Phil Hutchinson

An Elucidatory Interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Critique of Daniel D. Hutto's and Marie McGinn's Reading of Tractatus 6.54

Abstract Much has been written on the relative merits of different readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. The recent renewal of the debate has almost exclusively been concerned with variants of the ineffabilist (metaphysical) reading of TL‐P – notable such readings have been advanced by Elizabeth Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and H. O. Mounce – and the recently advanced variants of therapeutic (resolute) readings – notable advocates of which are James Conant, Cora Diamond, Juliet Floyd and Michael Kremer. During this debate, there have been a number of writers who have tried to develop a third way, incorporating what they see as insights and avoiding what they see as flaws in both the ineffabilist and resolute readings. The most prominent advocates of these elucidatory readings of TL‐P are Dan Hutto (2003) and Marie McGinn (1999). In this paper we subject Hutto’s and McGinn’s readings of TL‐P to critical scrutiny. We find that in seeking to occupy the middle ground they ultimately find themselves committed to (and in the process commit Wittgenstein to) the very ineffabilism they (and Wittgenstein) are seeking to overcome.

De-mystifying tacit knowing and clues: a comment on Henry et al.

Our first response to this interesting paper by Henry et al. [1] would be to refer them back to Loughlin’s very clear and constructive contribution to the discussion [2]. There Loughlin expressed sympathy with the basic thrust of Stephen Henry’s original paper on Tacit Knowing [3], while raising some basic and fundamental objections to the way that paper occasionally lapsed into a sort of semi-mysticism. We join Loughlin in sharing those sympathies and misgivings. The notion of tacit knowledge can be used in two ways: • One way serves to highlight the way in which oftenunacknowledged occasionand context-specific non-generalizable particulars along with background and framing factors play an epistemologically significant role (the significance of which is downplayed or dismissed by those in the grip of a positivist or quasi-positivist epistemology). This way of thinking about what is called ‘tacit knowledge’ ties it back into taking seriously human embodiment (and not abstracting away from the body into ‘culturalist’ fantasies nor into an excessive emphasis on the mind). • The other way the notion of tacit knowledge is sometimes invoked is by way of gesturing at the putatively ineffable, and thus can seem reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known knowns . . . known unknowns . . . and unknown unknowns’ speech. On this model, tacit knowledge is the unmentioned fourth possibility implicit in Rumsfeld’s typology: that of unknown knowns. Things one allegedly knows without being aware that one knows them. The central paradox or irony of this version of tacit knowledge is, ironically, that it (tacitly) figures tacit knowledge as exactly the same as ordinary knowledge except that it is tacit. (In this way, it is reminiscent of problematic models of ‘the unconscious’ which simply assume the unconscious to be a kind of unconscious conscious.) Tacit knowledge is in effect then said to be exactly the same in every way as standard cases of knowledge – except that it is ineffable, or inaccessible, tacit. Therefore, this second – unfortunately, very widespread, virtually standard – way of employing the notion of tacit knowledge is to be treated with suspicion. The reason being that it trades in a sort of mysticism, whereby we can gesture at something, claim to know of it and demand that it be acknowledged by our interlocutors as just as good as all the other knowledge that they already acknowledge, while at the same time claiming it to be inarticulable and constitutively unable to take its place alongside the standardly cited evidential data. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledge Loughlin, the authors of the article under review here seem to have ignored his commentary and proceeded to build on Henry’s original paper without taking heed of these issues. Indeed, we find that there is now further reason for concern, over and above that identified by Loughlin. So, to recap: towards the end of his short commentary, Loughlin furnished us with the following illustrative example: Consider the statement ‘My mother is unhappy today’. ‘I might come to believe this statement true on the basis of certain ‘evidence’: her facial expressions, the tone of her voice, her mannerisms as she goes about certain mundane tasks. The fact that someone who does not know her so well might encounter the same behaviour but fail to come to the same conclusion shows that the evidence for the claim does not logically entail the conclusion. If that person sees no reason to believe that my mother is unhappy he is not guilty of a formal contradiction, but he is wrong, all the same [2]’. Loughlin and the other person, who we will call Smith, observe the same scene, though Smith resists accepting Loughlin’s conclusion that his mother is unhappy today. We can say that what is going on here is that Loughlin has access to tacit knowledge that Smith doesn’t. Do we rest comfortable with that conclusion? We would suggest not. We propose that the difference between Loughlin and Smith, hereabouts, can be described as owing to a difference of sensitivity to the non-generalizable particulars of the scene (particulars which might be extremely difficult for anyone who is not Loughlin’s mother’s son to be capable of attending to or be aware of) and those factors that frame and serve as a backdrop to the scene. Such things as Loughlin’s decades-worth of experience regarding his mother’s character traits, the specifics of her emotional manifestations, how she usually goes about certain mundane tasks, what is a look of trust, what a look of defiance, and so on. Loughlin’s experience of and relative intimacy with his mother afford him a greater sensitivity to the non-generalizable particulars of the scene, the correct framing of the scene and the backdrop against which it is best situated. None of this is claimed to be ineffable, nor even logically restricted to Loughlin. It is simply

