Review: Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker by Peter Munz

I think it can safely be said that Popper and Wittgenstein didn’t like each other much and that their dedicated followers have not shown much interest in overcoming this dislike. Peter Munz makes an attempt to heal this breach in “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker”, claiming that each philosopher needs the other, and he also argues against evolutionary psychology. The Popper-Wittgenstein reconciliation argument seems a bit unconvincing as I shall now explain.Popper developed an epistemology in which knowledge advances by conjecture and criticism. If we want knowledge we start with a problem, some situation that seems unsatisfactory, propose ways to solve the problem (make the situation more satisfactory), then criticise the proposed solutions. Furthermore, the growth of complexity in nature can be understood along similar lines in terms of processes involving variation (conjecture) and selection (criticism). Roughly cells are controlled by genes. If genes mutate they can produce new variants on existing organisms and those organisms either manage to reproduce and pass on their genes or they don’t and the genes they carried die with them. Another Popperian idea that will be relevant is the open society: that is, a society in which people can criticise and replace their rulers without violence. Popper also had other ideas of varying degrees of quality and he explained them in a series of books written in clear prose. While some of Popper’s ideas are flawed, his epistemology (after some improvement by Bartley) and the open society stand up very well to criticism.

What was Wittgenstein’s contribution? He published one book while he was alive: the Tractatus, in which he said that all of the ideas we can talk about are scientific, they can be built up from simpler foundations and about everything else we must remain silent. This was inspired by discoveries Bertrand Russell made in the foundations of mathematics to the effect that some mistakes are a result of defining certain kinds of mathematical objects badly. For example, if S is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves then does S contain itself? The solution to this problem is to ban certain kinds of self-reference. Wittgenstein tried to solve philosophical problems using this idea in Tractatus. Wittgenstein came to realise that the Tractatus ideas couldn’t work, partly because he couldn’t break everything down to simple foundations. The rest of Wittgenstein’s writings consist of notes for lectures and that sort of thing that were only published posthumously. These writings consist of sketches of arguments and aphorisms. None of Wittgenstein’s work is easy to read and there is a thriving philosophical cottage industry of Wittgenstein exegesis. These philosophers claim to find great wisdom in his work and to be sure it is possible to quote some of it in such a way that it produces the impression he is making an argument. For some of these arguments it is difficult to tell how much of it is in Wittgenstein’s text.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy contains two related strands according to what I think is the standard view of his followers. (1) Some groups of people do stuff in a particular way and this is called a form of life. Language arises from and is taught in a form of life – let’s call this the forms of life argument. (2) There is no such thing as a person having a language nobody else can understand even in principle. This is called the private language argument. Wittgenstein wanted to use it to refute dualism by saying that the dualist believes that a person has a private language in the form of his private sensations that nobody else can see. So when I point at a fire engine and say it’s red then I am not referring to some private sensation nobody else can see because if I was nobody else could agree with me on the meaning of red. Moreover, because it’s private and uncheckable and private language I had could change the meaning of its terms all the time without my being able to tell the difference and so there just isn’t any such language according to Wittgenstein. This has supposedly helped inspire some later philosophers of mind including Daniel Dennett, but I won’t say anything more about that.

According to Munz Popper had no theory of the meaning of words and so when he proposed a theory, a conjecture, nobody could know what it meant and it wouldn’t be testable. Munz states that this should be fixed by using Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning in terms of speech communities and even on page 94 that closed societies are needed to build up linguistic capital. At the same time, Wittgenstein’s language community theory has led to lots of relativism and so it too needs revision, Munz writes.

Popper’s position on language was that the words we use aren’t that important. If we need to be clearer about how we are using a term for the purposes of some argument then we should clarify, otherwise we should not pursue precision for its own sake. Indeed, methodological essentialism, trying to do philosophy by defining words, will only lead to a morass of boring scholasticism. How do we agree the meaning of terms? Well, we start out with terms from previous theories and possibly amend them or invent new ones for new theories. This does not seem particularly problematic to me. The agreement on terms comes from agreement on problems and use of terms can be controlled by proposals and criticism like any other kind of knowledge. Wittgenstein adds nothing to this and indeed his relativism detracts from it. The notion that closed societies are needed to build up linguistic capital seems wrong in light of the fact that the creation of language is creation of knowledge and this does not proceed quickly in a closed society. In any case, there are artificially created languages in open societies, such as programming languages and Klingon, so Munz’s speculation seems factually false as well as theoretically implausible.

This book doesn’t solve the problems it sets out to solve. If Popperians and Wittgensteinians are going to reconcile, it won’t be because of the bad essentialist parts of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.