Abstract
I argue that it is possible and useful for moral philosophy to provide surveyable representations (as the later Wittgenstein understands the concept) of moral vocabulary. I proceed in four steps. First, I present two dominant interpretations of the concept ‘surveyable representation’. Second, I use these interpretations as a background against which I present my own interpretation. Third, I use my interpretation to support the claim that Wittgenstein’s ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ counts as an example of a surveyable representation. I conclude that, since the lecture qualifies as a surveyable representation, it is possible to provide surveyable representations of moral vocabulary. Fourth, I argue that it is useful for contemporary moral philosophy to provide surveyable representations, because it may help to dissolve problems in current debates. I provide an example of such a debate, namely, the debate between cognitivists and non-cognitivists.
De Mesel Benjamin. 2014. Surveyable Representations, the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, and Moral Philosophy. The Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3: 41–69. See http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/1922.
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Notes
- 1.
By ‘the moral use of our words’, I mean first of all the moral use of words that typically occur in moral statements (such as ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘ought’). In ‘a good knife’, the use of ‘good’ is not a moral one. But, as (among others) Cora Diamond has pointed out (Diamond 1996: 251–252), statements can be moral statements without there being any typically ‘moral’ words in them. Some words do not typically occur in moral statements, but do have a moral use in certain contexts. See, on this point, Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2. I do not want to exclude surveyable representations of the use of these words, although I will focus on the use of typically moral words.
- 2.
It is not easy to translate the original, German expression übersichtliche Darstellung. In the revised fourth edition of the Philosophical Investigations, übersichtlich has been translated as ‘surveyable’ ‘to preserve the reference to view and surview’ (Wittgenstein 2009a: 252), whereas Anscombe’s translation (and consequently, most interpretations) uses ‘perspicuous’. On this translation issue, see Baker and Hacker (2005: 308).
- 3.
One might object that the colour-octahedron dissolves all possible problems with the grammar of colour-expressions and is therefore the only example of a surveyable representation in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre. If this is true, it is difficult to understand why Wittgenstein did not include in his Philosophical Investigations the only example of what he judged to be ‘of fundamental significance’. In any case, an example of a verbal surveyable representation seems, in the ‘exhaustive’ reading of the broad interpretation, impossible to find in Wittgenstein’s works. Because Wittgenstein explicitly states that ‘a method is now demonstrated by examples’ (Wittgenstein 2009a: §133), we can expect him to have given at least some examples of surveyable representations.
- 4.
Most commentators would call them ‘methods’ (see Baker and Hacker 2005: 290–294), but I would prefer to distinguish ‘techniques’ from ‘methods’ here. A philosophical method is a (quite general) way of dealing with philosophical problems, of which ‘giving surveyable representations’ is an example. Techniques are specific ways to practice a method.
- 5.
In Wittgenstein 2009a: §130, Wittgenstein writes that ‘language-games stand there as objects of comparison which, through similarities and dissimilarities, are meant to throw light on features of our language’. Hence, there is no sharp distinction between presenting fictitious language-games (third technique) and offering comparisons (fourth technique). There is also no sharp distinction between presenting grammatical rules showing how words can and cannot be meaningfully used (first technique) and showing how words are actually being used (second technique). Nevertheless, I think it is useful to draw the distinctions as I have done: we can, for example, show how words are being used without explicitly stating rules (see Wittgenstein 2009a: §151) and not all comparisons are fictitious language-games (take, for example, the analogy between philosophical methods and therapies in Wittgenstein 2009a: §133).
- 6.
Other techniques include, first, Wittgenstein’s asking us to consider how we would teach someone the use of certain expressions and how we have learned them (Wittgenstein 1966: 2, 2009a: §208). A second technique is the invention of different notations, such as Wittgenstein’s invention, in the Tractatus, of the T/F notation (see Wittgenstein 1982: 98–99, 1969: 23; Baker 2004: 30; Baker and Hacker 2005: 293; Glock 1996: 279). A third technique is giving a picture representing grammatical facts (the colour-octahedron, for example).
- 7.
Not everything, because I do not want to exclude the invention of different notations (see previous footnote) from being a technique for producing surveyable representations.
- 8.
The ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ concern methods of anthropological hermeneutics, not philosophical methods (Hacker 2001: 75). A surveyable representation, in the sense in which Wittgenstein uses the concept in these remarks, is therefore rightly characterized as ‘a particular sort of arrangement of related cases of a phenomenon’ (Eldridge 1987: 242). What is surveyably represented is not necessarily the use of our words. Baker has criticized the Baker-Hacker interpretation because, on their reading, ‘it is a pleonasm to say that the subject-matter of a perspicuous representation is “the grammar of our language” or “the use of our words”’ (Baker 2004: 27). The interpretation of surveyable representations that I have presented tries to clarify the notion as it is used in the Philosophical Investigations. Because surveyable representations are explicitly linked in the Investigations with giving us an overview of the use of our words and remedying the lack of surveyability of our grammar, I do agree with the statement that is disapprovingly quoted by Baker . Wittgenstein may well have thought that ‘hypotheses about historical development or observations about a religious ritual’ (Baker 2004: 28) can be identified as surveyable representations, but that is not how he uses the concept in the Investigations.
