The Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry

The philosopher Lee Braver claimed that Wittgenstein’s “writing style is perhaps the most obscure of all the great analytic figures”. This has led to a “cottage industry of exegetical work and scholarly contention”. What’s more, according to Crispin Sartwell, “the only thing that mattered to [the interpreters] was the question: ‘What did Wittgenstein really mean?’”. All this has often resulted in situations in which there wasn’t “a question as to what’s the best position”.

Not: “Do you agree or disagree with Wittgenstein on this?”

(i) Introduction

(ii) Is Wittgenstein Dead?

(iii) What Did Wittgenstein Mean?

(iv) The Case of Saul Kripke

(v) The History of the Wittgenstein Industry

(vi) Conclusion: In Defence of Wittgenstein

Much of what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) wrote is hard to decipher. Indeed that’s the primary reason why there’s what can (sarcastically) be called a Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry. This also explains why so many loyal Wittgensteinians have got so hot under the collar when other commentators (as it’s often put) “get Wittgenstein wrong!”. Moreover, unlike many other philosophers, much of the debate around Wittgenstein’s work isn’t about whether or not what he wrote is correct or incorrect, well-argued or badly-argued, worthwhile or worthless, etc. — but about what he actually meant.

This need for endless interpretation is strongly connected to Wittgenstein’s appeal.

Yet many — or even most — of the people who read Wittgenstein don’t get him. They don’t understand what he is saying. (This is even true of some professional philosophers too.) Indeed even his fans admit this…

And perhaps that is precisely part of Wittgenstein’s appeal.

What’s more, the fact that Wittgenstein himself said that no one understood him simply compounds the problem even more. (See James C. Klagge’s chapter ‘No One Understands Me’, from his book Wittgenstein in Exile.)

So there are two ways of looking at all this:

(1) Those who claim to understand Wittgenstein deem themselves to occupy a higher intellectual — and perhaps even moral — ground.

(2) Any lack of understanding of Wittgenstein is itself part of the appeal. (As with — esoteric — religious, mystical and poetic writers and thinkers throughout history.)

In terms of one fairly recent example of Wittgenstein veneration, it’s worth mentioning the (otherwise excellent) book Groundless Ground: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (2012), by Lee Braver. This book is 239 pages long, yet it doesn’t contain a single criticism of Wittgenstein or his ideas (except the mention of his prose style below). What’s more, Lee Braver doesn’t even quote any critical words (i.e., against Wittgenstein) of any philosophers or commentators.

Yet, at the very same time, Braver also puts the problem-with-Wittgenstein (at least the one focussed upon in this essay) very well when he wrote the following words:

“[Wittgenstein’s] writing style is perhaps the most obscure of all the great analytic figures, leading to an unusual state of affairs: ‘one of the most striking characteristics of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein is the overwhelming lack of agreement about what he believed and why.’ Already in 1961, the literature on the Tractatus was compared to literary scholarship in dissension and sheer mass. His opaque prose and sparse argumentation have given rise to a cottage industry of exegetical work and scholarly contention [].”

So along with the aforementioned Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry comes Wittgenstein worship (or “Bible study”, as the Guardian’s Giles Fraser put it). That is, Wittgenstein worship generates the Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry.

Despite such problems with interpretation, Wittgenstein has of course been hugely influential outside the Philosophy Academy in the Sky. Filmmakers have produced biographical works on him, poets have written poems about him, and sociologists, psychologists, linguists and even religious thinkers have borrowed — or simply used — his ideas….

So if the views articulated by many commentators about Wittgenstein’s (as it were) essential mysticism are correct, then perhaps it’s not so strange that Wittgenstein is loved outside the set of all philosophy departments. (See John Horgan’s ‘Was Wittgenstein a Mystic?’.) Indeed it may be Wittgenstein’s esoteric prose that appeals to many of those Wittgensteinians on the outside of the Academy…

So, to track back, can we really accept the possibility which some professional Wittgensteinians (i.e., certain analytic philosophers) seem to believe: viz., that all of these outsiders get Wittgenstein wrong?

