21.9.08

What I really want to speak about is learning. All these thoughts came about through correcting my girlfriend's English. The problem was that I couldn't explain why we say things a certain way, all I could tell her was that what she had said was wrong, and then I could demonstrate the right way, which she then imitated until it became natural for her.

This is important because before learning about Wittgenstein I somehow had thought, and this seems absurd in retrospect, that learning involved the attaining of knowledge. I thought that if I bought a book on bee keeping, or composting or tree pruning, and if I read all that knowledge, that I would then be able to do it. It was as if doing something was a 'yes/no' state to me, like 'you either can do this, or you can't' and the difference between the two states was simply communicatable knowledge.

Then I started reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The point which struck me, in relation to all this, was what he wrote about rule following, which he explained by showing how we learn and use language. I won't explain it here, because this is really about my interpretation, or what I got from it, and not what he actually meant.

Anyway, I started becoming aware of how we follow rules in language (like teaching English to my girlfriend) which lead me to realise that it is important how we followed rules and not why.

This, now, can be applied to rule following in every day life as well. And the point is that we following rules, all the time. Everything we do is following rules. When I garden, or cook, I am following rules, not someone else's (unless it is a new rule), but my own. Perhaps I want to say that my way-of-doing-something is identical to Wittgenstein's 'rules.' For example, I follow a certain rule, a way-of-doing-something, when I cook tomato sauce, first I fry the onions in a specific way, add garlic, then tomatos, then salt and olives and so on. I have a certain way-of-doing which I follow, which is probably different from anyone else's. But this way-of-doing is followed because it works in achieving my aims. It is not wrong to fry the tomatoes and add sugar instead of salt, it merely fails to achieve my aims as much as the other way. In the same way it is not wrong, in an absolutist sense, to use the word 'cat' when we mean dog, but it just fails to achieve our aims, which is to use a commonly agreed upon set of sounds to communicate.

You are probably jumping ahead. I am not trying to get to any subjective/objective theory about correctness, or rightness. I instead want to go back to the books on beekeeping and gardening. The book may say do A before B (i.e. fry onions before tomatoes), and this knowledge is then instantly attained, if you can remember it. However, doing A and B, and doing them correctly only comes about through doing them. This brings us back to my first post.

Theoretical knowledge, something which can be transmitted by language or demonstration, is not the same as doing knowledge. Think of the builder in the first post, the one who hated maths in school, but now can do certain maths, even though he probably doesn't call it that.

14.09.08

I'll jump right into it without explaining anything too much. That is perhaps the very essence of the philosophy I want to talk about here: explanation is not as important as the actual doing of whatever it is you are doing. More precisely: you do something by doing it, not by talking about it; you learn something through action, by doing it over and over, not by learning the theory behind it. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave.

Take the piano as an example. How do we learn to play? By repetition, again, and again, and again, until we are sick of it. And then we begin again the next day. At first the song, or whatever we are playing, will sound horrid, we feel like giving up, then, out of nowhere, it will sound a little better, but still bad, and after a little more practise, perhaps the tune is coming through, and after even more, you can definitely listen to it without cringing. At this point you realise that your hands are moving by themselves, they know where to go next, they no longer need you to painstakingly tell them what the next key is, they simply move there on their own. And then more practise. And finally, after many many repetitions, the song is there. You look back to the point in time when you couldn't play it, you wonder what has changed, what do I know now that I didn't know before? what is different now?

While working outside today I thought we could look at it this way: think of the mind and the body as malleable objects, the the force which shapes them (generally) as repetition. So, for example, you become better at a purely physical activity by going through the motions over and over, building the strength and endurance of those specific muscles. Or take a purely mental activity, such as multiplication, where one only become proficient through willing practice... I guess if you're young and are forced to do maths against your will then no matter how many times you do it you'll never get better... but I'm not sure.

(But this is all too simple anyway: the mind and the body always work together, even in something as simple as swinging a hammer, so we should always think of it like that).

The strange thing is that many mental activities, such as pure maths, cannot easily be translated into real life situations. It takes a leap to get from doing Pythagoras in the classroom to realising that you can apply it almost anywhere, and that you need to apply it. A builder may have hated maths when he went to school, but now he knows certain things about building which the mathematician would call 'math-being-applied' but which the builder simply calls building. He has in a sense simply started seeing the world in a different way; where the mathematician sees Pythagoras the builder sees 'that's-just-how-it-works' i.e. a rule of reality (Pythagoras cannot not work).

So what has all this got to do with Wittgenstein? Although I'm probably getting it all wrong, I'll just pick some quotes and talk about them. Remember that Wittgenstein wrote about the philosophy of language, and I am now applying this to ways-of-doing-things (i.e. playing piano, using Pythagoras). All of these quotes are from the Philosophical Investigations.

This is part of Wittgenstein broader philosophical view in which he bids us to “look and see” (§66) and advises that in philosophy “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (§109). What he means (maybe) is that as philosophers we should concern ourselves primarily with describing what we see in front of us. I see all this applying somewhat to ways of doing things as well. For example, we learn nothing if some one attempts to explain playing the piano to us. Instead we learn either through doing it ourselves (trial and error), observing someone (emulating how it is supposed to be done), or description (relating how it is supposed to be done). So we may see (or hear someone describing) that one should hold the hands still while playing piano and as much as possible let the fingers do the moving. Or someone may explain how to read sheet music by showing you what each note means (a key on the piano), which is really just description anyway.

Of course you can break these ways-of-doing-things, you can play with your arms, not your fingers, you can read a C note as a G, and you can also, in regard to Wittgenstein's language games, use the word 'Cat' to denote a dog. But if you do any of these things then you are doing something wrong in the sense that you are not following the rules, and the rules are derived from how things are done best. That is to say, it is best if play piano from the fingers and not the arms (or shoulders or whatever), it is best if everyone reads that one note as a C, and it is best if everyone uses the word 'Cat' to refer to a cat.

Gone way off track here. Need to explain other stuff before this makes sense, and even then it's dodgy at best...