The Logical Alien Quotes

“Even if we restrict ourselves to the comparatively limited conceptual repertoire for talking about such matters that early Wittgenstein makes available, we may already say this: in order to learn a first language, the potential speaker needs not only to learn to see the symbol in the sign, she needs the very idea of language to become actual in her. This formal aspect of what it is to be human—the linguistic capacity as such—is something that dawns with the learning of one’s first language, with one’s becoming the bearer of a linguistic practice. We touched above, in the reply to Sullivan, on how the Tractatus inherits and adapts yet a further feature of the Kantian enterprise of critique: it starts with the assumption not only that we already have the very faculty we seek to elucidate in philosophy, but also that the prosecution of the philosophical inquiry must everywhere involve the exercise of the very capacity it seeks to elucidate. The Tractatus does not seek to confer the power of language on us: we already have this and bring it to our encounter with the book. Hence, it does not seek to explain what language is (as it is sometimes put) from sideways-on—from a position outside language—but rather from the self-conscious perspective of someone who already, in seeking philosophical clarity about what language is, seeks clarity about herself qua linguistic being. Through its exercise, however, the book does seek to confer a heightened mastery of that capacity on us—a reflective self- understanding of its logic and its limits, and of the philosophical confusions that arise from misunderstandings thereof. This heightened mastery (like the general power itself) can be acquired only through forms of further exercise of that same capacity. What I just said about the Tractatus, at this level of methodological abstraction, is no less true of the method of the Philosophical Investigations. The author of the Tractatus, however, unlike later Wittgenstein, never pauses for even a moment to reflect upon what it means to learn to recognize the symbol in the sign through attending to contexts of significant use. Nevertheless, early Witt- genstein would certainly agree with his later self on this point: for the learner of language, light must gradually dawn over the whole—over sign and symbol together.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Just as learning to produce phonologically contoured speech and learning to hear it as such are interrelated aspects of a single task, so, too, learning to creatively project words into new contexts and to grasp the projections of those same words by others into new contexts are two aspects of a single task. What can be hard to see here is that these two pairs of interrelated capacities - to hear and produce potentially significant phonemes, on the one hand, and to detect and to project a pattern of use, on the other - are themselves no less intertwined.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“For Frege, an account of what it is for a purely logical power to be in act suffices to allow us to achieve a proper philosophical appreciation of what “content,” “object,” “thought,” “judgment,” and “truth,” as such, are. These notions come to be fully in place through an elucidation of that power, considered apart from our capacity to arrive at kinds of knowledge that are not purely logical in content. Our capacity for empirical judgment, when it comes into view, will come into view as a comparatively complex joint exercise of a variety of faculties, in which the logically fundamental notions that figure in its explication (“content,” “object,” thought,” “judgment,” “truth”) are still supposed to retain the specific sense originally conferred upon them in our explication of the purely logical case, while allowing for their extension to logically impure cases of thought and proposition.
A certain picture of the role of reflection on the purely logical case, inthe order of explication of kinds of knowledge, is at work here—a picture that has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of analytic philosophy. On this picture, only if we are armed with a prior account of the case of purely logical thought, supplementing it as we go along, can we come to understand what empirically contentful theoretical thought (or practical thought) is. On this picture, the spatiotemporal bearing and the self-consciousness of the thinking subject do not belong to the form of thought (and hence their treatment does not belong, as Kant held, to a suitably capacious conception of philosophical logic); rather, all such further details among various species of thought are to be subsequently specified, if at all, through the introduction of further indices figuring within the content of thought. (Thoughts are simply conceived of as occurring at a time or at a person.) These consequences of the Fregean picture are not, on the whole, something for which post-Fregean analytic philosophers argue. Rather, it involves an entire philosophical picture that is simply tacitly, and largely unwittingly, assumed—a picture that is already under attack, albeit in very different ways, in both Kant and early Wittgenstein. According to this post-Fregean picture, we can furnish an account of the wider reaches of our capacity for finite theoretical cognition only by assuming the prior intelligibility of some self- standing account of how one of the ingredient capacities in empirical cognition—the capacity for logical thought—off its own bat is able to yield a delimitable sphere of truth-evaluable, object-related thoughts with judgable content, without its yet having entered into any form of co- operation with our other cognitive capacities.