the passage quoted with a Wittgensteinian

17. An important remark of Wittgenstein’s concerns the analogy between ‘math- ematical propositions’ and the other things we call propositions: the analogy depends on treating method of verification (in the case of an experiential proposition) as anal- ogous to method of checking truth (in the case of a mathematical proposition). See Philosophical Grammar, p. 366. The implication is that there is then an analogy between the problems concerning empirical propositions with no method of verifi- cation and problems concerning unproved mathematical propositions, and an anal- ogy between the effect of a new method of verification on the meaning of an empirical proposition and the effect of a new method of proof on the meaning of a mathemat- ical proposition. 112 I—CORA DIAMOND

‘interlocutor’. Whether or not we take this or that point in the passage to be made in Wittgenstein’s own voice, the remarks indicate the complexity which he recognized the problems about meaning and proof to have.)

VIII Why did Wittgenstein tie the sense of empirical questions to methods of discovery, and the sense of mathematical prop- ositions to proofs? His reasons are closely connected to his ideas about grammar. It is neither necessary nor possible for me to give a full account of how he uses that term; one way he uses it is in exploring the significance of departures from our ways of using words. Suppose there were people whose body of practices of dating things overlapped but in some ways differed from ours. Would they be getting the dates of things wrong, or not exactly dating things but (let us say) snating them? The difference between them and us is in the grammar of the expressions used: that is, ‘grammar’ is Wittgenstein’s term for the characterizing features of people’s ways of using an expression, including their methods of investigation.18 For the relation between methods of verification and grammar, see Philosophical Investigations §353: the specification of how we verify a proposition is ‘a contribution to the grammar of the proposition’. Wittgenstein also treats the proof of a mathematical proposition as a contribution to its grammar. Think of how the proof that there is no greatest prime number provides us with a method that we did not have before for upsetting any claim that such-and-such is the greatest prime, and in that way changes the available ways of talking. Proofs, then, and new methods of empirical investigation, in that they alter the ways we establish what is the case, the ways we call into question various sorts of claim, are contributions to the activities of using language; they belong (that is) to grammar. In the 1935 lectures that I quoted earlier, Wittgenstein dis- cussed the ‘arbitrariness of grammar’, though he notes that that label is misleading. He argues that, if we arrange grammar differ- ently, we should not be getting wrong the of what we are talking about; rather, we should be talking about something else.

18. What a ‘characterizing feature’ is is vague; see, e.g., PI §§562–568. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 113

(See also Zettel §320, and Philosophical Investigations §§371 and 373.) How we arrange grammar may be practically convenient or inconvenient, but it is not answerable to the nature of the things we speak about (because not separable from what things we are speaking about). In the case of empirical questions, it belongs to the grammar of a question what techniques there are for settling such matters. Thus, in a significant sense, what it is about which we are asking (the ‘age of the bones at Whoozie’) is dependent on techniques of enquiry, on the ways we do settle such questions. We can now see that the Woozley argument concerns the heart of the issue. Woozley said that when we have a question but no way of answering it, what guides our search for a method and our judgment that we have found an appropriate method is our understanding of the question, our grasp of what it is we are trying to find out. And so, if methods of investigation belong to what Wittgenstein speaks of as grammar, then (on the Woozley argument) our grasp of what it is we are trying to find out prop- erly guides us in fixing grammar. That, then, is a clear rejection of the idea that grammar fixes what we are talking about. The relation between the Woozley argument and Wittgen- stein’s fundamental ideas can also be seen in Roger White’s ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’.19 White discusses the conse- quences of Wittgenstein’s view that it is the proof of a mathe- matical proposition that shows us the meaning of the proved proposition. Writing before the publication in English of the passages I quoted from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, and before the availability of a proof of Fermat’s last theorem, he argues in more detail just what is argued in the first quoted paragraph: that we understand the theorem perfectly well. He then gives an argument parallel to Woozley’s: he says that it is ‘difficult to give a characterisation of the centuries of research devoted to the attempt to prove or disprove this Theorem on the supposition that the mathematicians were exploring a whose sense they did not understand perfectly well’. We ought not to think that there is some philosophical doubt about whether we can believe Fermat’s theorem now.

19. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 51 (1977), pp. 169–186; see especially pp. 171–173. 114 I—CORA DIAMOND

IX Where are we? Putnam’s idea was that, if Leibniz had thought that the bones at Whoozie were a million years old, he would have been right; and he also argued that it takes a crude pseudo- Wittgensteinianism to deny it. I have been trying to show the kinds of consideration that led Wittgenstein to tie meaning to methods of investigation. These considerations may indeed seem to support the most radical anti-realist readings of Wittgenstein. I have in mind ’s reading of Wittgenstein, and his claim that Wittgenstein’s arguments undercut the idea we have of facts independent of our actual investigations. On a Malcolmian reading what is meant by ‘These bones are at least a million years old’ is settled only when we have some means of establishing the age of the bones. The sentence has no meaning until then. On the more radical anti-realist reading, the truth-conditions of ‘These bones are at least a million years old’ are not settled even when we have techniques for investigating such matters, because it is not yet settled how we shall apply those techniques to the particular case of these bones. What counts as applying those techniques in the same way as we have been doing depends on what we accept, when the investigation is carried out, as applying them in the same way. Until we have actually carried out the investigation, what ‘aspects of the world’ count as showing our sentence about the bones to be true or false is undetermined.20

