I’ll use an analogy to express a problem with philosophy, something that happened at work today.
We were trimming out the interior of the porch we built today. David was on the scaffolding and I was at the saw horses below, cutting material for him.
David got to a corner and needed a one by four corner board; he called out as follows: I need a one by four X inches long, square to short of a long 5/12.
I asked him: am I pulling left to right or right to left, which side is the long point on, and is it a bevel or an angle?
He got a little impatient and thought that should be obvious, but was it?
How do I know where he is at, or which corner he needs, of if he’s running the board vertically or horizontally? I’m on the ground below him and can see nothing that is in front of him. There is no way I could know, without explicit directions, what he meant with those instructions, unless I climbed up there and saw where he was putting the piece I would cut.
David failed to realize this and switch perspectives. Had he put himself in front of the horses where I was, and the roles were reversed, he’d be asking the same questions… because he wouldn’t know what I was doing up there or exactly what I needed.
He thought the instructions he gave me were enough for me to properly cut the board he needed because he imagined I knew what he was looking at up there on the scaffold.
Philosophical discussion works the same way. When you present an argument or make a statement, you assume your listener ‘sees what you see’ and is ‘where you are at’ in reference to the thing you are trying to articulate with what you say. You give him a few basic instructions… these are the ‘words’ you use… but you do not explain to him how he is to apply those words to put together what you want, what you are trying to get him to understand.
But there is no getting around this like there is with the material I am cutting. David needed only to give me a few more instructions in order for me to cut the piece properly… but with philosophy, with words, you only slightly narrow down the possible ways in which your listener can understand what you are saying, and put together the proper comprehension for it. But since there is no final product, no end to the instructions themselves (see aporia), there is always more than one way to interpret what is being said, and you never get the right piece of material (understanding) from your sawman (listener).
It is very difficult to understand that when you use a word, especially a word in a philosophical context, how you comprehend that word is not the only way that word can be comprehended.
For instance, you use the word ‘morals’. But how many definitions for that word exist in philosophy? Countless, almost. So you narrow it down; Kantian morals, or Nietzschean morals. Now you are expecting your listener to have the same understanding as yourself of what each of these philosophers mean when they use the word. You realize this isn’t good enough… so you narrow it down some more. But all the narrowing only brings you to places that need to be narrowed further, and so on.
When you have an idea in your head and want to explain it, you are up on the scaffolding. Your listener is down at the saw horses. He doesn’t see what you see. You have to come down and stand in front of that material there at the saw horses to become aware of the fact that what is up there by the scaffolding cannot be seen from below. You have to switch perspectives, suspend for a moment what you think, and see the argument or statement from that position.
Wittgenstein used a similar analogy of a builders language, what he called a primitive language in which no mistakes in understanding can be made. In doing this he wanted to make an allusion to the kind of confusing language game that philosophy can often be, by comparison. The analogy I gave in this post is an attempt to demonstrate this.