Memento : A Philosophical Investigation

This paper offers a reading of Memento as a therapeutic dialogue, one purpose of which is to loosen the grip of both dualism (the ‘Cartesian’1 picture of mind) and behaviourism. We do this by illuminating aspects of the film with a reading of the opening of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (hereafter, PI).2

Shame, stigma, HIV: philosophical reflections

It is a distinctive feature of HIV that its pathology cannot be adequately grasped separate from a number of psychosocial factors, and stigma is widely seen as the most prominent. We argue that it is equally important to have an adequate understanding of shame, as the emotional response to stigma. We have identified five ways shame might negatively impact upon attempts to combat and treat HIV, which emerge from the stigma HIV carries and STI-stigma in general. In this paper, we draw out four insights from philosophical work on emotions and shame which we propose will improve understanding of shame and stigma. We conclude by briefly discussing how these insights might shed light on the negative role shame can play for a person living with HIV engaging with, or being retained in, care. We conclude by proposing further study.

Emotion-Philosophy-Science

Contemporary analytic philosophy of emotions is currently dominated by two seemingly opposing camps.1 In one camp we have those generally labelled cognitivists and in the other those who favour a Jamesian approach, the neo-Jamesians.2 The term ‘cognitivism’ brings together writers on emotions, some of whom might be termed pure cognitivists, for example Solomon (1976 and 2003c), Taylor (1985) and Nussbaum (2004), and those who might be termed hybrid cognitivists, for example Goldie (2000) Greenspan (1995) Nash (1989) and Stocker (1987). In the other camp we have the neo-Jamesians, which as the name suggests comprises those philosophers and psychologists who advance a contemporary variant of William James’s account of emotion and in doing so often align themselves with the research program initiated by Darwin ([1872] 1999) and later Ekman (1972); those Darwinian claims are often buttressed by theoretical claims drawn from neuroscience and cognate theories of mind, for example Damasio (1994), Prinz (2004) and Robinson (1995).

Reframing Health Care: Philosophy for Medicine and Human Flourishing

An important insight of Bill Fulford’s work is that there is no such thing as “value-free” diagnosis. To characterise a person as having a particular illness is to make a value-laden claim, whether or not people reflect on what the values are that underlie the diagnosis. We agree with him on this point, but want to ground a view about the role of value-judgments in diagnosis in a broader conceptual framework—one which argues that there is no such thing as an approach to health care (including the science of medicine) that is “philosophy-free”. We explain and justify this claim before bringing out its significance to Fulford’s VBP project and his own underlying assumptions about the relationship between value, philosophy, science and practice. Rather than ‘complement’ EBM with VBP, EBM should, we argue, be sublated. VBP should be dropped, and EBM could morph then into FOM: Flourishing-Oriented Medicine, our own proposed answer. No longer positivistic and scientistic, and more honestly ethical and political. With deliberative fora that, far from being mere tick-box exercises or amalgamations of individuals’ preferences, are actually likely to produce the best and most robust decisions. Decisions that are likelier to be compatible with both medical science and human flourishing.