It’s interesting, then, that Wittgenstein (in a letter — dated 1932 - to the logical positivist Maurice Schlick) wrote that

“from the bottom of my heart it is all the same to me what professional philosophers of today think; for it is not for them that I am writing”.

All that said, is the Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry now dead anyway?

Is Wittgenstein Dead?

The philosopher Daniel A. Kaufman once stated (in a video discussion with Crispin Sartwell called ‘Is Wittgenstein Overrated?’) the following:

“Wittgenstein has almost zero influence in analytic philosophy today. The interesting thing is that your experience [i.e., Crispin Sartwell’s negative experience] represented the last gasp of that tradition.”

Kaufman also stated (ironically, I presume) that there are only “three Wittgensteinians around today”. (He mentions P.M.S. Hacker as one of them.) Kaufman continued by saying that “analytic philosophy went completely beyond [Wittgenstein]”. He cited the influence of cognitive science as an example of this. Kaufman claimed that the “whole point of [cognitive science] is doing exactly what Wittgenstein believed that you shouldn’t do”. (It’s not clear what this means.) Despite that, Kaufman is also against what he called the “cognitive science revolution” in philosophy. He also believes in “bringing Wittgenstein back” in order to fight a counter-revolution against that cognitive science hegemony (at least within philosophy).

Kaufman admitted that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations would still come out as a “number one” book in many polls of analytic philosophers. In addition, it’s ironic that Kaufman says that Wittgenstein today is a “dead parrot” when one considers the fact that only recently there were as many as 1000 publications on Wittgenstein in one year alone. (As of 2022 and in ResearchGate, there are 22,934 publications which both mention and are about Wittgenstein.)

But perhaps all this entirely depends on whether Wittgenstein is now a dead parrot to analytic philosophers alone or whether he’s also a dead parrot to intellectual culture generally.

What Did Wittgenstein Mean?

The Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry is primarily driven by the following question (or variations upon it):

What did Wittgenstein really mean by written words […].?

It’s usually only professional philosophers who believe that they’ve got Wittgenstein right. Indeed it’s often a subset of such professional philosophers: Wittgenstein Experts.

However, if professional philosophers often accuse each other of getting Wittgenstein wrong, then what hope have non-professionals got of getting him right? A few, though not many, Wittgensteinians may say, however, that non-professional Wittgensteinians actually have more chance of getting Wittgenstein right. That said, this is certainly not the general view amongst professional Wittgensteinians.

The American philosopher Crispin Sartwell (1958-) picked up on all this (in the video discussion mentioned above) when he stated the following:

“The only thing that mattered to them [the Wittgenstein “cult”] was the question: ‘What did Wittgenstein really mean?’. [] There wasn’t a question as to what’s the best position here [] but what did Wittgenstein really mean?”

That’s what you find with many of Wittgenstein’s acolytes. That is, they’ll shout you down for getting Wittgenstein wrong. (Who knows, they may sometimes be right about this.) However, whether or not the interpreter is right or wrong, Wittgenstein’s ideas or positions (as they can be agreed upon by all the parties concerned) aren’t often the main theme of debate or discussion. Instead, the primary question is usually the following:

“What did Wittgenstein mean by […]?”

Either that, or the opponent-interpreter becomes a victim of the exclamation:

“Stop getting Wittgenstein wrong!”

So we have the classic problem of how to correctly interpret Wittgenstein.

Unlike many other philosophers of the analytic tradition, most of what’s said (or argued about) when it comes to Wittgenstein is about interpretation. Thus, we have Philosopher X saying that Philosopher Y has “got Wittgenstein wrong!”. And then Philosopher Z ostentatiously comes along and says that both Philosopher X and Philosopher Y haven’t “got Wittgenstein right”. And this goes on and on and on.

Ironically, Crispin Sartwell himself says that he “rebelled against Rorty as he read Wittgenstein”. So here again we have another example of the Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry. [Read Sartwell’s article on Wittgenstein quoted here. The original article has since — seemingly — disappeared.]

It gets worse.

