In philosophy we often say that people wrongly imagine a
certain state of affairs, e.g.
“they imagine that a law of nature in some way
compels things to happen”, or
“they imagine that it's a question of psychology
how a person can know a certain fact whereas it is one of
grammar” etc. etc..
But it is necessary in these cases to explain what it
means “to imagine this || so &
so”, what kind of image is it they are using.
It often sounds as though they were able to imagine the logically
impossible & it is not easy to straighten out our
description of the case & to say what in this case
they actually imagine.
E.g.: People treat the question “how do we know what so & so is the case” as a question of psychology which has nothing to do with the sense of the proposition which we say is known. But first: where do they take this idea from, how do they come by it? Which really psychological question are they thinking of? Obviously there is a case in which the question “how does he find this out” is a personal &, perhaps, psychological 11 one. “How did he
find out that N was in his room?” –
He saw him through the window or he was hidden under the bed. – “How did he find out that the
glass was cracked?” He saw the
crack with his naked eye or he saw it through the
magnifying glass
etc. We say he finds out the same thing in
different ways & therefore not that what he finds
depends upon how he finds it. When do we say that he finds out the same thing in two ways? Imagine language games: somebody is asked a question “A?” & trained to answer “yes” if he sees a man || person A in the next room, “no”, if he doesn't. He is trained to answer the question “A?” by “yes” also if he hears A's voice from the next room. “What right have we to ask the same question in these two cases?” or “What right has he to use these two different tests to answer the same question?” Or, suppose someone asked: “Now are these || is this really one & the same question or do we have two different questions only expressed in the same words?” Now consider the ostensive definition: “This man is called ‘A’” & ask yourself whether this definition tells us whether || if we are to regard seeing A from a different 12 side or in a different position or
hearing his voice as criteria of him being there? –
Here we are tempted to say: “But surely I just
point to this man, so there can't be any doubt
what object I am meaning!” But that's
wrong though the doubt of course is not whether I mean this
→ or that
↘ thing.
One may say that the ‘object’ I am inclined to say I am pointing to in the ostensive definition is not determined by the act of pointing but by the use I make of the word defined. And here one must beware of thinking that after all the pointing finger pointed to a different object in the sense in which the arrow ⟶
“But we conceive of objects, things, different from our sense data, e.g. the table as opposed to the views we get of it.” But what does conceiving of this object consist in? Is it a peculiar ‘mental act’ occurring whenever, say, we talk about the table? Isn't it using the word table in 13 the game we do use
it? Using it as we do use it? |
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