Shame and HIV: Strategies for addressing the negative impact shame has on public health and diagnosis and treatment of HIV

Abstract There are five ways in which shame might negatively impact upon our attempts to combat and treat HIV. Shame can prevent an individual from disclosing all the relevant facts about their sexual history to the clinician. Shame can be a motivational factor in people living with HIV not engaging with or being retained in care. Shame can prevent individuals from presenting at clinics for STI and HIV testing. Shame can prevent an individual from disclosing their HIV (or STI) status to new sexual partners. Shame can serve to psychologically imprison people, it makes the task of living with HIV a far more negative experience than it should, or needs to, be. Drawing on recent philosophical work on shame, and more broadly on work in the philosophy and psychology of emotion, we (a.) propose a framework for understanding how shame operates upon those who experience the emotion, (b.) propose a strategy for combatting the negative role shame plays in the fight against HIV, and (c) suggest further study so as to identify the tactics that might be employed in pursuing the strategy here proposed.

Shame, Placebo and World-Taking Cognitivism

In this chapter, I begin by exploring the status of the claim that shame is pain. What would we be doing in making that claim? Would we be invoking identity or category membership, such that shame is a particular type of pain? Or are we speaking figuratively, invoking ‘pain’ metaphorically? If we are tempted to the latter characterization of “shame is pain”, then what is the status of the metaphor? Is it a conceptual or cognitive metaphor, and thereby deeply embedded in our modes of thought? Or is it a literary metaphor, intentionally employed so as to illustrate and draw attention to certain aspects of shame experiences? These questions then serve to frame the discussion that follows. In that discussion, I want to put into question what I see as prejudice in favour of propositionality. I pursue this task with reference to a widely discussed ‘dilemma of adequate explanation’ in the philosophy and psychology of emotions and recent attempts to explain the placebo response, in the work of Daniel Moerman, and that of Fabrizio Benedetti. I offer an alternative to propositionality, which respects the data on the placebo response and helps us avoid otherwise seemingly intractable problems—chiefly the dilemma of adequate explanation—in the philosophy and psychology of emotions. Having done so, I return to my question before concluding with some reflections on the questions these considerations raise regarding debates in medical epistemology.

Experimental Methods and Conceptual Confusion: Philosophy, Science, and What Emotions Really Are

Philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition began to take renewed interest in the emotions in the 1960s. Since then the dominant ‘research program’ in the philosophy of the emotions has been—what is widely, though not uncontroversially, called—cognitivism. Authors such as Anthony Kenny (1963), Robert Solomon (1976, 2003c), Gabriele Taylor (1985), and Peter Goldie (2000)1 have offered explanations of the human emotions chiefly in terms of the beliefs (thoughts, judgements, evaluations) of the agents; in the early stages this ‘project’ was seen (often self-consciously) as a corrective to ‘feeling theories’ of the emotions, particularly those offered and/or influenced by William James (1884) and Carl Lange (1885)—often referred to as the James-Lange theory—which depicted emotions in a manner which led to them being characterised as irrational irruptions into an otherwise rational life. Cognitivism was seen as a corrective to this, in that it set out to rationally explain the emotions. Recently, the post-1960s, dominance of philosophical cognitivism has been subjected to strong criticism.

Shame and World

In the foregoing chapters I have essayed various problems with a number of philosophical approaches to emotion. The scientistic approach, as advocated and exemplified by Paul Griffiths, rested upon a picture of language and meaning that distorted our understanding of ourselves. The theory advocated by Agamben faced structurally similar problems in being wedded to a theory of meaning, which was found to be too abstract. I found much of interest in the version of cognitivism in the philosophy of emotion, which I called reason-giving cognitivism. However, we saw that this faced some serious problems (cf. Chapter 3, Sections 2 and 3). In addition, I briefly turned my attention to a recent influential, neo-Jamesian attempt to overcome (reason-giving) cognitivism’s problems, in the work of Jesse Prinz. This too was found to have substantial problems. The problems faced by reason-giving cognitivism and by Prinz’s neo-Jamesian approach were traced to their guiding, though unacknowledged, picture of mind and world as externally related, the former being that which bestows meaning on the latter.