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“How does one do justice to what occasions philosophical wonder in us without conferring false sublimity upon it? We said that what occasions Frege’s wonder—the absoluteness of the logical order—seems to him to be such that it cannot possibly be implicated in our dependence upon language: say, in our meaning to assert p in using a proposition to say one thing rather than another, or in our using just these words rather than some others to assert it. The Tractatus (while repudiating Frege’s conception that the nature of logic may in no way be implicated in that of language) still seeks a way to hold onto the idea that in logic it is not we who express, by means of signs, what we want; rather it is the nature of the essentially necessary signs—it is logic—that asserts itself. The later Wittgenstein, as we are about to see, seeks to undo this residual subliming of the logical in the Tractatus, while in no way seeking to dissipate the sense of wonder at the illimitable depth of the logical—(what he later calls) the grammatical—that shows itself in our forms of thought and life.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“In Frege’s conception of logic, a logical law states an absolutely general truth—one whose truth every rational being must, on pain of contradiction, acknowledge. In later Wittgenstein’s practice, a grammatical remark inherits an aspect of Frege’s conception of the logical. On a proper understanding of a grammatical remark, it articulates a truism— something that admits of no contrary—hence something that every speaker of the language must acknowledge. Or conversely, if there is something in a given candidate grammatical remark that proves to admit of disagreement, then the remark in question cannot serve its methodological role. It fails to bring into view a point of (what later Wittgenstein calls) grammar. Grammatical remarks acquire their point—that is, our need for such reminders derives—from our attempting but failing to achieve a proper reflective understanding of our way around our own language. If the grammatical remark serves its purpose, what is thereby acknowledged is something that can come into view only against the background of a prior failed attempt to achieve a perspicuous overview of our own concepts. A Wittgensteinian grammatical remark comes to life as such only against the background of a philosophical confusion. Logic or grammar for later Wittgenstein, pace Frege, could qualify as a science only if philosophy is one. This also means that, for later Wittgenstein, unlike for Frege, there is no preexisting stock of propositions that constitutes all of the logico-grammatical truths there are. In potentiality there are perhaps indefinitely many, but in actuality the only remarks that actually exercise the power to disclose a philosophico-grammatical truth, for later Wittgenstein, are those that allow us to make progress with the problems that actually vex us in philosophy.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Before we turn to the Tractarian treatment of logical propositions, it is worth pausing to consider what becomes in that book of the philo- sophical idea that what makes some set of statements true (be they log- ical or empirical) is that they “reflect” a structure intrinsic to a domain of things. If one misunderstands the Tractarian comparison of a picture with a proposition, then one may think its very point is to encourage such an idea. Some commentators tell us that the crucial idea here is that there are two isomorphic “structures”—there is a structure in the world and a structure in language (or thought)—and in order to say (or think) what is true, one of the two structures must “reflect” the other.
This is hopeless both as a reading of the Tractatus and as a conception of truth. As a reading of the book, it is hopeless, since the Tractatus says that it is the proposition that is a logical picture—where, on the conception of the proposition here at issue, it is essential that it be true or that it be false; hence, being true cannot itself be a matter of mere depiction. As soon as we focus on the question of what it is that I am right “about” if I affirm a true negative statement (e.g., “There are no elephants in this room”), it should become clear that the proposed conception is equally hopeless as an account of truth. For if the difference between true and false propositions were simply a matter of “reflecting” or “mirroring” what is the case, then the idea of speaking truth by affirming a negative statement would seem to require something very mysterious: a peculiar “negative” region of reality to which the truth of a negative statement may correspond. It is no small part of the point of the Tractarian deployment of the elucidatory comparison of a proposition with a picture to bring out the hopelessness of any such conception of truth—any one, that is, that tries to explicate the difference between true and false thoughts by appealing to the idea that the true ones “reflect” what is the case and the false ones do not.