Today's episode is about Wittgenstein. Our guest will beJuliet Floyd.

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don't share that view. But there's no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime -- a book that he later basically repudiated -- he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Wittgenstein has to be regarded as one of the great founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, especially of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy.

Now I don't profess at all to be an expert on Wittgenstein. I did read a fair amount of Wittgenstein as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where a number of my teachers had an enduring fascination with his work. I don't doubt that Wittgenstein was a deep, ingenious, and highly impactful philosophy. Nonetheless, I find myself resistant to much of his philosophy -- especially his later philosophy. In the rest of this post, I'll try to say a bit about why.

When I say that I find myself resistant to much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, it's not so much this or that particular claim of his that I resist. There's lots of things that Wittgenstein says in his great work thePhilosophical Investigations例如，我觉得有趣、深刻、具有挑战性，甚至在今天也很值得思考的问题。我想我们今天会讨论他的一些更有趣的哲学主张——他关于意义的图片理论，他认为我的语言的极限就是我的世界的极限的主张，他后来(而且极具影响力)认为意义就是使用的观点，他反对私人语言存在的可能性的论点。所有这些都是丰富而刺激的东西。尽管我最终可能会拒绝其中的很多内容，但维特根斯坦的这些内容并不是我难以接受的。我发现自己一直对他的“形而上学”观点感到厌恶。也就是说，我最坚决反对的是他关于如何做哲学以及通过做哲学你能做什么和不能做什么的观点。

让我解释一下。维特根斯坦，尤其是后来的维特根斯坦，认为哲学在他的到来之前或多或少是一种混乱的预算。Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in thePhilosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.

就拿所谓的他人思想问题来说。这个问题是如何开始的?笛卡尔让很多哲学家相信我们可以直接且不可救药地接触到自己思想的内容，就好像我们的思想在某种程度上是完全开放的。很明显，我们无法以同样的方式了解他人的思想内容。从这个观察开始，不需要太多的争论就能让你进入一个思考框架，一个人可以合理地，明白地怀疑我们是否知道别人的思想。一旦你进入了那种惊奇的状态，你就不需要再多的论证来说服你自己对我们对其他心灵的认识持完全怀疑的态度。当然，至少其他一些哲学家不会被你的怀疑主义所打动。他们可能认为自己是常识的守护者。但一旦他们承认你的论点至少值得回答，承认我们对他人思想的认识确实存在问题，那么我们就开始了一场竞赛，看哪一套哲学论点会占上风。怀疑论将与反怀疑论开战。 the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.

We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.

Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how weactually usesuch terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.

Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we therebysolvethe traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that wedissolvethem. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.

There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic.

因为我很快就要去演播室了，我不确定我能在播出前把这些都说出来。我可能会在节目结束后再回来，并提供更新。但我为什么不同意维特根斯坦对“持久的”哲学问题的评估，以及他对如何应对这些问题的评估，这里有几个简短的解释。首先，我认为如果我们只看语言的实际使用方式，那么关于他人思想的问题就会简单地消失的说法是错误的。我们不需要怀疑我们确实知道别人的想法。我们可能只是想知道我们怎么可能知道别人的想法，以及我们实际上是如何做到的。这两个问题对我来说都是重要而有趣的。你会发现哲学家更有可能问前者的问题。第二个问题，你会发现心理学家/认知科学家更可能会问这个问题。

I could say a lot about the nature of how possibly questions. Think of what you're doing when you ask and try to answer a how possibly question like this. You've got an initial budget of concepts -- maybe concepts of mind, knowledge, self, others. And reflecting on these concepts you find yourself puzzled as to how these concepts "coordinate" with one another. You can see how possibly a thinking being can know itself, but your puzzled about how a thinking being can know the contents of the mind of another thinking being. You start to imagine the possibilities. In so doing, you are, as it were, taking an imaginative walk through a range of alternative possible worlds, trying to see if there are any in which one mind knows the contents of another mind. If you find one, and if it's not too far away from the actual world, you conclude that yes one mind can know the contents of another mind. If you don't find one, or if the ones you find are very very far from the actual world, you become a sceptic or conclude that one can only know the contents of one's own mind.

你可以把维特根斯坦解读为，我们没有任何严格的方法，以任何可能产生稳定信念的方式，走过各种可能性的范围。我们不应该在一系列想象出来的、无序的可能性中不受约束、不受约束地漫步，我们应该只是看看。看看我们是如何在实际的语言游戏中谈论心灵，自我，知识和其他的，当我们在有生命的生活形式的环境中这样做时，这些游戏就会得分。

I think there is something to this advice. But not everything that Wittgenstein seems to think.