Daniel A. Kaufman (again) then asks Sartwell this question: “Do you believe that Rorty read Wittgenstein correctly?” And Sartwell answers: “Yes and no. He read him tendentiously.” Sartwell continued:

“[Rorty’s] basic premise was not to get Wittgenstein right; but to annex him for his own project.”

Yet isn’t that what many — or even most — philosophers have done when they’ve discussed the works of other philosophers?

All the above raises this question:

Is there such a thing as Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein?

Or is Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein simply Sartwell’s (or add some other name here) Wittgenstein? And, controversially, if the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was correct when he stated that “there is no outside-text” (or, perhaps better expressed by other theorists, authorial intent is irrelevant when it comes to what we can get from texts), then perhaps it doesn’t really matter what Wittgenstein really meant! (Of course Derrida’s odd utterance about texts has itself been interpreted in multiple ways.)

A more particular example of the history of the Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry (if not Wittgenstein worship) can be found in the case of the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke.

The Case of Saul Kripke

This pressure to respect — or even worship — Wittgenstein was obliquely commented on by Saul Kripke (1940–2022).

Kripke was honest enough to admit (in the video ‘Wittgenstein and Kripkenstein’) that his initial interest in Wittgenstein was solely down to who taught him at university when he was a student. (He mentions “three faculty members”.) Kripke also said that he didn’t at first see the importance of Wittgenstein (particularly, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations). Indeed he didn’t “develop [his] own take on what [Wittgenstein] was doing until 1962 and 1963”. (Then again, Kripke was still only 22 in 1962!)

More relevantly, the very neologism, Kripkenstein, was coined to express the idea (or feeling) that Kripke got Wittgenstein wrong! (This was particularly in reference to the issues of rule-following and the Private Language Argument.)

Kripke obviously denied that he “didn’t understand Wittgenstein at all”. Indeed Kripke backed this up when he says that “it’s hard for anyone to claim that he or she has got the right understanding of Wittgenstein”…

So why is that?

Kripke continued by saying that

“both the early and late Wittgenstein writes in some style which invites one to wonder what it really means”.

More surprisingly, Kripke then said that Wittgenstein’s work “may be more like continental philosophy than analytic philosophy”. However, it’s still the case that Wittgenstein is “mostly thought to be an analytic philosopher anyway”.

The interviewer of Kripke herself picked up on Wittgenstein’s obscure style of writing. She put forward the possibility that perhaps Wittgenstein wrote in that style “on purpose in order to get readers to think on their own terms”. (This has also often been said about Jacques Derrida — see my ‘Derrida’s Obscure Style of Writing: A Philosophical Critique’.) Kripke responded by saying: “Well, yes, that’s what he says.” Kripke then agreed that Wittgenstein wanted to “encourage readers to think for themselves”.

More importantly, Kripke argued that Wittgenstein didn’t “state theses in philosophy, since everyone would agree to them”. In other words, Wittgenstein didn’t want agreement.

The History of the Wittgenstein Industry

Those who use Facebook will be familiar with the endless quotes (in the guise of memes) from people like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, etc. on every subject under the sun. Even pretty banal words from these people are turned into memes which are then spread like confetti around Facebook…

Perhaps something similar is (or was) true of Wittgenstein.

Historically, some of Wittgenstein’s early followers treated Wittgenstein’s every off-the-cuff comment as a nugget of pure gold. And then they quoted these comments verbatim to their students, fellow academics and friends. Indeed, according to Julian Baggini, “[a]colytes at Cambridge would even mimic Wittgenstein’s mannerisms and ways of speaking” (see here). Moreover, according to Timothy Williamson (see here), philosophers were scared of criticising Wittgenstein and his work because his cultish followers would respond to such criticisms with anger and aggression.

All that said, we really need to go back to the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to trace the roots of the Wittgenstein Industry.

