Language, Mind and Value By SeverinSchroeder, London: Anthem. 2024

The book assembles fifteen papers by Schroeder on a somewhat eclectic range of topics in the philosophy of language, mind and action, as well as on aesthetics, ethics, and religion, all previously published, and all about, or closely related to, Wittgenstein's philosophy. Lucidly written, the book occasionally puts Wittgensteinian ideas in conversation with later analytic philosophers, for example Davidson, Kripke and Williamson, though not systematically, and it portrays, without much attention to alternatives, a familiar image of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy: from cold strict and rigidly systematic logicism to a more nuanced and relaxed context-sensitive humanism. This also often involves taking post-Tractarian claims as reversals of Tractarian insights, rather than, for example, as attempts to rethink those insights, rework them and ultimately, albeit critically, reclaim them. My own interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy is somewhat different from Schroeder's, as will be apparent, and given the space limits, I address only a few points that sparked my interest. I make no comment, for instance, about the final part of the volume about ethics, aesthetics, and religion, except to say that I found parts of it a bit repetitive, and parts comparatively introductory. (L) This proposition is false. A: I assure you, what I'm saying is true. B: And what are you saying? A: I'm saying that I assure you, what I'm saying is true. B: Yes, but what are you saying? A: I'm saying that I assure you, what I'm saying is true. (55) Here, the absence of reference is palpable, and one may react like Wittgenstein: ‘It is just a useless language-game, and why should anybody be excited’? (LFM 207). Schroeder methodically and effectively, I think, shows how an illusion of meaningfulness—the illusion that we know what proposition we are supposed to have in mind—may lure us here, and he demonstrates how, by showing this, the air of paradox can be dispelled. (SL1) This sentence doesn't express a proposition. We have here a sentence that apparently denies its own propositionhood and meaningfulness, not truth, but unlike with (L), Schroeder thinks, saying that (SL1) doesn't express a proposition would commit us, ‘to the apparently inconsistent verdict that (SL[1]) is both true and not even (expressing) a proposition’! (60). We can therefore, Schroeder thinks, not reply to this paradox as we did with (L), by denying the propositionhood of (SL1). (M) The sentence 'This sentence doesn't express a proposition' doesn't express a proposition. But they don't say the same thing, and if so, then someone who endorses the reply Schroeder rejects can accept (M) as true, without accepting that it is a reformulation of (SL1). Specifically, even if we allow that both sentences contain a reference to a sentence (i.e. not to a truth-apt proposition), we may still say that (M) is and (SL1) isn't a proposition. That is, we may insist that (SL1) says nothing—not even that it says nothing, as (M) says; that's what it means for (SL1) not to be a proposition: It says nothing. Unlike (M), (SL1), we may say, is a piece of nonsense, a mere façade of a proposition, however well-disguised. A: I assure you that I'm saying something. B: And what are you saying? A: I'm saying that I assure you that I'm saying something. B: Good, but what is that something that you are saying? A: The something that I'm saying is that I assure you that I'm saying something. To which, the Wittgensteinian response still applies: ‘It is just a useless language-game’. As I mentioned, however, this is not Schroeder's conclusion. He believes that (SL1) like other formulations of the Strengthened Liar's Paradox still does manage to say something. Given the strengths of Schroeder's discussion of the Liar's Paradox, and the effectiveness with which he dispels the illusion of propositionhood there, I found it a little strange that his discussion of the Strengthened Liar's Paradox clings to what seems to me very much like yet another, and not dissimilar, illusion. An analogous issue arises in the tenth chapter, in Schroeder's discussion about so-called ‘hinge propositions’, or ‘Moore sentences’, in On Certainty. Schroeder there acknowledges that ‘without a suitable context, their [Moore sentences'] utterance would appear odd and unclear’ (148). Here again, that is, there is a worry that these sentences present us with a mere façade of meaningfulness, an illusion of sense. We may, in response, want to take a step back and ask what it takes for a sentence to be meaningful in the first place. In the quotation above, Schroeder mentions one consideration: context. In different contexts, the same words may mean different things; out of context, what words mean may remain obscure. So, possibly, being embedded in a proper context is one condition for meaningfulness. Underlying here, we may note, is a familiar Wittgensteinian worry that for any semantics to be visible in the words we use, we need to attend to what is being done with the words—more familiarly, that to see meaning, we must look at use. And to emphasize, for Wittgenstein, this is arguably not a matter of (mere) pragmatics. If one said, for example, ‘The egg was laid by the dog’, it would make a big difference if they meant that the egg was birthed by the dog or rather placed nearby; it would have different logical implications. We must therefore look at how words are used, that is at their logical applications, to know what they mean. The pragmatic issue regarding how the words ‘laid by’ are used in my example and the semantic issue of what they mean are therefore, and to this extent, not separate. We may even want to say that detached