‘It is raining and I don't believe it’

Moore's paradox is the observation that it makes no sense to say:

(1) It is raining and I don't believe it.

What is the point of Wittgenstein's discussion of this paradox in Chapter x of MS 144, published as Part II of the Philosophical Investigations? A first answer to this question might be given as follows: One of the leitmotifs of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is his critique of referentialism, the view that words have meaning in virtue of standing for objects, their reference (see Schroeder 2006, pp. 128–34). And Wittgenstein was particularly concerned with the application of referentialism to psychological language and the consequent view that words like ‘understand’, ‘think’, ‘pain’, ‘hope’, or ‘believe’ denote states or processes in the privacy of our minds (cf. PI §308). According to this – highly natural – view, one would be inclined to say that the statement:

(2) I believe that it's not raining.

was a description of the speaker's state of mind (PPF §86; p.190), whereas the statement:

(3) It is raining.

was a description of something entirely different namely the weather (cf. RPP I §819). So one should expect these two statements to be perfectly compatible, as descriptions of two logically independent subject matters.

However, this conjunction is a sort of contradiction. So expressions of belief, such as (2), cannot be understood as merely descriptions of one's own state of mind. As a more plausible reading, Wittgenstein suggests that (2) is in fact used very much like the assertion:

(4) It is not raining.

In this case the introductory phrase ‘I believe that …’ is fairly unimportant (PPF §89; p. 190). It may be seen as a rhetorical device to attract attention to oneself as opposed to others, comparable to the preface: ‘If you want to know my opinion …’

Over the last 17 years, I have written a number of essays on important topics in Wittgenstein's philosophy not covered in my earlier book Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle (Polity 2006). I have collected them together in this volume, loosely grouped into three thematic sections: language, mind, and value.

Language

The 1st essay ‘Wittgenstein on Grammar, Rules, and Norms’, describes Wittgenstein's concept of grammar as a system of rules determining linguistic meaning and considers, and to some extent defends, his key claim that grammar is autonomous, that is, not determined by reality. Then, I follow the development of Wittgenstein's view of linguistic rules and introduce the distinction between rules and norms. Furthermore, the role of the rulefollowing considerations in Wittgenstein's philosophy is explained, and the final section offers a brief account of Wittgenstein's view of mathematics as grammar.

In the 2nd essay, ‘Analytic Truths and Grammatical Statements’, I defend the traditional account of analytic truth as truth by virtue of meaning against eight current objections. In the second part of the essay, the concept of an analytic statement is compared with Wittgenstein's concept of a grammatical proposition.

Essay 3, ‘Semantic Normativity and Moral Obligation’, offers a brief sketch of the normativity of linguistic meaning, which is central to Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, and then considers the opposing view of semantic antinormativism as defended by Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wickforss. I distinguish between three different types of obligation (moral obligation, socially enforced obligation, and freely adopted obligation) and argue that Glüer & Wickforss's position is based on a misconstrual of semantic normativity as a source of something like moral obligation, when in fact it produces only obligation of the third type.

Essay 4 presents a Wittgensteinian dissolution of the Liar Paradox. It is argued that the crucial flaw in the Liar paradox is the lack of propositional content. Hence, the conflict between truth and falsity is only apparent since it never gets to the point of an actual statement that might be true or false. The so-called Strengthened Liar suffers from the same lack of propositional content, which should be reason enough not to worry about it. However, defective as it is, it seems correctly to indicate its own defectiveness.

Introduction

In the 1950s, American Exceptionalism was informed by three distinct particularistic components: faith, dominion, and managerialism. The particularistic markers of the notion of American Exceptionalism dictated the course of US foreign policy in the 1950s. American policymakers dealt with the threat posed by the Soviet Union by putting together policies aimed at securing the supremacy of the United States in the international order. American Exceptionalism was underscored by the faith in the supreme moral values of the United States. In order to operationalize these values in an effective manner, there was a need to give a quasi-religious quality to the expansion of the geopolitical reach of the United States. The faith in the supreme moral values of the United States was needed for legitimizing the dominion over the American sphere of inf luence. The large scope of responsibilities that the United States acquired as a result of the outcome of World War II created a new relationship between the private and the public sectors, aimed at managing the international political system in an effective manner.