Russell once stated that Wittgenstein was “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius”. Yet that was despite Russell admitting that he didn’t understand Wittgenstein! More precisely, Russell wrote (in 1913) the following:

“I couldn’t understand his objection — in fact he was very inarticulate — but I felt in my bones that he must be right. I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”

So exactly why did Russell believe that Wittgenstein “must be right” at the very same time as admitting that he “couldn’t understand his objection”? The following is Professor Bejamin Murphy’s neat take on this matter:

“That Wittgenstein’s mysterious charisma disabled a philosopher and logician as brilliant as Russell was among the first of its baleful effects, and Russell did in fact largely abandon logic at that moment. For a while, instead, he concentrated on spreading the Wittgenstein miasma, and his admiration turned Wittgenstein into an intellectual superstar. Ever since, Wittgenstein has been more of a cult than an argument, an irrationalist movement in a supposedly rational discipline. Like Russell, Wittgenstein’s followers know he is right; the only difficulty is knowing what he meant.”

Now let’s jump forward to the 1980s.

Sartwell (again) pointed out that Wittgenstein worship was still prevalent in the 1980s. So that’s some 40 years or more after Wittgenstein worship had first kicked in (if within small circles). Sartwell mentioned Cora Diamond, who was teaching at the university he was a student at. Sartwell stated that “it felt like a cult” at the time… And that’s exactly something that the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle (also an admirer of Wittgenstein) noted some 30 or more years before the 1980s! (Read Ryle’s article ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’ from 1951, written in the year Wittgenstein died.)

Conclusion: In Defence of Wittgenstein

Of course contemporary Wittgensteinians (as well as Wittgenstein’s defenders) will explain the appeal of Wittgenstein, rationalise why many people don’t get him (as well as why many people have spent so much time arguing about what he means) and even justify the existence of the Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry itself.

So this is how one fan (a Steve Tolley) of Wittgenstein characteristically sums up the critics of Wittgenstein. He does so with a quote from… Wittgenstein:

“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

Another Wittgensteinian (a Jim Michmerhuizen) sums up both the critics and fans of Wittgenstein in the following way:

“I get the impression, surveying the answers to this question so far, that most of the respondents fall into one of two classes:

those who are looking for answers

those who are looking for questions

People in the first group appear to assume that Wittgenstein’s importance must be measured by the correctness of his answers. Invariably, these people are horribly disappointed. People of the second class, discovering that Wittgenstein asks far more questions than he answers, are generally ecstatic. I am one of the these.

No one since Socrates has probed his interlocutors as deeply, precisely, and empathetically as Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

Of course there must be at least some consensus on Wittgenstein’s writings. For example, almost everyone agrees that there are “two Wittgensteins”… or do they? (See this article, which has the words “Wittgenstein’s two philosophies are not in conflict; they are complementary” within it.)

So it can’t entirely be a chaotic free-for-all when it comes to Wittgenstein’s words. That said, the problem readers have is wading through the mountains of interpretation — and the heaps of outrage and anger those interpretations bring about — in order to get close to at least some form of consensus. That said, if one is a True Wittgensteinian, then consensus will be the last thing one desires.

Finally, it must now be said that I too have a high regard for much of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. (I’ve written many essays on Wittgenstein — see here.) The problem (if it is a problem) here is that what I’ve gained from Wittgenstein might well have been a result of my misinterpretations of him! (What I’ve gained might also have been partly down to how I’ve unconsciously added to Wittgenstein without even realising it.) That said, if what Derrida and others claimed above is correct (i.e., that “there is no outside text” and/or that authorial intent doesn’t matter), then who cares! That is, who cares if I have or haven’t got Wittgenstein right. Whatever the case is, I’ve still gained something from the Austrian philosopher.

Physicist Steven Weinberg Defended Reductionism: Mary Midgley and Gerald Edelman Attacked It

Philosopher Mary Midgley once asked this question: “How will the language of physics convey the meaning of the sentence ‘George was allowed home from prison at last on Saturday’?” Steven Weinberg replied: “This criticism would strike home if there were physicists who were trying to use physics for such a purpose, but I don’t know of any.” Biologist and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman stated: “A person is not explainable in molecular, field-theoretical, or physiological terms alone.”… So who has actually claimed that a person is explainable in these ways alone?

Right: Mary Midgley and Gerald Edelman

“A reductionist analysis could decompose the words into their individual letters, the letters into the chemical constituents making up the black ink on white paper [] it would not tell you about the meaning of the letters combined as words, sentences, and paragraphs.”