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Here is another way of putting an aspect of that same parallel: just as The Critique of Pure Reason seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of an object presuppose a form of synthesis that belongs to the understanding, so, too, the Tractatus seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of the identity of a sign presupposes linguistic self-consciousness of the logical nexus of the symbol. Just as Kant seeks to show how, on the one hand, the understanding must bear on sensibility in order to have content (for it to represent anything), and how, on the other, the sensible manifold requires conferral of unity through the activity of the understanding to be more than merely blind (for it to amount to more than mere sensory noise); so, too, later Wittgenstein aims to show how, on the one hand, the symbol must find expression in the sign to be more than nothing (for it to say anything), and how, on the other, the form of the sign (in spoken language—its phonological form) presupposes the apprehension of its real possibilities for symbolizing (its logico-grammatical uses in acts of speech) in order for it to come into view as having the form that it does.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“If Wittgenstein is right—if the capacity to employ and discern signs, on the one hand, and the capacity to employ and discern symbols, on the other, are two aspects of a single capacity—then strictly thinking through the thought-experiment of the logical alien should leave us with someone who is not only a logical alien but also more of a phonological alien than, in initially framing such a thought-experiment, one might at first suppose. Moreover, if Wittgenstein is right, there should be limits on how far either one of these two dimensions of what can be alien in the language of another can vary independently of the other—how far the possibility of the discernment of the repetition of utterly alien signs can come into view apart from some discernment of the actuality of their intelligible use as the sensibly apprehensible aspects of meaningful symbols. Philosophical efforts to imagine the possibility of a logical alien often involve a peculiar combination of intimacy and strangeness: they imagine the logical alien as saying things that, on the one hand, we are in one sense able to understand without difficulty (in the sense of phonemically parse, we are supposed to be able to report straight off—verbally repeat—the utterances of the alien), but that, in another sense, we are unable to understand at all (inasmuch as we are supposed to be unable to make sense of how the different things the speaker says hang together as a coherent logical whole). This requires imagining the logical alien as having mastered the phonological space of our language or our having mastered the phonological space of his, while each of us remains an outsider to the logical space of the other. It requires imagining us as standing in the relation of being logically alien to one another without our being in the least phonologically alien to one another. Can we imagine that? Or does our inability to find a logical foothold in the linguistic behavior of the being with a supposedly logical alien form of thought have the con- sequence that we should be equally unable to find a phonological foot-hold in his supposedly linguistic behavior?”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Charles Kahn offers the following summary of how a new metaphysics takes shape in Islamic philosophy:
'My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation; that is to say, under the influence of biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God on the one hand, and that of the created world on the other.'
The new metaphysics that takes shape in Islamic philosophy proves fateful for subsequent philosophy in various ways. What will interest us immediately below is how it plays a role in triggering a debate about how to conceive divine creation. What will be of implicit interest later in these replies is how a remarkably unvarnished version of this new metaphysics comes to be detached from its original theological context. The ensuing detheologized modal metaphysics remains in force in some quarters of analytic philosophy, even though it takes its point of departure from a topic (how to understand the act of divine creation) that is no longer of much interest to most analytic philosophers. For the new metaphysics introduces concepts and ways of thinking that, once divested of their theological garb, continually resurface in the history of philosophy up to the present day.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“There is certainly something to the thought that certain classic papers of Putnam and Quine offer perhaps the closest thing to be found in twentieth-century philosophy to an attempt to rehabilitate Descartes's claim that it would be hubris for us to assert of an omnipotent God that He would be inexorably bound by the laws of logic - those laws which happen to bind our finite minds. In a move which is characteristic of much of contemporary naturalistic thought (both in and out of the academy), science is substituted for God. Cartesianism in the philosophy of logic, freed of its theological trappings, becomes the view that it would be hubris for us to assert of the ongoing activity of scientific inquiry that it will be forever bound by the laws of classical logic - those principles which happen to be most fundamental to our present conceptual scheme. The contrast is now no longer, as in Descartes, between the infinite powers of man and the infinite powers of God, but rather between the limits of present scientific thought and the infinite possibilities latent in the future of science as such ... If Descartes is led by a sense of theological piety to insist that God can do anything - no matter how inconceivably it may be to us - the contemporary ultra-empiricist is led by an equally fervent sense of naturalistic piety to insist that the science of the future might require a revision of any of our present axioms of thought - no matter how unacceptable such a revision might seem by our present lights. The exploration of the contours of possibility belongs to the business of the physicists. In this regard, we philosophers must issue them a blank check - it would compromise our standing as underlaborers to put a ceiling on how much they can spend. To paraphrase Descartes on God: we must not conclude that there is a positive limit to the power of science on the basis of the limits of our own (present) powers of conception. All of its hostility to theology notwithstanding, this contemporary form of piety is, in a sense, no less religious (in its unconditional deference to a higher authority) than Descartes's - it has simply exchanged one Godhead for another. But, unlike Descartes, precisely because it is overly hostile to theology, it is able easily to blind itself to the fact that it is a form of piety.