The Faith in the Supreme Moral Values of the United States

There are two important components regarding the significance of faith in the development of US foreign policy during the 1950s. First, faith was seen as an instrument for improving the world in the postwar conflict context. Second, faith allowed the American political establishment to see the Cold War as a spiritual battle between two totally opposed systems: communism and Western capitalism. Communism symbolized evil, while the American system symbolized good. The North American configuration of Christianity legitimized America's mission as a force for good in the wider world. It was believed that there could be a confluence between “both the best of American democracy and the best of Christianity,” embodying values such as “compassion, tolerance and belief in justice and equality.”1 The Christian faith, as practiced by the descendants of the British settlers who made their way to North America in the seventeenth century, was seen as an instrument in order to improve the world. American and Christian values were seen as a workable platform for world government.

Grammar: the rules of language

‘Grammar’ is Wittgenstein's preferred term for the workings of a language: the system of rules that determine linguistic meaning. A philosophical study of language is a study of ‘grammar’, in this sense, and insofar as any philosophical investigation is concerned with conceptual details, which manifest themselves in language, it is a grammatical investigation.

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein offered a mathematical picture of language, presenting language as a calculus. The essence of language, supposedly found in the general form of the proposition, was given by a simple formula (TLP 6). Like a calculus, language was claimed to be governed by syntactic rules: (i) formation rules about the licit combination of names to form elementary propositions; (ii) formation rules about the licit combination of elementary propositions to make complex propositions; and finally (iii) truth-table rules, which enable us to identify logical truths and entailments. Notoriously, the existence of the first type of rule remained a postulate. As no examples of actual names were given, the rules governing their use could, of course, not be presented either. Moreover, Wittgenstein insisted rather perversely that no syntactic rule could be meaningfully stated.

When Wittgenstein grew dissatisfied with this view of language, it was not the idea that language was essentially rule-governed that he found fault with. On the contrary, that idea he held on to emphatically, at least until about 1936, only correcting his account of what those rules were and how they functioned. In fact, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Wittgenstein's break with his early philosophy was largely due to a careful reconsideration of the role of rules in language. Roughly speaking, while the author of the Tractatus thought that rules could work in secret and that their workings had to be discovered and analysed (just as one has to discover and analyse invisible chemical processes), the Wittgenstein of the 1930s realised that language is an artefact and, to the extent to which it is governed by rules, those rules must be made and applied by us (BB 27–28; BT 268).

This book is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policymakers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the theory of Afrocentricity, in its interrogation of the ideas and processes of development in Africa. It also adopts a historical approach in its interrogation of the idea of African development as a by-product of political deliberations. This book is about how the discourse of development as a field of study needs to be reoriented to African-based epistemologies to dismantle coloniality, in opposition to the historical embeddedness of development discourse in Eurocentrism.

This book contests the limitation of the modern African understanding of Africa's journey with development to the period of the aftermath of World War II, to be specific, to President Harry S. Truman's 1949 Point Four programme. Instead, that journey should be understood holistically. By this, I mean that Africa's engagement with development did not begin with the politics of the Euro-North American political bloc – the story of African development must take into consideration Africa's classical civilization, namely the Nile Valley civilization and its contributions to human civilization. Such an approach provides a more holistic interrogation and casts light on how Africa's history of greatness continues to be an inspiration even in modern times. Such an approach rejects the many reductionist lies and half-truths that undergird the modernist paradigm which seeks to portray African people as dependent beneficiaries of the colonial Euro-modernity framework. This framework has undermined the humanity of non-western people in general, and Africans in particular. The book pursues the tradition of decolonial epistemic reflections to oppose discourses that are riddled with a racist agenda towards those in the Global South, especially Africans. In the spirit of the pursuit of cognitive justice in the twenty-first century, this book argues that the discourse of development must be decolonized from hegemonic Eurocentric propaganda and needs to be framed from the viewpoint of those who have been seen as being on the receiving end, those projected as ‘backwards’ from a Eurocentric perspective.

In 1972, Georg Henrik von Wright published an article presenting the key ideas from Wittgenstein's final notebooks, posthumously published under the title On Certainty. There Wittgenstein considers some truisms or certainties put forward by G. E. Moore in his attempt to refute scepticism, such as ‘I have two hands’, ‘This is a hand’, or ‘The earth has existed a long time before I was born’. According to von Wright, Wittgenstein makes a number of important claims about such certainties. They are said to be:

• (i) not known;

• (ii) not empirical;

• (iii) but rules of grammar;

• (iv) ineffable;

• (v) not propositional;

• (vi) not truth-apt.

These claims have been developed and defended in greater detail by other commentators, in particular by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (2007; 2017). Picking up one of Wittgenstein's metaphors for their transcendental role (OC §341), such certainties have often been called ‘hinge propositions’. The doctrine of hinge propositions has been regarded as a new development in Wittgenstein's thinking, so significant that the author of On Certainty has been called the ‘third Wittgenstein’ (Moyal-Sharrock 2004).

In his 2004 paper ‘Knowledge, Certainty and Scepticism: In Moore's Defence’, and again in his ‘Philosophy Rehinged?’ (2016), Hans-Johann Glock takes issue with that account of Moore's certainties, defending Moore's view that they are empirical and can be said to be known. I shall side with Glock in arguing that the idea of hinge propositions is indeed not the anti-sceptical panacea as which it has been presented. In spite of their certainty, Moore's truisms are fallible empirical propositions. To regard them as the basis of our language-game is at best a metonymy, if not a category mistake. What is fundamental to our language-game are not specific propositions (such as ‘Here is a hand’ or ‘The earth has existed for many years before my birth’), but the standards of rationality that make us regard such propositions as certain, at least under normal circumstances.

A note of exegetical caution

Von Wright's influential claims about ‘hinge propositions’ are not without some textual support. However, for each claim, there are also passages supporting the opposite view.

Scientific aesthetics

In one of his lectures in 1938, Wittgenstein comments on the idea of a science of aesthetics:

You might think that Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful – almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. (LC 11)

The idea of such a ‘science of aesthetics’ goes back to the 19th century, when Gustav Theodor Fechner, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1876), studied people's preferences for certain shapes and colours in the hope of ultimately reaching a psychological understanding of complex aesthetic experiences. Such hopes are much more widespread today, when empirical psychology has been joined by neuroscience as a provider of systematic research in order to resolve questions in aesthetics. In the introduction to a recent interdisciplinary book on ‘Aesthetic Science’, Arthur Shimamura appears to confirm Wittgenstein's contemptuous suspicion that the envisaged science would also be regarded as responsible for pronouncing on the taste of coffee, as he defines ‘aesthetics’ as ‘any “hedonic” response to a sensory experience’ (Shimamura 2011, p. 4). Shimamura distinguishes six questions for scientific aesthetics (pp. 2, 4), selecting only the last three as the focus of his edited collection:

• [1] What is art?

• [2] Why do humans make art?

• [3] What is art's function in modern society?

• [4] What happens when we experience a work of art?

• [5] What does it mean to have an aesthetic experience?

• [6] Can science help us derive general principles about aesthetics, or is there really “no accounting for taste”?

Scientific answers to question [1], the question of the nature of art, have been suggested by neuroscientists. Thus, in 1999, V. S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein claimed to have discovered ‘what art really is’ – namely caricature, an exaggerated representation of things able ‘to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object’ (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999, pp. 16–17). An example of this is Indian sculptures of women with uncommonly big breasts (ibid., p. 18).

Introduction

This chapter examines the markers of foreign policy of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The Soviet intellectual class contributed to maintaining social control of the citizenry through the projection of a narrative that served to legitimize the power of the ruling elite. Eurasianism was also an instrument that entrenched the geopolitical inf luence of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The cultural rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the countries of the Intermarium was propelled by the need to secure that area of Europe from interference by the Western powers. Eurasianism became an important instrument for harmonizing the political and economic principles that would guide relations among the countries that made up the Soviet bloc. The bureaucratic class also played a role as a bulwark of the managerial system that prevailed in the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The despotic tendencies that emerged from the bureaucratic class were of paramount importance for deploying a scheme of foreign policy that would enable the Soviet Union to keep control over its sphere of inf luence.

The Intellectual Construction of Communism in the 1950s

The Soviet intellectual class disseminated the articles of faith that guided the construction of Soviet society and Moscow's foreign policy in the 1950s. The intellectual class was put in charge of constructing a narrative aimed at legitimizing the Communist system. The task of Soviet intellectuals was informed by the international environment, which was still perceived as being hostile toward the Soviet Union. The Soviet intelligentsia was in charge of projecting a legitimizing narrative in exchange for a living standard that was higher than the rest of the population. Their role was to “perfect” social relations and to create a “new man,” even when this implied the existence of a certain level of dissonance between reality and ideology. The intellectual class was in charge of paying attention “to the ideological and political education of all the people,” which included the members of its own social stratum. This meant that the leading class of the Soviet Union was not the “proletariat” but a small group of people in charge of disciplining society through the projection of narratives that legitimized the power of the Communist Party.

Over a century ago, in his examination of “The Sensational in Modern English Prose Fiction” (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded—that is, the appeal to fear” (2). It is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal—a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. In this vein, crime fiction persists as one of the most popular genres of literature across the globe, a fact that is further evinced by the inundation of onscreen adaptations of crime narratives, dramas, capers, and comic books which now, more than ever, reflect our common anxieties about the perceived failures of modern social institutions. That is because, as Catherine Nickerson asserts in “Murder as Social Criticism,” crime fiction “is deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern eras, including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control” (1997, 744). Thus, crime fiction would appear to be the perfect vehicle for examining the origins and endurance of those societal fears which are firmly grounded in such conceptions and the perceived boundaries that perpetuate them, but this volume argues that we must examine those boundaries in fiction and nonfiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures that produce the spatial uncertainties that so often lead to such collective anxieties.

This collection makes a unique contribution to current scholarship on crime writing by gathering in one place texts that take multifaceted approaches to how these boundaries are drawn and how they respond to changes—sudden and forced or unseen and gradual—in relation to social and/or political power.

Addressing cultural conflict over land management in ordinances dates back to the nineteenth-century timber trade in Sierra Leone. Traders who rampantly exploited forest resources were strangers, Europeans, and Creole descendants of formerly enslaved people resettled in the Colony of Sierra Leone centered around Freetown. The Creoles although ethnic African were classified by the government as British subjects. As wealthy and influential strangers, they often appropriated landlord-indigenes’ customary rights and authority over land management. Chiefs responded to this injustice in traditional ways by imposing poro sanctions that prohibited laborers from, for instance, moving timber logs. Great Britain's response was to establish the Sierra Leone Protectorate by Ordinance to control trade in valuable commodities like timber and to acquire additional lands for extraction (Fyfe 1962).

John Hargreaves (1956, 70) explained that “the most drastic intervention from London with respect to the Protectorate Ordinance of 1897 was on the lands question.” One of its provisions overtly prohibited the use of poro sanctions to govern resources, a method that had been used for centuries. Another provision vested all mineral rights in the Crown. Further, under the ordinance, the Governor had the power to grant land rights to nonnatives or strangers. In contrast, customary law states that land which comprises “the surface soil and things found naturally under, on or above the surface, such as minerals and wild plants and trees. Man-made structures and cultivated crops are distinct from the land itself. The land is inalienable. Heads of landlord-indigene families are responsible for distributing any benefits accruing from land which in mining lease areas include surface rent payments stipulated in statutory law” (Renner-Thomas 2010, 177).

Ordinances also allowed the Governor to dispose of perceived waste and uninhabited lands.

Weekly Miscellany, No. XXVII (27). Saturday, June 16, 1733

I hope I shall be excus’d for postponing several excellent Letters, while I entertain my Readers with a pleasant one from a young Lady. As it is the first which have received from the Sex, I could do no less than give it a Preference, tho’ some may be of Opinion that I should have consulted my own Credit better by not publishing it at all. If the Lady intended it only as a private Admonition, she should have given me some Intimation of her Meaning, but as it came without any Injunction of Secrecy, I thought myself at Liberty to make my own Use of it. The Ingenuity of it, I dare say, will make it agreeable to the Publick; and the good Humour of it cannot fail of making it inoffensive to the old Lady and the Curate who, next to myself, are most affected by the seeming Severity of her Banter. I shall give it exactly as it came to me.

To Richard Hooker, Esq;

SIR,

I cannot say that I am ever a Reader, or often an Admirer, but it is my Misfortune that I am always a Hearer, of your Miscellany. I live with an old Maiden Aunt, who mightily likes the Piety of your Design, and the Gravity of your Performances. She longs for the coming in of the Post with as much Impatience as I should expect a Letter from my Lover. As soon as the Letter-Carrier knocks at the Door (which is generally in the Evening) the Candles, the Curate, and Miss are call’d for in great haste. When the good old Gentlewoman has properly placed a little Instrument to her Ear, and the Reverend Gentleman has fixed another upon his Nose, your dry Discourse is bawled out with a Voice as loud as would reach the largest Church in your City, and in a Tone as canting as any that was in Fashion in the Times of old Noll.1 If any Part be duller; I ask your Pardon, good Sir, I mean graver, than ordinary, it is sure to strike their Want of Fancy, and we must needs have it over again.