Philosophy vs Metaphysics
> By the way, could you explain a bit more about this statement of yours?
>>As
for metaphysics, the problem with it is--as Wittgenstein pointed out
long ago (and as I only lately realized)--that it seeks to cast
questions into a scientific form, though they are not the right type of
questions for this.
You're
quite right to ask for an explanation of this, though I'm not certain
that I'm up to it. Some metaphysical questions seem to have a form that
looks very much like the form of an empirical--or scientific--question.
For example, "What is the nature of consciousness?" is one that used to
exercise me a great deal. I thought that consciousness was some sort of
"process"--something that "goes on", so I wanted to find an explanation
of just what kind of process this is. Wittgenstein address this very
point in section 308 of
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS:
How
does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and
about behaviourism arise? --The first step is the one that altogether
escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature
undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them--we think. But
that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the
matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to
know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick
has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)
--And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls
to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet
unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental
processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.
When
we set up a philosophical question like this ("What characterizes the
process of thinking? How does the mind interact with the body?") we
believe that we are posing it in neutral terms, but we are not. We have
an analogy in mind, and the analogy invites us to explore the question
just as though we were answering a question, say, of physics or biology.
When
we ask the question like this, it seems as though getting an answer
were a matter of doing a hazy kind of physics, or a diaphanous
neurophysiology. The temptation is to think that just as we have
theories in physics, we need a theory of consciousness; just as we have
mechanisms in neurophysiology, we need a mechanism that illuminates the
mind-body interaction.
Though
such questions have the form of questions that can be answered
empirically (by an experiment), they can't really be answered like this.
To attempt to answer them empirically--for example, by taking
photographs (as some have claimed to take photographs of the "auras"
that surround persons) leads one deeper in mystical confusion. The most
valuable thing one can do in connection with such questions is to
examine why one wants to ask them.
For
example, what is one asking who asks, "What is consciousness?". What is
the basis of this question? What do we mean by "consciousness"? _Does_
this word have a meaning when it's used like this?
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