— The English neuroscientist and science spokesman for the Socialist Workers Party Steven Rose (1938-) stating something that literally no one would ever attempt to do. (See source of quote here.)

************************************

(i) Introduction 

(ii) Mary Midgley on Reductive Megalomania

(iii) Gerald Edelman on Silly Reductionism

(iv) Steven Weinberg on Persons and Consciousness

(v) Jackson, Chalmers and Weinberg on Physical Entailment

Steven Weinberg (1933 — 2021) was an American theoretical physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions (along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) to the unification of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. His work on elementary particles and physical cosmology earned him many awards and prizes, including the 1991 National Medal of Science.

Weinberg was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Britain’s Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Weinberg also served as president of the Philosophical Society of Texas, a consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress. Weinberg received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. This society stated that he was “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today”.

A younger Steven Weinberg.

Most of Steven Weinberg’s words in the following essay can be found in his article ‘Reductionism Redux’, which was originally published in The New York Review in 1995. This article itself can be found in Weinberg’s book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (2001).

Mary Midgley on Reductive Megalomania

A younger Mary Midgley.

In his book Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, Steven Weinberg discussed the British philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018) and her strong stance against reductionism. Weinberg primarily responded to Mary Midgley’s words as they can be found in her article ‘Reductive Megalomania’, which itself appears in the book, Nature’s Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision.

Mary Midgley asked the following questions:

“‘What, for instance, about a factual statement like ‘George was allowed home from prison at last on Saturday?’ How will the language of physics convey the meaning of ‘Sunday’? or ‘home’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘prison’? or ‘at last’? or even ‘George’?’”

Weinberg responded to this passage by saying that

“[t]his criticism would strike home if there were physicists who were trying to use physics for such a purpose, but I don’t know of any”.

Indeed one must try and give Midgley the benefit of the doubt here and assume that she must have been discussing (as it were) possible reductionism. Thus, perhaps Midgley simply meant that reductionism could go down this rabbit hole if we (or if scientists) weren’t careful. So perhaps she wasn’t actually claiming that any physicists have attempted to reduce statements like “George was allowed home from prison at last on Saturday” to physics — yet she still believed that this could be the case if we don’t watch out.

As it is, it can be doubted that this last interpretation is correct. Why is that? It’s because this is precisely how many self-styled anti-reductionists do see reductionism — with its (to use E.O. Wilson’s words) “hissing suffix”.

Weinberg didn’t go into much philosophical and/or scientific detail about Midgley’s words. So I’ll need to add some details myself.

Firstly, no physicist would ever even attempt to reduce the sentence “George was allowed home from prison at last on Saturday” (or even the referents of any of the words within it) to physics because that sentence and its contents simply aren’t in the domain of physics. (Mary Midgley herself didn’t explain why she believed that some — or any — physicists would want to reduce that sentence to physics.)

That last statement about not reducing “George was allowed home from prison at last on Saturday?” to physics isn’t an expression of what anti-reductionists would warn reductionists against. No physicist himself would deem this area to be the domain of physics. Indeed the very idea of reducing the event (let alone the previous sentence) of George being let out of prison, George himself, a prison, Saturday, etc. to physics seems ridiculous.

Weinberg himself spots the problem with Midgley’s position or at least what her position can lead to or what it may imply. Although he didn’t state that Midgley held this position herself, Weinberg did claim that

“many of our fellow citizens think that George behaves the way he does because he has a soul that is governed by laws quite unrelated to those that govern particles or thunderstorms”.

What now needs to be said is that many non-religious philosophers and laypersons also take this position without also believing in a soul (at least as the soul is seen in various religions). Arguably, all (or at least most) anti-physicalists do take the position expressed by Weinberg directly above. However, in order to see that all the reader needs to do is take out the word “soul” and substitute it with the word “mind”, “consciousness” or “person”.

[In a few moments it will be seen that Gerald Edelman did indeed use the word “soul” in his article, ‘Memory and the Individual Soul: Against Silly Reductionism’.]

To get back to Mary Midgley.