- 9.
I have chosen to show the possibility of surveyable representations of the moral use of words by giving an example (simply because that seems to me the most convincing way), rather than by giving reasons for the possibility and showing the reasons of others against the possibility to be unconvincing. I will not treat in any detail Kelly’s, Richter’s and Diamond’s reasons for rejecting the possibility here. In general, they think that ethics is too different from other philosophical subjects that Wittgenstein deals with (or that ethics is no philosophical subject at all) for it to be treated by the same methods, for instance because ethics is personal or because there is nothing to be said in ethics. See, on this point, Chap. 4.
- 10.
One could argue that Wittgenstein aims at a surveyable representation of the logic of language in the Tractatus. In one sense of ‘surveyable representation’, this is undoubtedly true, but it is clear that the surveyable representation Wittgenstein aims at in the Tractatus is very different from the surveyable representations he provides in the Investigations. In this chapter, I present an interpretation of ‘surveyable representation’ as used in the Investigations (see also footnote 8) and argue that this interpretation excludes a lot of what Wittgenstein does in the Tractatus. The way I present surveyable representations is interwoven with the use of the later Wittgenstein’s techniques, and in this sense Wittgenstein does not provide surveyable representations in the Tractatus while he does provide them in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’. I do not want to deny that Wittgenstein aims at a surveyable representation in another sense in the Tractatus.
- 11.
Someone might object to this chapter by claiming that surveyable representations cannot be of help for problems in moral philosophy, because conceptual investigations will never tell us what to do. Here, however, one (unjustly, I believe) equates ‘problems in moral philosophy ’ with ‘moral problems’. See, on that point, Chap. 8, Sect. 8.5.
- 12.
I do not think that there are many examples of surveyable representations, as I have characterized them in this chapter , to be found in the literature. A good candidate is Georg Henrik von Wright’s book The Varieties of Goodness (1972). Without explicitly referring to Wittgenstein’s concept , von Wright attempts to surveyably represent the grammar of ‘good’. He aims at an ‘illustration of the multiplicity of uses of the word “good” by means of examples’ (von Wright 1972: vii). Hans Oberdiek mentions von Wright’s book as an example of Wittgensteinian ethics: ‘He [von Wright] shows the fruitfulness of challenging philosophical dogma (such as the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics) while attending to terms as we use them in thinking about good, duty, and justice. He is especially acute at showing how a field of concepts interconnects’ (Oberdiek 2009: 194–195). P.M.S. Hacker describes The Varieties of Goodness as a ‘great work on axiology’ in which ‘one could discern a Wittgensteinian awareness of “conceptual multiplicity” and a striving for a systematic surveyable representation of a large and complex conceptual field, even though the subject-matter was far from Wittgenstein’s preoccupations’ (Hacker 1996: 144, my italics). I have termed The Varieties of Goodness ‘a good candidate’ for a surveyable representation, because it is unclear to me whether it satisfies the goal condition: it sometimes seems as if bringing out the different uses of ‘good’ (and not the dissolution of philosophical problems generated by our misusing the term) is von Wright’s end.
- 13.
In the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein himself had assumed this: he wanted to point at ‘the characteristic features’ that moral statements ‘all have in common’ (Wittgenstein 2014: 43).
- 14.
- 15.
On fictitious examples, thought-experiments and their role in Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, see Diamond (2002).
- 16.
In footnote 6, I mentioned as an additional technique for producing surveyable representations Wittgenstein’s asking how we learn the use of certain words. In Wittgenstein 2009a: §77, he asks how we learnt the use of the word ‘good’. Answering this question (‘A father saying to his child that it is wrong to do something can best be understood as prescribing the child not to do it.’) may contribute to the dissolution of the ‘Cognitivism or non-cognitivism?’-dilemma.
- 17.
For a detailed treatment of these issues, see my forthcoming contribution in Kuusela and De Mesel (2018).
- 18.
I am grateful to Stefan Rummens for his comments on several versions of this chapter and to Oskari Kuusela and Yrsa Neuman for their comments on a preprint version of the article in the Open Review procedure of The Nordic Wittgenstein Review. A version of this chapter was presented at the fourth symposium of the International Wittgenstein Society and the Nordic Wittgenstein Society, ‘The Contemporary Significance of Ordinary Language Philosophy’ (Ǻbo Akademi University, Finland, 2013). I am grateful to the audience for their searching questions.
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De Mesel, B. (2018). Surveyable Representations, the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, and Moral Philosophy. In: The Later Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97619-8_3
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