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Archive for the ‘Wittgenstein’ Category

Reading Wittgenstein Between the Texts

This post is the fourth of a series of contributions to the DR2 Conference. Comments are welcome! (How to comment) Marco santoro1, massimo airoldi2 & Emanuela riviera3 1 University of Bologna; 2 University of EM, Lyon; 3 Independent Researcher    ABSTRACT: Sharing the “historicist challenge to analytic philosophy” (Glock 2006) we attempt a “distant reading” of the (mainly) philosophical literature on and about Ludwig Wittgenstein. We start with a descriptive profile of the temporal structure of LW’s work. Then we focus on the literature (i.e. scholarship) on LW as we have been able to represent it through an analysis of bibliographic data drawn from the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy as a discipline. This is the central section of our paper, and the longer one, in which we attempt to describe and to map with the help of more sophisticated statistical tools Wittgenstein scholarship in its properties and changing forms. We look at the social profile and relations of the authors who contributes to the establishment of LW as a central reference in the current intellectual landscape as well as the network and dynamics of topics to which LW has been associated.  We end by proposing a set of possible explanatory frameworks (not really explanations, but research directions for elaborating explanations) for our results. With our paper we would add a “social dimension” to the aforementioned historicist challenge, making a case for an historical-sociological approach to (analytic) philosophy, along the lines of Bourdieu (1988) on Heidegger, Lamont (1992) on Derrida, Gross (2006) on Rorty, and Collins (1999) on the whole philosophical tradition.   My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written (L. Wittgenstein)   In this paper we will attempt a “distant reading”[1] of the (mainly) philosophical literature on and about Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW).  We are not doing research on Wittgenstein’s work as such but on people doing research on him. This is one first sense according to which we understand the meaning of ‘distance’ in our ‘distant reading.’ The second sense is that we are not studying those people through a close reading of their texts, but through a reconstruction of the aggregate properties of their works and of themselves as authors. Indeed, it is a sociology of philosophical work addressed from the vantage point of its output, a bibliography, what we are attempting here[2]. The choice of LW as the main reference of our research has two reasons. First, he is  “considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century” (Stanford Philosophical Encyclopedia) or at least “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy -IEP)[3]. At least two major traditions of philosophical research have elected him as a central reference point, i.e. logic positivism and later analytic philosophy (see e.g. Gellner 1958; Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2015), not to mention more specialized fields as the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of mind. A focus on him has therefore an intrinsic interest even if it would make a case less generalizable than other, less influential and more “typical” philosophers (if such a figure ever exists). Second, as social scientists we have a special interest in Wittgenstein as possibly the most “sociologically relevant” of contemporary philosophers, or at least the philosopher whose work has exerted the stronger impact on the social sciences – sociology as well as anthropology (Winch 1959; Saran 1965; Giddens 1976; Porpora 1983; Bloor 1997; Das 1998; Pleasants 2002; Rawls 2008) and to a lesser extent even political science (Pitkin 1972). Currently, LW is still a major influence over at least three influential research streams in social theory, namely the sociology of scientific knowledge, ethnomethodology, and practice theory (e.g. Bloor 1973, 1983; Phillips 1977; Coulter 1979; Lynch 1992, 1993; Schusterman 1998; Schatzki et al 2001; Stern 2002; Kusch 2004; Bernasconi-Kohn 2007; Sharrock, Hughes, and Anderson 2013). Indeed, LW’s influence in a growing number of fields outside philosophy is what observers (including historians of contemporary philosophy) suggest[4] and it is what our research aims to assess empirically. There is indeed a third reason for our choice of LW: the richness and complexity of his publishing and editing history (Kenny 2005; Erbacher 2015), which makes “Wittgenstein” a strategic case study for a research on cultural production and postmortem consecration – two major topics in the contemporary sociology of cultural life (see for instance Heinich 1990; Santoro 2010; Fine 2012). Indeed, this third reason crisscrosses profitably with the first, when considering that Wittgenstein’s stardom in the philosophical field has grown along with the posthumous publications of his (many) unpublished writings, and that LW’s place in contemporary analytic philosophy has considerably declined in the last decades – or at least this is what the now standard tale tells us (Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2009). We have organized our paper in three virtual sections. First, we describe the temporal structure of LW’s work: to have a literature on Wittgenstein you need to have Wittgenstein’s literature, so it seems necessary to have at least some knowledge of the latter. Second, we focus on the literature (i.e. scholarship) on LW as we have been able to represent it through an analysis of bibliographic data drawn from the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy as a discipline. This is the central section of our paper, and the longer one, in which we attempt to describe and to map with the help of a few sophisticated statistical tools Wittgensteinian scholarship in its properties and changing forms. Third, we set forth a series of provisional explanations for our results, also considering the research on Wittgenstein beyond and besides the philosophical field, looking for trends and patterns of circulation of his ideas across different research areas and disciplinary fields, mapping what we would call, following Bourdieu (2002), the ‘international field of Wittgensteinism’.