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“On the Kantian conception logic as a whole is concerned with investigating the form of the understanding: that is, the form of the intellectual aspect of our overall cognitive faculty to represent objects. Pure general and transcendental logic, in turn, are each concerned with investigating a dimension of that form. On this conception, the source of logical form is not to be comprehended apart from the role of our capacity for thought in the achievement of forms of cognition that are not merely logical. And the source of the notion of mere form of which pure general logic treats is not to be comprehended apart from its internal relation to the full-blooded form of that unified general cognitive capacity - and hence to the forms of the understanding or the categories. This means that on a Kantian understanding of the order of explanatory priority, we must first comprehend the inner logical dimension of form of which transcendental logic treats if we wish to arrive at a proper appreciation of how, via an abstraction, we may arrive at a proper comprehension of the comparatively outer logical dimension of mere form of which pure logical treats - that dimension of form which the rationalist logician, in accordance with his logically thin conception of reason, takes to be self-standingly available.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“The sign for Wittgenstein partakes of a logical dimension that cannot simply be taken in through an act of Hilbertian immediate perceptual apprehension that is prior to all thought or language. To put this dimension of Wittgenstein's teaching in our earlier Kantian idiom: an employment of language in which no symbol is to be recognized in the sign - so that we're confronted with the occurrence of a mere sign - involved a kind of exercise of our linguistic capacity whose very possibility presupposes the prior capacity successfully to employ signs as the sensibly perceptible aspects of symbols. In this area of philosophy - as in some of the others explored earlier in these replies - contemporary philosophers are prone to assume that the order of logical priority must be the other way around. They are inclined, with Hilbert, to regard the (to borrow Kant's term) problematic mode of occurrence of the sign as the logically simpler phenomenon and the comparatively less problematic case as the product of an enhancement of the 'mere sign' - an enhancement that breathes life into a sort of something that is, regarded in and of itself, logically mute and inert.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“Philosophical confusions of the sort Wittgenstein is talking about here are not due to the mere transgression of some grammatical rule. Rather, they are due to the tacit hovering between different forms of use - uses that by themselves are perfectly all right. Now in order to treat such confusions, grammatical rules can be quite useful, despite - or even precisely because of - their circular character. For the use of these rules in such cases is not to prescribe particular uses and proscribe others. Indeed, such attempts at prescription and proscription would be counterproductive: for the problem is not that there are correct and incorrect ways of using the relevant words. Rather, the trouble is that two different uses are being conflated - so what we need is to get clear about the differences between them. What we need rules for is to capture the relevant patterns of use, describe them, and thereby make it clear that the confusion is due to an attempt to play two different games at the same time. This requires entering precisely into the sort of dialogue that Hacker's conception of grammatical rules seems to prevent, or at least make unnecessary - a dialogue that does not presuppose that the relevant 'pieces' and 'games' have already been identified but is genuinely open to the possibility of using language in a multitude of meaningful ways.”
― Martin Gustafsson, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“In his review of Hacker's and Maxwell Bennett's 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Churchland argues that Hacker's and Bennett's criticisms of recent neurological theory:
do no more than highlight the independently obvious fact that the new theory violates some of the default conceptions of the average ten-year-old. But where is the crime in this? Why should we make those baseline expectations permanently critical for the meaningful use of the terms at issue? Were we permanently to cleave the standards of 'conceptual hygiene' thus imposed by [Bennett and Hacker], we would be doomed to only the most trivial of scientific advances. For our conceptual innovations would then be confined to what is currently taken, by the average ten-year-old, to define 'the bounds of sense.'