So who, exactly, was Midgley arguing against and warning us about?

Perhaps it was the English molecular biologist and neuroscientist Francis Crick (1916–2004).

More accurately, perhaps it was a very-well-known passage from Crick which has been quoted innumerable times (nearly always negatively or critically). In fact, if readers Google the passage, there are 19 pages of links (with 10 entries on each page — that’s 190 separate links) to papers, articles, essays, books, etc. which fully quote Crick’s words (see here).

That infamous passage can be found in Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. So here goes:

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

And, guess what, Mary Midgley did indeed refer (more than once) to this passage from Crick! For example, she did so in her book Are You an Illusion?. (See also her references to it in the Guardian, New York Times and Philosophy Now — see here, here and here.)

I myself have quoted this passage twice (in two essays) in recent months and other times over the years. (See my ‘Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism’.)

So this passage was worth quoting again simply because I suspect that it is the main — perhaps exclusive — source of what many anti-reductionists take reductionism to be (or, at the very least, what they believe it can be).

However, to add something new here (i.e., something not in my previous essay on Crick), it can be said that even in those infamous words above, Crick isn’t literally advising reducing “‘you’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will” to the brain, neurons, biochemistry or to anything else — at least not explicitly.

But, firstly, it must be said that Crick’s phrase “no more than” is problematic. It is vague. And it may well be simply metaphorical or rhetorical too.

More relevantly to the issue of reductionism.

Stating that “x is no more than y” isn’t also an explicit claim that x can be reduced to y. (See final section on physical entailment.) It can mean this in that in some cases a given x could be reduced to y. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. That is, x may be no more than y even though it would still be impossible to (fully) reduce x to y. (Perhaps for reasons of complexity, the difficulties of “inter-theoretic” reduction, the clash of concepts from different disciplines, etc.)

Steven Weinberg also focusses on Francis Crick’s fellow biologist and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman and his now widely-known stance against what he called “silly reductionism”.

Gerald Edelman on Silly Reductionism

A younger Gerald Edelman

Gerald Edleman’s following words also appear in the same book as Midgley’s (i.e., in Nature’s Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision). His article is called ‘Memory and the Individual Soul: Against Silly Reductionism’.

Steven Weinberg quoted Gerald Edelman putting his general position against the

“kind of reductionism that doomed the thinkers of the Enlightenment is confuted by evidence that has emerged both from modern neuroscience and from modern physics”.

It can be doubted that were many scientists and philosophers in the 20th century — or even in the 19th century — who believed the kinds of things Gerald Edelman stated that they believed. (I’m willing to be contradicted on that because you can always find extreme or silly positions — on literally any subject — if one looks hard enough for them.)

In any case, Edelman continued:

“‘[A] person is not explainable in molecular, field-theoretical, or physiological terms alone. To reduce a theory of an individual’s behavior to a theory of molecular interactions is simply silly. [] Even given the success of reductionism in physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, it nonetheless becomes silly reductionism when it is applied exclusively to the matter of the mind.’”

Now for a simple question:

Has any reductionist (or person deemed to be a reductionist) ever claimed that a person — yes, person — is “explainable in molecular, field-theoretical, or physiological terms alone”?

… Other than, say, Francis Crick (as already discussed)?

More specifically, since when has any scientist who deals with molecular chemistry, field theory or physiology ever taken persons to be their subject matter?

So let’s concentrate on two important words used by Edleman: “person” and “alone”.

Personhood (or the nature of a person) is a philosophical subject and term which, at the most, has been covered by social scientists.

What’s more, even if a field theorist, chemist or physiologist did tackle the nature and status of a person, would he or she claim that field theory, chemistry or physiology (to use Edleman’s word) “alone” would provide a complete explanation of such a thing?

Like Weinberg, I personally haven’t come across any field theorist, chemist or physiologist who’s made such claims…

So perhaps it has been others — i.e., people who aren’t natural scientists — who’ve made these claims. Perhaps, say, philosophers or scientists of other disciplines have done so. This would mean that such philosophers and/or scientists have used the data of field theory, chemistry and physiology to advance their claims that persons are (literally) fields or chemical and/or physiological mechanisms alone…

Yet even this can be doubted because it would entail a literal identity between a given person and his fields or his chemicals and/or physiological mechanisms.