20. See Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics (London, 1980), p. 196; also chap. XI. I shall not here discuss Wright’s reading of Wittgenstein or its more recent development. Any criticism of the 1980 reading should, however, take seriously the textual support it can be given. One cannot argue against it that the reading misses the significance of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the internal relation between a rule and its application to a particular case. Wittgenstein himself rejected the philosophical attempt to appeal to internal to explain what counts as applying the rule properly. He argued that, after we have introduced the use of ‘red’ by an ostensive definition, we could go on to use the word, not (as we do) for many different shades of red, but for top C and the smell of lavender. No internal relation stands in the way of doing so; for if we did call such things red, we should say that they are related to the earlier things we called red by the internal relation of ‘being similar in colour’. To say that we call blood and strawberries red, after we have given the ostensive definition, because there is an internal relation between the things we call red is, he said, to give another rule of grammar for ‘red’. What Wittgenstein made clear (in a lecture on 21st January 1936, part of which is included in the Appendix to this paper), is that one cannot reply to a reading like Wright’s by the arguments of G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker in Scepticism, Rules and Language (Oxford, 1984); he deals specifically with the central point they make on p. 96. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 115

What then are the consequences of this anti-realist reading for the sameness of beliefs at different times? If, at any time prior to the actual dating of the bones, you say ‘I believe that the bones are a million years old’, the most your belief could come to, it seems, is the belief that, when it is fixed what counts as making the sentence ‘The bones are a million years old’ true, the sentence will turn out to express something true. But that is not what we believe afterwards. (Compare Wittgenstein’s own remarks about having a hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct. He says that, since we can extend mathematics so that the conjecture comes out true, or extend mathematics so that it does not, having a hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct is having a hunch that mathematics will be extended so that the conjecture will be said to be right.21) I have tried to show that Wittgenstein’s apparent ‘verifi- cationism’ is a matter neither of bad readings imposed on the texts nor of a view that he took for a few years and left behind as a kind of philosophical temptation of which he had been cured. A ‘verificationist’ element within his thought is tied to his ideas about grammar: grammar as showing what we are talking about;22 and the view that grammar shows what we are talking

21. Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 137; see also Philosophical Gram- mar, p. 161. See also the very interesting discussion in Wittgenstein’s lecture on 18th November 1946 of the difference between two language-games in which there might be said to be conjectures about what someone was thinking. In one game we form conjectures and we then ask the person what he thought; what is said in this game has important practical consequences of various sorts. There is another sort of game in which we might say such things as ‘Queen Victoria may have thought so-and-so as she lay dying’. Is this guessing at what she thought? We might call it guessing at what she thought, Wittgenstein says, but we should note that this is a different use of ‘guess’, a different game. (See Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47, ed. P. T. Geach (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), p. 274.) 22. It is also connected, in ways I shall not discuss, with his treatment of rules. My reading of Wittgenstein on the issue of verificationism is different not only from that of Putnam, but also from that of in Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’ (Cambridge, 1989). Winch argues that, although Wittgenstein was concerned with the problems that preoccupied the logical positivists, there is no ‘close kinship’ between his view and theirs. But ‘close kinship’ and mere concern with the same problems are not the only possibilities. As I read Wittgenstein’s 1935 lectures, he thought it was useful (in connection with problems about personal and the sameness of after-images) to say that a would-be empirical sentence that could not be verified had no sense. I should agree with Winch that this should not be read as verificationism of the sort held by the positivists. But I think that there need be nothing misleading in noting it as an expression of a verificationist element in Wittgenstein’s approach to various problems. 116 I—CORA DIAMOND about is not given up after the 1930s. (A good example from well after the 1930s can be found in Geach’s notes to Wittgenstein’s lectures of 1946–7. Wittgenstein said of describing oneself as remembering having done a calculation in one’s head, that this use of the past tense, when someone first comes up with it, ‘is a new use, like the use of the past tense about dreams’, and he added ‘What we mean by memory depends on how the memory is checked’. This is a new language-game, he said, with a new sense of memory.23) Putnam is right that Wittgenstein is not properly read as a verificationist; but he does not (I think) see how far the ‘verifi- cationism’ is internal to Wittgenstein’s thinking. It is not merely a philosophical temptation, although some modes of expressing it are. And so the reply (within the context of Wittgenstein’s phil- osophy) to the voice of verificationism is complex, and is not merely a of philosophically confused expressions of verificationism (as Putnam seems to suggest in ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief’.24) I explore these matters further in Sections X–XII, but I want first to note the relation between my reading of Wittgenstein and two remarks of his already quoted: the epi- graph to this paper, and §353 of the Investigations. The two remarks in different ways bring out both the importance of the tie between what is meant by a sentence and what justifies asserting it and the importance of not treating that tie as the basis for a reductive identification of meaning with method of verification or with assertability conditions.25

X It will be useful here to look at another example, resembling those we considered earlier. Suppose that we have a method determining whether dogs dream or not. Even if we actually had such a method, it would not determine the content of their

23. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, pp. 30 and 148. 24. See pp. 63–64, the passage discussed in Section III above. 25. I am indebted to James Conant for suggestions about my arguments here. He has also emphasized the significance of the first sentence of §353, which I have not quoted earlier: ‘The question about the method and possibility of verification of a proposition is only a particular form of the question ‘‘How do you mean that?’’’. It is a form of that question but only a particular form. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 117 dreams. Yet it seems possible, does it not, that they should dream about chasing rabbits, or even about being chased by giant rab- bits? If, in a story told from a dog’s point of view, we were told of such dreams, we should certainly not think that the sentences we were reading were meaningless.26 Now take this sentence: ‘If someone that his dog has been dreaming about chasing squirrels, then either he is right or he is wrong, whether or no we have a way of telling’. How might Wittgenstein respond to someone who said that?27 He might say that, when we talk in that ‘either... or’ way, it sounds as if we are asserting that there are two alternatives: the person who believes that dogs dream about squirrels believes rightly, or he believes wrongly. But what we are doing is insisting on a particular use of ‘believes’. If we are going to say of this person ‘He believes this about dogs’, that way of talking brings with it (in the use we are insisting on) talk of believing rightly or wrongly. But we are not advancing beyond the fact that we want to use ‘believe that’ in this context. (There are other ways of using ‘believe that’. In discussing related issues, Rorty uses the example ‘Theseus was the son of Poseidon, not of Zeus’. If we say of someone that he believes that Theseus was the son of Poseidon, that use of ‘believe’ does not bring with it ‘he believes rightly or he believes wrongly’.28) We are willing to say of someone: he believes dogs dream that sort of thing. We use ‘believe’ in that sort of context, although we have no way of investigating the question. If he says ‘I believe etc.’ we would not say that he had merely uttered a sentence that will some day be usable to express a belief, nor do we think that the person believes merely that when it is fixed what ‘aspects of

26. See, for example, Don Marquis, ‘Blood Will Tell’, in Treasury of Great Dog Stories (New York, 1990), ed. Roger Caras, pp. 422–430, at p. 428. See also Wittgen- stein’s remarks in the lecture referred to in note 21 above, about Lytton Strachey’s description of the dying of Queen Victoria. Wittgenstein denied that Strach- ey’s description was meaningless because of its unverifiability. It has its meaning through its connection with the public language-game of description of people’s thoughts. See Geach, Mental Acts (London, 1957), p. 3; cf. also the of that lecture in Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47, pp. 32, 152, 274. 27. The response I imagine is based on Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Michelson– Morley experiment in the lecture of 18th November 1935, included in the Appendix. 28. For a discussion of these issues, see John McDowell, ‘On the of a ’, Mind 86: 159–185 (1977), especially §8. 118 I—CORA DIAMOND the world’ establish the truth or falsity of the sentence, it will turn out to be a true sentence. Again, and similarly, we do use ‘believe that’ this way: if the story Putnam told us were true, then someone in the seventeenth century did believe that the bones at Whoozie were a million years old. We are, that is, willing to talk about people, whose lives differ from ours in lacking many techniques of investigation important for us, as believing what we do. And when, in philosophy, we discuss this willingness we do not get beyond it, to anything else which supports it, although we may appear to do so. That willingness to ascribe the same beliefs as ours to people whose lives with words (including the words they use in express- ing what we take to be beliefs which are the same as ours), are in some respects very different from our lives with words (includ- ing in particular the words we use in expressing the beliefs we take to be the same as theirs): that willingness is a striking and significant human phenomenon. It is one of the characteristic features of our relation to the thought of other people. We can connect it with the case of translation. When Putnam discusses Malcolm’s understanding of Wittgenstein, he objects that the view Malcolm ascribes to Wittgenstein forces us to say that the word ‘water’, used in a novel or letter written in 1700, does not mean what the word means today, because our tech- niques for telling whether something is water have changed. And so it would follow that we should not translate the word ‘water’ used in 1700 into present-day English as ‘water’. Against this, Putnam protests that Wittgenstein quite sensibly would allow there to be sameness of meaning despite differences in methods of verification, and so would not be committed to the impossi- bility of such translations. Wittgenstein as I read him might draw our attention to the phenomenon here, our simply going ahead and taking those people’s word ‘water’ as ours, our simple will- ingness to ‘translate’ their word ‘water’ by ‘water’. This is not made correct by a word’s meaning being independent of tech- niques of investigation. Rather, seventeenth-century life with the word ‘water’ is in many ways very like ours; in the presence of the many similarities and the limited differences, what we do in most of the contexts in which we want to talk about their thought is connect it with ours, in that we treat their word in just the same way we treat the word in the mouth of one of our contemporaries. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 119