Churchland's charge is that Hacker and Bennett are simply imposing standards of conceptual hygiene that, if actually implemented, would hinder a sort of spontaneous linguistic imagination that is essential to scientific progress - and, I would add, to our everyday life with language as well.”
― Martin Gustafsson, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“A conception of a cognitive capacity can qualify as unrestricted in aspiration and yet be insufficiently capacious in conception. A conception of a capacity, in aspiring not to go outside the order to which the capacity belongs so as to explain the capacity, may unwittingly frame its conception of the target capacity in terms that sever it from the conditions required for its genuine possession.
This is a difficult balance to strike correctly in philosophy. Frege is concerned with not admitting anything psychological into his conception of the logical. This is the mark of the unrestrictedness of his aspiration - his refusal to admit anything external to the order of logic in his account of logic. But he builds his guardrail of protection against falling into the psychological sufficiently far in from the actual danger point that he severs the unity of our capacity for knowledge. Hence the need for a de-psychologizing of Frege's conception of the psychological.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“There is no thinking the form of thought from outside of thought. This yields a very different understanding of why there is no position from which we can do something which can qualify as 'apprehending a logically alien thought ' - where this is supposed to qualify as doing something that is at the same time a case of apprehending that which we do in thinking and a case of apprehending a form of activity that is comprehensible to us, as such, only from outside (only from a position that cannot be available to us in and through engaging in that form of activity).”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“In a well-wrought Hollywood film, what can seem like an effortless shift in the narrative point of view from third to first person, signified by an apparently familiar form of camera movement, may in fact involve far more sophisticated cinematic technique than an uncritical viewer is at first able to appreciate. After the shift is accomplished, the viewer, if asked, may say that the point of view from which he sees the world of the movie perfectly coincides with that of the first-person point of view of a female character in the movie onto that same world. But careful examination will reveal that the viewer's ability to follow the visual narration depends on a form of understanding of what he sees that is considerably more logically sophisticated that he takes it to be. For the viewer actually understands that he sees what happens in that fictional world from a point of view that somehow succeeds in folding her first-person point of view (through whose perceptual consciousness the world of the movie is disclosed to him) into a further first-person perspective (namely his - the viewer's). The manner in which the one is enfolded in the other needs to permit the viewer's point of view fully to subtend her perceptual first-person present point of view onto the world of the movie without his thereby coinciding with hers. The two forms of subjectivity (that of the viewer and that of the character) must manage to be perfectly aligned along one logical dimension, while along another remaining perfectly distinct. An ordinary viewer of an ordinary (so-called) point-of-view shot in a Hollywood movie achieves a remarkably logically complex form of point of view onto the world of the movie - one that requires its own cinematically specific mode of logical alienation.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“We can now say this: the capacities that homo erectus and homo sapiens generically have in common - such that they may both be generically characterized as 'walking', 'eating', 'drinking', and 'playing' - must formally differ in the manner in which they are done in order for these respective pairs of sets of activities to belong to the very different forms of life that they do. The philosophical obstacles that stand in the way of such a vision of the human animal are considerable. If the wish to transpose Wittgenstein's point here into Boyle's Kantian idiom, then it may be put as follows: walking, eating, and drinking are not just parts of our material animal nature that can be brought into view apart from their relation to a form. If we seek to understand what is involved in learning to walk, eat, and drink as we do, this will require conceiving those activities under the aspect of their human form. Such forms of learning characterize 'initiation' into our form of life no less deeply than learning how to give orders, ask questions, tell stories, and chat. In relation to the concept of our form of life, not only do these capacities all stand at the same level, but more importantly: those in the one set would not be of the sort that characterize our form of life unless they were part and parcel of a single form of life that also involved those in the other. Our manner of walking, eating, drinking, and playing and our manner of giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, and chatting all partake of a single form. The form here in question figures in Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy as a very abstract logical (or, as he later prefers to say, grammatical) category - the category of a form of life.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“What Wittgenstein points the way toward here is the possibility of appreciating how (what we, under the pressure of certain philosophical assumptions, are prone to conceive of as) our 'merely' animal capacities are not merely animal. Even those capacities that we are inclined to view as beloning to our 'merely' animal being - capacities such as walking, eating, drinking, and playing - come to be transformed through and through in the lives of the sorts of creatures we are: ones who speak.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics