Showing and Doing by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317252153
Google: k2DvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T06:00:04+00:00

We might call this the “learning hypothesis” that follows from the notion of man as a rational creature, able to reason, and follows from the first proposition. Finally,

[Third], that all the answers must be compatible with one another, because, if they are not compatible, then chaos will result. (22)

This third proposition is a version of the law of non-contradiction; that is, in logic not both p and not-p (meaning it is not possible that something be both true and not true at the same time), first expressed by Plato in the Politeia and described as the first principle of rational discourse by Aristotle in the Metaphysics (1005b, 12–20).

In some senses these principles are translated into a demand for clarity, especially with the so-called linguistic turn of twentieth century philosophy. Indeed, the very conception of analysis in analytic philosophy is served by a set of assumptions that preserve the traditional epistemic virtues of clarity, economy, elegance, and rigor that at least since Descartes “clear and distinct” ideas have functioned as a regulative ideal. With the linguistic turn and the development of analytic philosophy the ideal of clarity came to mean more than just clarity of expression. Michael Dummett (1994) has characterized analytic philosophy as adhering to two principles: (1) That a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and (2) That a comprehensive account of thought can only be so attained (4). Analysis in analytic philosophy is above all a form of logical analysis represented in the work of Frege (function-argument analysis), Russell (the theory of descriptions and logical atomism), Moore (decomposition), and Wittgenstein, who through the construction of an ideal notation wanted to reveal the logical form of a proposition and show the underlying semantic structure of ordinary propositions no longer obscured by their surface syntactic form.5

It is a conception of clarity as an epistemic virtue that is well characterized in Fred Ayers’s (1972, orig. 1936) depiction of the movement in the title of his Language, Truth and Logic. It was further reinforced by Wittgenstein’s (1922) insistence in the Tractatus that “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly” (4.116). Philosophy, as “the critique of language” (4.112) is “the logical clarification of thoughts,” an activity that consists purely in elucidations. It does not issue forth propositions but rather consists in the clarification of propositions making them transparent (less “cloudy”) and distinct and giving them sharp boundaries. In so doing, philosophy “set limits” to the sphere of natural science (4.113); it “set limits to what can be thought” (4.114) and signifies “what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said” (4.115). Clarity as a philosophical ideal and epistemic virtue is a reflection of the structure of fact-stating language and its logical isomorphism with the world. This notion of clarity figures strongly in the preface, where Wittgenstein writes: “The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the

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