Consider the practicing cognitive scientist. What we do when we walk through a range of alternative worlds in the imagination can feel a lot different from what we do when we do science. Take your practicing cognitive scientist who wants to know how minds actually cognize one another. How does she go about constructing a theory of how people actually manage to know the minds of others. Well one thing she doesn't do is to simply look at how words like "knowledge" "mind" "self" "others" etc are used in ordinary language games. She might take such use as data points. But she's perfectly prepared to find out that people don't actually have much of a clue as to how we actually go about figuring out what other people think and believe. So what does she do? She deploys more or less tried and true methods of hypothesis generation and testing. She does experiments, she builds models, etc. That is, she draws on all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to try to figure out exactly how, in fact, we so regularly, reliably and systematically figure out what other people feel, believe, and desire. [She also notices that we are not so good at figuring out our own thoughts and feelings.

But what about the poor philosopher? The psychologist cum cognitive scientist in her attempt ot answer the how actually question about our knowledge of other minds is armed to the teeth. She has all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to draw upon. But what do we poor philosophers have to draw on in trying to answer our how possibly question? One worry might be the one we discussed above. We philosophers really don't have much to draw on except our own unconstrained philosophical imaginations. But philosophical imagination unmoored to the everyday forms of life that give our language games point, is a paltry thing, a thing more likely to mislead than illuminate. So perhaps what Wittgenstein is trying to do by suggesting that we look at how language actually works is simply to give us a way to constrain the imagination in ways that prevent it from just running rampant.

I applaud that instict, if that was the instinct. But take it a step further. Why restrict ourselves to just in tact "language games" in which the problematic terms and concepts supposedly have their homes? You wouldn't recommend that procedure to the practicing psychologist cum cognitive scientist would you? You wouldn't say look only at what people say. Don't do clever experiments designed to ferret out the hidden inner mechanisms or regularities not immediately evident in our everyday practices and our everyday descriptions of those practices.

WHy should the evidential base for our philosophy be more restricted than the evidential base for the construction of psychological and other theories.

Because philosophy is, well, different, and sui generis? I don't think so. Philosophy, on my view, is very much continuous with science. I don't mean to say that philosophy is just one science among others. It isn't. For one thing philosophy really is much more concerned, often, with "how possibly, if at all" sorts of questions than the sciences typically are and less concerned with the "how actually" than the sciences typically are. But how possibly questions should really be thought of as "how possibly, given what we know" questions. And as science increases our knowledge of the actual, we get greater and greater resources for constraining our answers to the how possibly questions that are our stock and trade.

因为我的写作速度有点快，因为我想在去工作室之前把它写好，我不确定我是否讲清楚了。所以让我来快速地陈述一下反维特根斯坦的底线，它对维特根斯坦做出了一些让步，但远远不是全部。仅仅从一个“有多大可能”的问题开始，不太可能让你走得很远。你所要做的一切，从头开始，就是你自己的哲学想象力。但是不受限制的想象力可能并不是任何深奥事物的可靠指南。在实践中审视实际的语言可能是约束的来源之一。我们确实有一种谈论他人思想的方式。我们确实会用实际的证据来支持我们对他人思想内容的实际结论。明智的建议是我们从观察这些事物开始。但我们也应该做好准备，看看认知科学的成果在哪里，也要用这些成果来限制我们的想象力。 And we should also be prepared to find that our everyday practices are sometimes infected with all sorts of illusory material, founded on all sorts of historical mistakes and misdiagnosis that achieve through the mechanisms of cultural transmission the status of received wisdom. That is, we should be prepared to find that common sense and ordinary usage may themselves stand in need of thoroughgoing reformation.

但是一旦我们看到我们可以用很多不同的方式，从很多不同的来源限制我们的想象力，在一个充满可能性的空间中行走，为什么要相信我们甚至连开始行走都被阻止了呢?为什么要绝望地认为我们只会在混乱和无果的争论中结束?也许我们会，但我们不一定会。

当然，另一个担忧是，如果我们在问题的实际程度上取得越来越多的进展，问题最终将不再紧紧抓住我们。至少这部分哲学将会结束。也许吧。但当我们甚至不能开始掌握事物的实际运作方式时，我们经常被这些问题的可能性所困扰。我不知道这里面有什么机制，但让我们看看可能有什么机制。一旦我们考虑到哪些可能存在，让我们看看我们是否可以排除一些可能的，并专注于实际的。排除各种可能性是科学的工作还是仅仅是哲学的工作?我认为答案肯定是两者兼而有之。只要概念重构的时机成熟，哲学就永远有空间。只有当概念困惑本身结束时，哲学才会结束。

说到这里，我真的要走了，正如Ian Shoales所说的。