When Putnam said that, if a seventeenth-century person had entertained the idea that the bones at Whoozie were a million years old, he would have been right, he says that there is a picture we have: a picture ‘which has as much weight in our lives as the idea that there are people out there, in the past, and in other cultures in the present, with whom we can communicate’. Such pictures are intrinsic to the practices which they inform and sup- port. The suggestion there is that we see others as in the same thought-space as ourselves, able to speak of the same things, able to say and mean at least roughly what we can. This is an idea of what is possible in the relation between their thought and ours. But does such an idea support and inform our judgments of what is actually the case, our practice? Our practice here is the complex one of communicating with people, a practice which includes the ascription of beliefs to them in a great variety of circumstances. Putnam’s sentence ‘if a seventeenth century person had... enter- tained the possibility that the skeletal remains found at Whoozie are a million years old, that person would have been right’ pro- vides not so much a picture supporting our practice, but a sample of our practice. We do not get beyond the practice to an idea or picture of human relations or language, forming an important kind of support for it. Putnam, we saw, contrasts Wittgenstein’s real views with Mal- colm’s reading of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, according to Put- nam, accepts that meaning may remain unchanged when techniques of investigation change. But in what sort of context might the view ascribed to Wittgenstein appear to be needed? And what is it doing in such contexts? The apparent need to hold that meaning remains unchanged in such circumstances arises because it seems that our ascriptions of beliefs (about water, or the age of bones, or whatnot) to people in the past can be correct only if their sentences can mean what ours do; and the verifi- cationist has called that into question. But our response to the challenge should not be to join in a debate with the verificationist about when meanings can be the same, or about when people’s sentences can refer to the same things. Putnam holds that there are important ideas about sameness of meaning, ideas which Wittgenstein does not call into question, which support our prac- tices. Against this I am arguing, and putting forward as Wittgen- stein’s view, that these practices are not supported by such beliefs 120 I—CORA DIAMOND or pictures. (Compare the practice of taking some of what is said to us as contradicting what we have said. In this practice, we make our utterances meet each other, make them stand in such- and-such logical relations. The practice is a fundamental one, and does not rest on ideas about people being able to hold con- tradictory beliefs, or any other ideas.) I am not here making any general claims about the importance pictures can have in connection with our ways of using words. There are two particular kinds of case worth noting. First, a con- ception of human as beings with whom communication is possible, a conception which one might describe as a picture of human beings as capable of communication, may support attempts to communicate in circumstances in which there are grave barriers, like the total incomprehensibility of the language of the people among whom one has suddenly found oneself. (So far as Putnam’s claim about the role of pictures in supporting our practice calls attention to such cases, I should have no objec- tion to it.) And, secondly, there are cases in which a picture may be important in determining whom we take to be incapable of communicating. If I believe that people who look very unlike myself and my compatriots are utterly incapable of speaking my language, then, even when they utter in my presence sentences of my language, pronounced just as I and other natives pronounce such sentences, I may not connect the sounds they make with my language, may not take them to be saying anything in my lan- guage. (Or, if I do understand the sentence, I may look around in some bewilderment for the person uttering it, not being able to take as possible the idea that it was uttered by the person directly in front of me, any more than I should think that it might have come from the fly sitting on my hand.) A picture of these foreign people as incapable of communicating may stand in the way of taking them to be uttering sentences that I or my compatriots might assert.29 But the possibility of such cases does not imply that, in the normal case, there is also a picture, but a picture with an opposite role, a picture of people as capable of communicating, providing an underpinning for such ordinary practices as the ascription of beliefs (about water, for example) to people who lived three hundred years ago.

29. I am indebted to James Conant for general discussion of this case, and for details of what it is like to be treated as not capable of communication. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 121

XI Here is a remark of Wittgenstein’s that is relevant. ...the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. (Remarks on the Foundations of Math- ematics, p. 333.) The illusory image is, in our present case, that of something lying beyond the practice of saying such things as that Leibniz believed about the bones what we now know to be so. We are willing to ascribe our belief to him, willing to treat the sentence in his mouth as about the age of the bones, just as we use our words, including ‘triangle’, in giving the beliefs of a six-year-old child, whose life with the word ‘triangle’ is very different from ours. The child does not grasp the geometrical propositions which, according to Wittgenstein, go to determine the grammar of the word ‘triangle’. These propositions can be used by us in all sorts of ways, for example in figuring out such things as what of triangular tiles might fill a space. Or, again, we can use the geometry of the triangle in figuring out the height of some distant object; the child cannot do so. Since the child lacks knowledge of the proofs which, according to Wittgenstein, contribute to fix- ing the grammar of ‘triangle’, and since the child is incapable of doing with the word all those things that depend on some mas- tery of geometry, it seems to follow that the child who uses the word ‘triangle’ is using a word with a different grammar, and hence does not mean what we mean, and hence that his beliefs about what he calls triangles are not beliefs about triangles in our sense. (Compare Wittgenstein’s remark from the 1940s, quoted earlier, that for the person who has not yet got the proof that there are an infinite number of primes, the proposition saying that there are has no or only the vaguest meaning. And compare also ’s discussion of what it is for such-and-such sort of object to ‘exist in someone’s world’.30) I am drawing attention here to the fact that in our practice we do not refuse to treat the child’s beliefs as beliefs about triangles. But I do not want to go beyond the fact that in our practice we do ascribe

30. The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1979), ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Lan- guage’, pp. 168–190, especially pp. 172–173. 122 I—CORA DIAMOND beliefs about triangles to the child to the idea that what informs or supports our practice is an idea of meaning as capable of being the same despite differences in mastery of geometry, or an idea of the child as someone with whom we can communicate, some- one able to mean what we do. What I have just given as a ‘Wittgensteinian’ account may seem very close to the Rortyan view to which Putnam objected, the view that saying of the seventeenth-century sentence that it was true then is simply paying a compliment to ourselves. For I have described us as simply taking certain sentences uttered with apparent assertive force, or as conjectures, and treating them as expressions of what we would now be saying if we uttered those sentences. Putnam called the Rortyan view an emotive theory of truth because the word ‘true’ is treated as a mere compliment; but what then am I saying, if it is not that we compliment Leibniz by treating his sentence as expressing our belief? What are we doing if not patting people on the back for coming out with sentences like ones we ourselves use? We are, I suggest, making connections between activities of thought and talk which are dif- ferent in certain ways. Those differences could be given great weight, or less weight. There are various possible ways in which a concept of sameness of thought, sameness of belief, might be shaped. The shape we give it, in our ascriptions of belief, is this: thought or belief that is part of an activity differing from ours in many of the available techniques may be the same as thought or belief that is part of our life with words. There is great human significance in our making connections of thought in that way. In our practice, we make the of something which people at different times, with different techniques of enquiry, may believe, may be said to believe, in that we use the same sentence to state our beliefs and to give theirs. We make the notion of something with truth-conditions independent of techniques of investigation, in that we use the same sentence to state our beliefs and to give those of people living hundreds of years ago. So here I am rejecting the idea that sameness of truth-conditions should be thought of as supporting our practice. The picture of sameness of truth-conditions as supporting our practices of translating is a philosophical elaboration of the complex facts of our actual practice; its attractiveness lies in its seeming to go beyond what we do. In arguing against Rorty, Putnam appeals to the difference between a Davidsonian account of translation and a Quinean HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 123 account (NTO, pp. 6–7). A Davidsonian account, applied to the present case, might have in it: ‘The sentence ‘‘The bones at Whoozie are a million years old’’ is true in seventeenth-century English if and only if the bones at Whoozie are a million years old’. If Rorty does follow Davidson here, he must, so Putnam argues, distinguish this from the Quinean schema that simply allows the seventeenth-century sentence to be ‘translated’ by our sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a million years old’; and so Rorty must allow that the specification of truth-con- ditions in the Davidsonian scheme has significant weight. But the Davidsonian scheme can block our view of what it is for our understanding of the languages between which we are translating to enter the translations we give. Consider the familiar case of ‘Snow is white’ and ‘Schnee ist weiss’. There is the life in which the German sentence is used, and the life in which ‘Snow is white’ is used, and then there is the making of connections between the German life and the English life. That is, there are many acts, of various sorts, in which we evince our willingness to treat those lives as alike, acts like the making of vocabulary lists for children to learn, acts like the ascription to Germans of beliefs akin to ours, and so on. The practices in which we forge such connec- tions are not (so I am arguing) supported by pictures of the relation between understanding and truth-conditions. Rather, there are branches of the family of language-games of translation which lend themselves to Davidsonian representation. It is important that we may wish to call attention to dissimi- larities rather than similarities between the life that some group of people have with some word or words and the life that some other group of people have with what appears to be a word for the same thing, say a word for the same place. We may want to insist that there is no translating between the two groups. Such a case is presented in Brian Friel’s play Translations (London, 1981): the Irish name ‘Baile Beag’ and the English ‘Ballybeg’ may be names of the same place, but the language-games in which they are used have such limited , such grave differences, that sentences containing the two words may (Friel lets us see) be treated as not translations of each other.31 And one could say