[5]. In particular, we advance four hypothesis, mutually compatible and reinforcing, two referring to exogenous and two to endogenous explanations in the sociology of cultural life (Kaufman 2004), which we suggest could be used to make sense of the results of our distant reading.   1. The structure of LW’s work and the philosophical field. Far from being a strange one, the question “What is a work by Wittgenstein?“ (Schulte 2006)  is not only appropriate: it is almost inevitable in a research as ours. The literature on LW is chronologically intermeshed with Wittgenstein’s philosophical work as it was made available to readers and authors, in a relation that is circular: research on LW – secondary literature as it is called – has been part and parcel with the same work for which LW is acknowledged as author.  As Wittgenstein published barely 25,000 words of philosophical writing during his lifetime— including a book (i.e. the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), a caustic book review, and a very short conference paper he never read—the texts or writings that he left unpublished have played an unusually large role in the reception of his work – comparable probably in 20th century to Husserl and Gramsci only. According to public estimates, the posthumous publications, almost all of them based on materials collected in his Nachlass, contain well over a million words. As the Nachlass as a whole contains approximately three million words (i.e. over 20,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts), one might estimate that roughly a third of Wittgenstein’s writing is in print. However, as much of the material that was not edited for publication consists of early versions, rearrangements, and other source material for the previously published material, one could argue that considerably less than two thirds of his Nachlass has still to see the light of day in one form or another. Fig. 1 – The temporal structure of LW’s work Legenda: new edition/translation only in English Fig. 2. A cumulative work, in published books (1922-2015)   The publishing history of LW is however less linear than it may appear from these figures.  Consider the following. As Wittgenstein never copyedited any of these papers for publication, each of the posthumous books and papers called for substantial editorial decisions about their content, and how to present it; b) three persons (G.E.M. Ascombe, R. Rhees and G.H. von Wright) have been charged by the same LW of these publications after LW’s death, and they had to negotiate among themselves and other actors (e.g. publishing houses, other people owning materials etc.) exactly what to publish and in which order and form; c) very soon other people entered in the business, more or less accepted by the literary heirs, who made what was possible to them to keep control over the publication plans; d) new materials (manuscripts, letters, lessons’ transcriptions) have come to light, or to the market; e) manuscripts and typescripts had usually to be translated from their original German, and this asked for a preliminary interpretation and opened the door to “manipulation”, also in a positive sense; f) new collective actors entered the game time after time, as departments (e.g. Cornell’s Dept. of Philosophy who owned a copy of all the materials, Bergen’s Dept. who bought these copies in order to digitalize it, etc.); g) editing conventions as well as publishing technologies have been changing, asking for new editions and new solutions. Consequently, almost all of the twentieth-century publications from the Nachlass were extensively edited, often with little or no indication of the relationship between the source texts and the published material (at least till what Erbacher calls the “later rounds of editing Wittgenstein’s Nachlass”), opening the door to debate about not only the content of LW’s ideas but also their form, composition and structure. Briefly, the Work was far from being fixed, established, crystallized, and not only its contents but also its forms and its boundaries have been themselves a stake in the politico-intellectual game through which Wittgenstein as both an Author and a Person has been known (i.e. read, commented, criticised, contradicted, supported, refined, developed, interpreted, canonized etc.) in the almost seven decades after his death.[6] In a sense, LW’s work – once published – has fostered if not generated what LW has tried to fight if not solve all his life: “philosophical problems”. To be sure, this generation started in 1922 (the year of publication of the Tractatus) but has literally exploded only after 1953 (the year of the posthumous publication of the Untersuchungen/Investigations, that is the first of his post-mortem books and for many still his masterpiece). As we will show, LW work has spurred a whole “industry” inside the philosophical discipline, an industry made of people, articles, books, journals, conferences, associations, academic positions, fellowships, and so on. Our research focuses on this industry – that we would conceptualize, following Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, as a field of cultural production (or better: as a subfield located at the intersection of other fields, including the field of philosophy as an academic discipline): The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field — literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc. — is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. It follows from this, for example, that a position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is change in the universe of options that are simultaneously offered for producers and consumers to choose from.  The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader (Bourdieu 1993, p. 30). Fundamental to Bourdieu’s view is that we cannot understand any work […]

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Posted in History of philosophy, Open Peer Review, Science Mapping, Wittgenstein | 31 Comments »

Two quantitative researches in the history of philosophy. Some uphazard methodological reflections

This post is the third of a series of  contributions to the DR2 Conference.  Comments are welcome! (How to comment)   guido bonino1, Paolo maffezioli2 & paolo tripodi1 1 University of Turin; 2 University of Barcelona   In this paper we are going to put forth some methodological reflections on two different investigations we have conducted in the context of the DR2 research group. Such investigations were our first serious attempts at applying distant reading techniques and more in general quantitative methods to the history of philosophy. A sketchy preliminary presentation of the two researches is in order as a basis for the methodological remarks. 1.two case studies in quantitative history of philosophy 1.1 Wittgenstein and academic success The first investigation concerns the place of Wittgenstein in contemporary analytic philosophy. Of course, this topic has already been amply investigated by means of the traditional methods of the history of philosophy. A rather convincing historical reconstruction is largely shared within the philosophical community. The story begins in the 1950s and 1960s, when Oxford, and to a lesser extent Cambridge, were the centre of analytic philosophy, and when Wittgenstein – the later Wittgenstein – was regarded as the champion of that philosophical tendency. In the 50s and 60s the Wittgensteinian paradigm was so dominant in Britain, that many people thought that that tradition was about to have a similar impact also on the US. However, things went on differently. That happened presumably for a number of philosophical, cultural, and even geopolitical reasons. Let us just say that the Wittgensteinian tradition has been largely forgotten or rejected by present-day analytic philosophers: it has lost its centrality in Britain, and it has never reached a comparable reputation in the US. That is roughly the story that many philosophers accept and that is told by historians of philosophy. The aim of our work was to check whether a quantitative approach to the history of philosophy can add some interesting details and new insights to the historical-philosophical understanding of the decline of the Wittgensteinian tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy. It is important to realize that, notwithstanding the supposed decline, Wittgenstein has always remained a very important philosopher, a “classic” – so to speak – throughout the whole period under consideration, and that he has always been a very popular subject matter of PhD philosophy dissertations in the US.   We thought that one aspect of the supposed decline of Wittgenstein in the history of analytic philosophy could be investigated by analyzing the academic careers (if any) of those who wrote their dissertation on Wittgenstein, and by comparing them with the careers of those who wrote their dissertation on a “typical” analytic philosopher. In particular, we chose four analytic philosophers, who hold very different views on virtually every subject, but who are almost unanimously regarded as important figures within the analytic community. They are David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Michael Dummett and Jerry Fodor. The first step of the work was that of selecting the philosophy dissertations defended from 1981 to 2010. Then we selected those dissertations in which the name ‘Wittgenstein’ occurs in the abstract. Thus we got 329 dissertations. The same was done with the “analytic” dissertations (we got 404 of them). Then we traced the academic careers (if any) of all the authors of dissertations that had been selected. We attributed a numerical value to the highest position each of them held (if any). We took into account both the academic rank (adjunct, assistant, associate, full professor) and the ranking of the philosophy department (we used a rather rough ranking, based on three levels, and drawn from existing rankings). Then we calculated the average value for each group: this is what we called the Academic Success Index. Figure 3 shows the comparison between Wittgensteinian and analytic dissertations.   As you can see, there is a significant difference between the two groups. The Wittgensteinian “decline” seems to be in some way confirmed. The relatively low Academic Success Index is a manifestation of such a decline. It must be remarked that the Academic Success Index, given the somewhat arbitrary way in which the different factors are weighed, should not be taken too seriously as an absolute value. However, we think that it represents a significant indicator, if it is considered in a comparative way. What makes us confident that the result is rather solid is that we considered other groups of dissertations and made other comparisons, and all of them converge toward its confirmation. More or less the same results can be obtained whether you consider the whole period 1981-2010 or rather the disaggregated data for five-year periods, whether you focus on strictly Wittgensteinian theses or you take into account also those in which Wittgenstein is a minor topic, whether you normalize the Academic Success Index for academic age or not, etc.; moreover the Academic Success Index of Wittgenstein is low not only with respect to typical analytic philosophers, but also with respect to some other groups of dissertations we chose as control groups: Gadamer, Spinoza and a random sample of the dissertations.   What does all that mean? Everybody knows that correlation is not causation. The fact that those who write a dissertation on Wittgenstein are less likely to enjoy academic success with respect to those who write their dissertation on a typical recent analytic philosopher (or on Spinoza, for that matter) does not by itself mean that the choice of the subject matter of their dissertation is in any way a cause of their not so brilliant career. We tried in our work to show, by means of different comparisons of data, that the choice of the subject matter is at least a genuine cause, among others, of the difference in academic success. But why, and how, does a philosophical topic make a difference for academic success? Using a visualization software, we found this.         