from their logical usefulness and abstracted from their possibilities of application, propositions are thereby severed from their very meaningfulness. To do so is, arguably, no longer to regard them as propositions at all. Now, immediately after voicing his worry, Schroeder goes on to say: ‘just as it is true that fish can swim, it is true that Moore has the knowledge in question (e.g., that he has hands)’ (148). Schroeder thus brushes aside whatever worries he had about the meaningfulness of Moore sentences uttered out of context. He says: ‘The contingent pointlessness of a statement—that it's just stating the obvious—doesn't seem enough to rule it out as nonsensical’ (ibid.), which seems true to me as far as it goes; for even stating the obvious can be significant sometimes, and may have a point. Still, the argument here leaves me a bit dissatisfied, since the inverse seems equally true: The contingent significance of a statement doesn't guarantee its meaningfulness on any particular occasion. Ultimately, one is left with a nagging sense that, for Schroeder, the spectre of discovering nonsense in one's own words is not a live and serious threat or something that he expects to learn much from. It would be inaccurate to say that what allows Schroeder to brush aside these worries is a rejection of the Wittgensteinian insistence on the connection between meaning and use. Schroeder is very much a Wittgensteinian and endorses this connection. He does, however, seem to endorse a rather specific notion of that connection, which is also visible, I believe, in his tendency to read claims of Wittgenstein's like: ‘One says “I know” when one is ready to give compelling grounds […]’ (OC §243) as rule-stating statements fixing the use of words, and so as contradicting other claims Wittgenstein makes in On Certainty about the use of ‘know’, for example in §§424, 582 (149–50). Schroeder endorses this reading strategy, rather than, for instance, reading all such remarks together as invitations to consider the variety of uses the word 'know' and its cognates might have—particular applications of such words in particular contexts, pieces of human life in which the words function. Schroeder's tendency, in contrast, is somewhat abstracting, and he at least leaves us with the impression that the connection between meaning and use, for him, is made less in specific life contexts, and more via grammatical algorithms. In closing, I would like to turn to a different topic and say a bit about Schroeder's discussion about aspect-perception in the ninth chapter, in which I'm personally interested (e.g. see my 2023). Schroeder usefully distinguishes between two ways of using the terminology of ‘aspect-seeing’ and ‘seeing-as’: One concerns an ongoing disposition, what Stephen Mulhall called ‘continuous aspect-perception’ (1990); the other concerns episodic, ephemeral experiences, which typically take place when an aspect dawns. There indeed seem to be here two, albeit related, phenomena, and two, albeit related, ways of using the term ‘aspect-perception’. Now, Schroeder relies on this to conclude that Wittgenstein was confused about aspect-perception and shifted between two accounts of it, but this conclusion too seems to me too quick. In his discussion about continuous aspect-perception (PI, 194–5), Wittgenstein seems rather careful to mark the differences and connections. He is, for instance, rather clear that we may only ascribe continuous aspect-perception to someone who does not see an ambiguity that we can see—someone who can only see as a duck, for example. It would be meaningless for such a person to say about themselves that they see the duck-rabbit image 'as a duck'; there would be no grammatical space for this. And this, Wittgenstein seems to argue, because talk of seeing aspects grammatically involves an expectation for an alternative way of seeing. If one points at a knife and fork, for instance, and says ‘I see this as a knife and fork’, they thereby open the door to be asked: ‘How else would you see it?’; they imply the existence of an alternative. No such thing is implied by them merely saying ‘I see a knife and fork’. Arguably, these considerations suggest a rather different way of using the term ‘continuous aspect-perception’ than Mulhall's, which allows us to talk of seeing aspects continuously even in the absence of alternative ways of seeing. But, of course, this doesn't mean that Mulhall is not talking about anything; Mulhall's seems to me a perfectly sound way of using the term ‘aspect-perception’, even if it is not Wittgenstein's. It is, of course, debatable whether and to what extent ‘seeing as’ is part of perception generally (although see PI 197). But even if one is convinced, unlike me, that Wittgenstein used the terminology of aspect in Mulhall's dispositional sense—and this seems to be by far the standard way of reading—it seems somewhat uncharitable of Schroeder to criticize Wittgenstein for being confused, when it is quite open to rather read him as talking about different matters and different phenomena—one episodic another dispositional. Unlike many before him, Schroeder rightly sees the difference between these two ways of using the terminology of aspect. But, like so many before him, Schroeder seems to me to muddy the waters by artificially and unnecessarily forcing the two issues into some contrived unity. It should also be noted that the distinction between the episodic and dispositional notions of aspect-perception was formulated and extensively discussed by Avner Baz a full decade before Schroder's paper was originally published (Baz 2000). I don't know what explains this oversight. There is a lot more to address in the volume. I hope to have given some sense of the kind of discussions it affords.