31. On the issues here, especially on the difference between interpretation and trans- lation, and on different sorts of translation, see also Michael Forster, ‘On the Very Idea of Denying the of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes’, Inquiry, 41: 133–185 (1998). 124 I—CORA DIAMOND here that the two names are in a sense not names for the same place after all, because the place Baile Beg does not exist in the world of the British soldiers (to use the way of speaking I quoted from Stanley Cavell).32 The issue of translation is here political; a focus on cases like ‘Snow is white’, or even ‘These bones are a million years old’ leads attention away from cases in which we may reasonably refuse to make that connection between human lives that is made by treating our words as meeting the words of others. Friel’s play makes explicit the relation between the failure of human connectedness and the absence of connection of words, as it does also, and with great comic effect, the relation between the human connectedness of the Irish peasant with the author of the Georgics and the connection between the Irish language and Latin. Putnam says that we have the idea that there are people out there, in the past, and in other cultures in the present, with whom we can communicate. Friel’s play presents such communi- cation with people in the past, but shows also what it is like for there to be people out there with whom there is no real communi- cation; the language of an occupying army is seen in the play as an instrument not of communication but of occupation.33 Speaking of mathematical conviction, Wittgenstein said that it might be put in the form ‘I recognize this as analogous to that’;

32. See also Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments about such pairs of place-names, in ‘, Power and Philosophy’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philo- sophical Association, 59: 5–22 (1985), especially p. 7. 33. For a summary of controversies about the relation between politics and language in Friel’s play, see Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (, 1988), Appendix II of Chapter 6 (pp. 154–5). Friel’s play helps make clear what is the matter with some remarks of John Koethe’s about my reading of Witt- genstein on these issues (in his The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought, Ithaca, 1996, p. 71). Koethe has claimed that I make the willingness to attribute beliefs like our own to people distant from ourselves into a mere verbal response to similarities and differences. The language he uses, of ‘mere verbal response’, seems to miss the depth and far-reachingness of what we do with words, and also the kind of importance Wittgenstein saw in the use of words, in the making of connections with words. Such connections both reveal and help to shape our relations with others. What would it be to be willing to connect Baile Beag with Ballybeg, or to treat ‘Nablus’ and ‘Shech- em’ (say) as if they were ‘simply two names of the same place’, two labels one or other of which we might put on a roadmap for tourists? I don’t mean the answer to be obvious: Friel’s play shows us a context in which the willingness to make a connection constitutes a betrayal of one’s community. What the human significance is of a ‘verbal response’ has to be seen in the particular case. See also MacIntyre, op. cit., for dis- cussion of ‘simply two names of the same place’, and for a response to the idea that the tourist use of place-names exemplifies a ‘core’ use, all the rest of what is involved in the use of such names being a matter of mere contingent associations. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 125 and he added that ‘recognize’ is used there, not as in ‘I recognize him as Lewy’, but as in ‘I recognize him as superior to myself’. It is the indication that one accepts a convention (Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 63). I am arguing here that accepting a translation is similar: it is a ‘recognition of this as analogous to that’; and the use of ‘recognize’ is like that in ‘I recognize him as superior to myself’. What I have suggested about Friel’s play, then, is that it may lead us to say: ‘I will not recognize a sentence about Baile Beg as analogous to a sentence about Ballybeg’. If there is incommensurability between the lan- guages, it is a matter of refusal to accept conventions allowing translation. In ‘The Craving for ’, Putnam emphasizes that what makes a translation correct depends on the context and on our interests.34 That claim can be understood in various ways; so, although I too might say that what makes a translation correct depends on the context and on our interests, I am not sure how far our agreement here goes. Like Putnam, I should reject ideas of incommensurability based on our being supposedly impri- soned in our own forms of thought or language; I do, however, leave room for a kind of incommensurability, based on our poss- ibly refusing to ‘recognize this as analogous to that’. Such a view does not remove objectivity from our practices of translation, any more than Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics removes objectivity from our practices of proof (but that is another story, and the analogy between proof and translation cannot be pushed too far). If Rorty is recommending that we treat Leibniz’s utterance as not having a , why should I object? Why should Put- nam? For neither Putnam nor I takes our present practices of translation to be sacrosanct, and Rorty is simply recommending a change in those practices, so far as they entitle us to say that Leibniz got right what we now know, so far (that is) as they give sense to a notion of non-local correctness. The problem is not that he has recommended a change, but that his case for the usefulness of the change depends upon his seeing in those present practices a dependence on suspect features of our philosophical

34. Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), pp. 120–131, at p. 122. 126 I—CORA DIAMOND tradition. The case for change is that it would be generally useful to replace the tradition with something less stultifying. My argu- ment has not been that Wittgenstein requires us to leave our practices alone, but rather that the practices in question depend neither on suspect nor on non-suspect conceptions of the pos- sibility of communication or of the possibility of our getting right how things are.

XII Let us go back to our narrative of the seventeenth century, and make some changes in it. We can imagine the history of our culture having gone very differently from the way it went. In this new story, the do not develop as they actually did. Scientific work is discouraged, and then suppressed, and is treated as inspired by the devil. Various ancient scrolls are disco- vered, and taken to be divinely inspired. They are believed to contain in somewhat cryptic form the answer to questions that we should say are empirical. Procedures are developed and are taught in universities for finding these hidden answers in the sacred texts. The texts are used to assign dates to events; to assign a date to a past event is to assign it a date from 0 to 6000 years ago: that is their dating system. Using the sacred texts, the bones found at Whoozie are determined to be 1200 years old.35 Putnam’s remark about our ability to communicate with peo- ple in cultures different from our own suggests that he would say that the people in the culture I have described do have beliefs about how old the bones are. That is, he would go along with the way I have ‘translated’ their beliefs just now, when I said that they took the bones to be 1200 years old. And I think he would say that their beliefs about the age of the bones are wrong. But here we should note that, within their life with talk about the age of things, it would be treated only as a sort of joke to say of something that it is a million years old. In their grammar there is no place for the hypothesis that the bones are a million years old: there is no such serious move in their game. I am not saying that their language is incommensurable with ours; I am allowing

35. The story was suggested by my reading of R. L. Goodstein’s ‘Language and Experience’ in Philosophy of , eds. and Sidney Morgenbesser (New York, 1960), pp. 82–100. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 127 that we might indeed ‘translate’ their sentences into our lan- guage, and ascribe to them false beliefs about the age of the bones. But we should note that we are doing this across a big difference in grammar. Their life with talk of how old things are is quite like ours in some ways and very unlike ours in others. If someone in that culture uttered the sentence ‘Those bones are a million years old’ we might indeed say ‘She got the age of the bones right’, but (because the sentence has such a different place in our life from what it has in theirs) our saying such a thing is closer to being a compliment we pay to the sentence than is say- ing the same thing of Leibniz in the original story. If we say of someone at another time or in another culture that, in uttering the sentence she got such-and-such right, how close that comes to being merely a compliment we pay to the sentence depends on how far life with those words is in that cul- ture from ours. In the case of Leibniz’s speculation about the bones, we think of him as already within a scientific culture, a culture in which theories may be tied to each other in the design of instruments and the development of techniques, and in which sacred texts are not seen as determining the possibilities within which what can be recognized as serious speculation takes place. What makes the sentence an hypothesis at all is that it is connec- ted with the ways hypotheses are formulated and discussed, and methods for investigating them thought about, looked for, critic- ized, and so on. And so, if we say of Leibniz that he got the age of the bones right, our comment itself has more to it than if we say the same thing of someone who utters the sentence in the culture that has altogether rejected scientific investigation. A criticism of Putnam, then, is that the idea of us as having a picture of people communicating with each other over time and across cultures can lead attention away from how much or how little there may be in ascriptions of beliefs, beliefs specified in our language, to people distant from us.

XIII Here are my conclusions, including a few comments on the debate between Rorty and Putnam. It is worthwhile, I think, to give the opposite emphasis from Putnam’s to Wittgenstein’s remark (PI §43) about meaning and 128 I—CORA DIAMOND use: that, for a large class of cases, though not for all, in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be explained this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Putnam emphasizes that Wittgenstein is not identifying meaning with use. True. But he is insisting that in a large number of cases we should try think- ing of meaning as use. And, if we do that, it will indeed push us in the direction of verificationism,36 will lead us to take seriously those differences in use emphasized by verificationists. We should note that, if a specification of the method of verification is a contribution to grammar, and if grammar tells us what we are talking about, then giving a method of verification is a contri- bution to telling what we are talking about. We can emphasize these connections in Wittgenstein’s thought without taking him to be presenting a theory of reference or meaning as determined by grammar (let alone by verification). What I have called the verificationist strand in Wittgenstein’s thought is properly seen as a matter of a philosophical technique, a technique for redirecting attention; the usefulness of the technique depends on the particu- lar kinds of problem with which we may be confronted. Wittgenstein is no verificationist. But taking seriously the veri- ficationist element that is present in his philosophical methods is something that we can do, that Putnam could do, without giving up on the importance of communication and understanding between people over time and across cultures that vary in many ways, including their techniques of investigation. If that verifi- cationist element is allowed for, is the distance between Putnam and Rorty narrowed? Not, perhaps, by very much. One signifi- difference between them is that Putnam’s account does and Rorty’s does not treat as important the human connections that are recognized in our willingness to translate the sentences of others as sentences of our language, as expressions of what we