These maps have been obtained by retrieving and counting the occurrences of terms in the abstracts of the theses. The size of an item’s label and the size of an item’s circle depend on the number of occurrences of the item. Looking at the analytic map, we found a pattern that we did not recognize in the Wittgensteinian one. The keywords on the map (that is, the biggest blue circles), suggest the idea that philosophy is a kind of theory – ‘theory’ is the main keyword – which provides arguments, gives accounts, defends claims, in order to solve problems. Theory, argument, problem, account, claim: these are all important keywords on the analytic map. It is a pattern that alludes to a science-oriented style and metaphilosophical view. To sum up the present results: it seemed to us that the difference of academic success may be (partly) explained by the presence (and the absence) of certain semantic patterns; such patterns, in turn, point to the presence (and the absence) of a science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Therefore this is perhaps our main thesis: the index of academic success for PhD candidates in US philosophy departments in the last forty years is quite strictly connected to the choice of a more or less science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Did our quantitative research add anything original to the picture of the decline of Wittgenstein provided by historians of philosophy by means of traditional methods? We think so. We have retrieved, measured, read and interpreted a relatively large amount of data, and by examining the data we have pointed out the metaphoric place where the decline of Wittgenstein began. It is up there, so to speak, in the very same place in which the process of academic recruitment takes place. Our results seem to suggest that the decline of Wittgenstein, which at least in part depends on the choice of a certain topic for the PhD dissertation (a topic more or less associated to science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy), is not due, so to speak, to a widespread Zeitgeist. If a philosopher is simply out of the Zeitgeist, or against the tide of history, it is likely that people cease to speak of his work: for example, PhD students would probably write few dissertations on him. Here we have to do with a different phenomenon: the decline of Wittgenstein seems to be a consequence of a top-down process, or better: of a process driven from the top, a process guided by a relatively small number of people, i.e. those academics who hold the power of influencing the recruitment policies in the philosophy departments. Of course, this remark is nothing but a suggestion. More work should be done, and more data should be analysed, in order to make the suggestion a solidly confirmed hypothesis. However, it is not an airy-fairy suggestion either. 1.2 Logic in analytic philosophy The aim of our second work was that of substantiating with data the widely shared view according to which logic has become increasingly central in analytic philosophy. The corpus taken into consideration comprises all the articles published in five important philosophical journals (The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, The Philosophical Review, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) in the time span 1941-2010. To give a concise anticipatory overview, we provided some results concerning the overall presence of logic in these articles, the relative technical sophistication of the logic used for philosophical purposes, the kind of use that is made of logic (i.e., subject matter vs. instrumental). Our guiding questions were: What are the relations between analytic philosophy and logic? What is the role of logic in analytic philosophy? Would you need logic to do analytic philosophy? The common opinion is that logic is very important in analytic philosophy. However, to understand better what the role of logic in (analytic) philosophy is, it seemed interesting to us to investigate how much logic and what kind of logic is present in philosophy, and how it is used. Distant reading and, more generally, quantitative methods allowed us to find more interesting and reliable answers to such questions.   By distantly or – as Moretti once said – serially reading all the articles in which logic is in some way present, for each paper we raised the following two questions. Q1: What does this paper use logic for? Q2: What level of logical competence does this paper require? In answering Q1, we distinguished an instrumental and a non-instrumental role of logic in philosophy. By non-instrumental uses we mean either doing logic properly understood (= giving proofs, demonstrating theorems, and so forth) or dealing with logic as a subject matter of philosophy (= investigating the philosophy of logic). Instrumental uses are those that can be found in articles in which the role of logic is that of providing an instrument for philosophy: logic as an instrument for doing moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and so forth. A third category (“Other”) includes history of logic and inductive logic.   Logic as an instrument increases over time, logic as a discipline does not: philosophy of logic decreases and logic proper remains constant (with negligible numbers). The common opinion seems to be confirmed by data, but it does not tell the whole story. Even with respect to Q2, we wanted to find an answer as precise and complete as possible. In order to get to such an answer, we proposed a method to measure the level of “logical sophistication”. We have represented in a map the most relevant topics in logic, from logical preliminaries to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, so to speak. The map is based on a comparative analysis of the table of contents of ten well-known logic textbooks and online courses. Technically, the map consists in a graph with nodes labelled by logical topics and arrows connecting the nodes. The nodes are the following: Preliminaries: prel Propositional logic: pl Propositional modal logic: pml Non-classical propositional logics: ncpl First-order logic: fol Peano arithmetic: pa Proof theory: pt Second-order logic: sol Model theory: mt Set theory: st First-order modal logic: foml   The numbers represent […]

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