36. Putnam, in ‘Meaning Holism’ (Realism with a Human Face, pp. 278–302, at p. 301, quotes ’s remarks about §43, and expresses agreement with Goldfarb’s view. Goldfarb wrote ‘Given that invoking use by itself carries little infor- mation, I take [Wittgenstein’s] remark in §43 to be, by and large, a denial of the possibility and the appropriateness of theorizing about meaning’ (‘I Want You to Bring Me a Slab: Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investi- gations’, Synthese, 56: 265–282 (1983), at p. 279). My view differs from Goldfarb’s in that I take the invocation of use in §43 to have significant content, and to be connec- ted with Wittgenstein’s efforts to draw attention to differences in use that we may be inclined to overlook in philosophy. (I should not disagree with his point that §43 does not provide a definition of meaning.) HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 129 should believe were we to utter the same words. Putnam’s example of the bones at Whoozie is a particularly telling example, because the connections we make here between the speculator and ourselves reflect a shared human interest in under- standing the strange things we find in the world with us. But Putnam’s example takes us further. I have spoken of our words meeting the words of others: stand- ing in such relations as expressing the same or different beliefs. Our words meeting the words of others, our words meeting what is the case: these ‘meetings’ (that is to say, the of belief ) are shaped in what we do, our responses to words and gestures. ‘...’, Wittgenstein said, ‘are the expression of our inter- est, and direct our interest’ (PI §570). In Putnam’s discussion of the bones at Whoozie there is expressed clearly and feelingly the great importance of our interest in ‘people out there’ (NTO, p. 4), our interest in understanding and communicating, and also our interest in getting things right. These ideas form part of a concep- tion lying at a great distance from Rorty, from his idea that the ascription of beliefs to organisms and machines is an activity the point of which is that it makes possible the explanation and prediction of behaviour. That activity of ascription of beliefs, as Rorty conceives it (and as he recommends that we conceive it), is detached from the idea of our beliefs being made to be true or false by how things are (except in a derivative sense of ‘make’). For Putnam, such a view—of the ascription of beliefs to other people, and of what is meant by beliefs being true—involves a kind of alienation from our Lebenswelt; for Rorty, that Lebens- welt, with its familiar modes of thought, is something from which we may do well, even at the cost of paradox, to alienate ourselves (although we may indeed find a few of its phrases useful for the sake of rhetorical effectiveness).37 The debate between Rorty and Putnam is not about solidarity versus truth, but about whether

37. My statement of Rorty’s views is based on his ‘ on Social Prac- tices’, in Truth and Progress, pp. 122–137, especially pp. 128–129 and 132–137; my statement of a possible reply from Putnam draws from his ‘Why is a ?’, in Realism with a Human Face, pp. 104–119, especially p. 118. For a discussion of Rorty’s claims about the usefulness of dropping talk of the answerability of our beliefs to anything but other people, see James Conant, ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’ and Rorty’s reply to Conant, in Richard Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford, forthcoming); Conant also has a general account of the debate between Putnam and Rorty in his Introduction to Putnam’s Words and Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994), pp. xxiv–xxxiii. 130 I—CORA DIAMOND there is (as Putnam thinks) an understanding of solidarity that does not oppose it to truth, and at the same time does not water truth down. The debate is also about how to read Wittgenstein, about what is useful in Wittgenstein, and about whether Wittgen- stein’s sort of attention to the kind of beings we are, to our natu- ral history, leads to a that has no room for unwatered-down truth. But unwatered-down truth is a question for another occasion.38

APPENDIX I have referred to material from Margaret Macdonald’s notes to Wittgenstein’s lectures during 1935–6. The Appendix contains relevant excerpts from those notes.39 18th November 1935 If one says that are private, they are often contrasted with physical objects. Like putting some transparent paper between him and the object and tracing it in two dimensions. We are sometimes tempted to think that what we see is a two- dimensional picture in this way. We are then tempted to say that what I see is not really a chair at all, but a sense datum or a particular view of the chair or some such thing. There may be a mirror which I do not see when I think I see the chair, so that what I am really seeing is a mirror image. I might point out that we are not compelled here to say that we see the same but [could say] that something seems the same, or that the appearance is the same, with regard to both the mirror image and the object. Propositions like ‘This is green’ (when I point to my own sense datum and utter these words) have been discussed by Russell and Moore. Nothing prevents me from pointing and saying the words, but that is about all. But Russell and Moore said that

38. I am very grateful to James Conant and Anthony Woozley for comments and suggestions about an early version of this essay. I much appreciate having had the ´ opportunity to present the material at the Simposio de Filosofıa: En Torno a la ´ Obra de Hilary Putnam, organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas. In preparing this version of the essay, I have been helped by Hilary Putnam’s very illuminating response to it at the conference, and also by the comments of the other participants. An early and shorter version of the essay, translated by J. A. Robles, ´ appeared in , 1992. 39. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder of the material included here. HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 131 when one said this one was talking to oneself. This seems to be taken as a proof that there is some sort of object there when I say ‘This is green’—but not the , which is public. The form ‘This is so-and-so’ is very well known to us. In certain situations in which we use the expression it is tautologous but seems to have very good sense.40 We are tempted to say that, whether we know or not whether he sees red, he does see it or not, although we have no criterion for this. Compare with the determining of the velocity of light, and the means of finding out when the light reached the mirror. We are inclined to say ‘Either it did reach the mirror in half the time or it did not, even though we have no means of detecting this’... This sort of question says nothing; it is a . But what role does the tautology play? It sounds as if, when you say ‘Either the light reached the mirror in half the time or it did not’, you were insisting that there were two alternatives. But what is done is to insist on the use of certain expressions. We have a particular picture that we think corresponds to our words; we have a picture of something arriving somewhere at a certain time, and we say that we know what we mean by saying that the ray of light arrives at a certain time. But do you know how to use this picture in the particular case we are discussing? Light is compared to a sort of Messenger. We are then using a sort of picture which almost compels us to go on in a certain way. I cannot talk about light as a ‘Messenger’ without saying that it makes sense to say that he arrived somewhere at a certain time. All we have is a lamp, a mirror and a certain sensation of light. But we think of the experiment in terms of throwing a ball and of a ball bouncing back again. But actually nothing was thrown and nothing came back. But the idea of a surface which ‘throws back’ the light is very familiar to us. But, if we go on with this picture, then to say it makes no sense to ask at what time the light reached the mirror makes havoc of our thoughts. We have to give up the picture. To say that it makes no sense to say that the light arrived at a certain moment involves also that it makes no sense to say that it arrived at a time between two limits. But, you might say, we are not dealing with moments but with length of time (man with a watch); but this makes no difference.

40. The footnoted sentence is an altered version of Margaret Macdonald’s notes. 132 I—CORA DIAMOND

After-images. We might say that one thing is favourable to the notion of sense data: the fact of after-images. One might say: An after-image is private. I cannot have his after-image. What would it be like for me to have his after-image? The question ‘What would it be like for so-and-so to be the case?’ is always asked relative to the removing of a certain sort of trouble. If someone said ‘What would it be like for someone to sit on a chair?’, I should say: What do you mean by asking this question? What sort of thing do you want explained—what is your trouble? Ordinarily, we know what it means for someone to sit on a chair; there is no difficulty about it. He justs sits on a chair and that is that. Or are you asking me to paint a picture of someone sitting on a chair? Or are his legs stiff, so that you do not know what he will do with them when he sits on the chair? Compare this with asking what it would be like to be expecting someone from 4 to 4:30. Is it asking whether there is a peculiar state of mind lasting from 4 to 4:30, or whether it is different activities, or what is it? It usually involves several alternative pos- sibilities, as if, e.g., one could sit on a chair in many different ways. If you ask ‘What would it be like to have the same after-image as someone else?’, one might ask ‘What sort of explanation do you want?’ We must say what particular trouble we want solved and what comparison to be made. We must compare this with the case in which we should normally say that we see ‘the same so-and-so’. We want to know the use of ‘same’ in, e.g., ‘I see the same chair’, ‘I see the same colour’ or ‘I see the same after-image’ as he. What is the criterion for this being the same chair as I saw yesterday? I can have two chairs which look exactly the same, take them out of your sight and then return them, and, pointing to one, say ‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ In these circum- stances there would be no answer to this question; it would have no sense. Compare the case of two rivers which flow into each other, and one goes on. Which is the one that goes on? If a brook flows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say it is the Danube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose two rivers join and go on with a new name, then we can say: two have disappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people who would say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it is not, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be non- sense. How are the words ‘It is or it is not’ being used? HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES? 133

What is the criterion in the case of the after-images? Can we say ‘I saw the same after-image on two different occasions?’ If I look at the sun and then look away, I see an after-image, and if I look at an electric light, I see an after-image of the same sort, though I usually say they are different [after-images] though exactly alike. How do we compare two after-images? We could describe them or paint a picture of them. But, again, people might say ‘However you compare them, either you have the same after-image or you have not’. (Should we regard the sameness of after-images as an unreachable goal which we can approach but never attain?)—You can say either. The point is that we use the word ‘same’ in a very different way. To say ‘Either we see the same thing or we do not’ is to insist on a particular kind of imagery. It suggests seeing two pictures which are either alike or not alike. I do not object to this, but you must be careful about the application, because the cases are very different. You must give the grammar of a picture as well as of a word or sentence. You must say how you are going to use the picture. Compare the case of looking out of the window and seeing a shower of rain. People would say there must be a certain number of drops, although we cannot count the number, and we must be seeing just that number. This looks as if there ought to be an answer to ‘How many drops are there?’ This is a case where whatever you say is likely to clash with something else you say. Compare the case of a primitive arithmetic having ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, ‘5’, and ‘many’ for anything above 5. You want to say that ‘many’ is an expression of ignorance (but that need not be so). Suppose someone asks ‘How many hairs has he got on his head?’ You would probably say ‘A lot’, not ‘99’ or any definite number. We see what makes us say that after-images are ‘essentially private’ and ‘Only I can know what after-images I have’. We might think that our grammar shows this, and reveals a differ- ence in the ‘nature’ of physical objects and after-images, but it doesn’t. Excerpt from notes, 21st January 1936 (The following material is in parentheses in Margaret Macdonald’s typescript, and has her initials at the end, suggesting that the para- graph or some part of it may have been reconstructed by her from sketchy notes.) 134 I—CORA DIAMOND

To put a patch of colour beside the word ‘red’ as an ostensive definition does not yet compel you to call blood or strawberries red, etc. This is something that you do afterwards, and you do in fact do it. To say that you do it because there is an internal relation of similarity between the things you call red is to give another rule of grammar for ‘red’; the things which you do in fact call red you are always going to say are related by the internal relation of ‘being similar in colour’. And you could use ‘red’ both for blood and for top C and the smell of lavender— just as you use it now for many different shades of red when you might not—but if your use becomes too erratic we shall not say that you are using a ‘word’ in a language at all. The use, e.g., must conform to your rules...