Weinberg himself goes into detail on Edelman’s position here:

“When Edelman says that a person cannot be reduced to molecular interactions, is he saying anything different (except in degree) than a botanist or a meteorologist who says that a rose or a thunderstorm cannot be reduced to molecular interactions?”

So why is such a reduction of a rose or a thunderstorm (to put it modally and strongly) impossible?

Well, Weinberg goes on to say that

“[i]t may or may not be silly to pursue reductionist programs of research on complicated systems that are strongly conditioned by history, like brains or roses or thunderstorms”.

This means that the complexity of a given system itself can’t be fully explained in the language of atoms, particles, forces and fundamental laws, and neither can the contingencies of its history.

More relevantly, what isn’t silly is the

“perspective [] provided by reductionism, that apart from historical accidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the fundamental principles of physics”.

So was all this a case of Edleman tilting at windmills?

And was Edelman doing so simply to prove that he wasn’t a boneheaded reductionist? And if Edleman did want to prove that, then why did he do so?…

Perhaps Edelman did so because reductionism was precisely what he himself had previously been accused of on a few occasions! (This was before he was seen as being an anti-reductionist — see here, here and here.)

Interestingly enough, Steven Weinberg himself — just like Edelman — did appear to offer a single exception to his general reductionism: the human person. Or more specifically: consciousness.

Steven Weinberg on Persons and Consciousness

Take this passage from Weinberg:

“But it seems to me that [Peter] Atkins is not sufficiently sensitive to the problems surrounding consciousness. I don’t see how anyone but George will ever know how it feels to be George.”

It’s not clear if how it feels to be George could ever be the subject of any reduction. One important reason for that is that it’s not even clear what phrases like “how it feels for George” mean.

In any case, there have been many philosophers (if not scientists) who’re both naturalists and physicalists and who also fully accept the first-person perspective on things. (The philosopher Owen Flanagan is a very good example of this. See my ‘Yes, Thomas Nagel, x can’t know what it’s like to be y’.) They also accept that first-person perspectives can’t be reduced. That said, they also believe that this fact (if fact is the right word here) most certainly doesn’t work against either physicalism or naturalism.

So do self-styled reductionists also accept all this?…

Prima facie, it’s not entirely clear that Steven Weinberg himself ruled out a reduction of consciousness or the human person to physics because he did continue with the following words:

“On the other hand, I can readily believe that at least in principle we will one day be able to explain all of George’s behavior reductively, including what he says about how he feels, and that consciousness will be one of the emergent higher-level concepts appearing in this explanation.”

This seems to be Weinberg putting Daniel Dennett’s heterophenomenological position (see ‘Heterophenomenology’). This isn’t to say that Weinberg knew about Dennett’s position. However, it is very similar to it.

It would be best, then, to split the passage above into two parts.

The first part is Weinberg’s advocacy of heterophenomenology:

“I can readily believe that at least in principle we will one day be able to explain all of George’s behavior reductively, including what he says about how he feels [].”

But then Weinberg seems to go beyond Dennett when he concluded:

“[C]onsciousness will be one of the emergent higher-level concepts appearing in this explanation.”

To Dennett, a scientist or philosopher can — and should — happily analyse what George says about “how he feels”. He can even analyse George’s own personal — and perhaps philosophical — words about his own consciousness and mind. That said, the scientific or philosophical heterophenomenologist still won’t be analysing George’s actual feelings, consciousness and mind: he’ll be analysing what George says about these things. (Some people interpret Dennett as holding the position that what George, heterophenomenologists and scientists say about x actually is x.)

All that said, would Dennett also accept (as Weinberg did) that consciousness is (to use Weinberg’s words) “one of the emergent higher-level concepts”? Indeed does Dennett accept consciousness at all?…

Well, Dennett both does and does not accept consciousness. That’s primarily because it all depends on how he — and others — define the term “consciousness”.

What’s more, there’s a big difference between “emergent higher-level concepts” and emergent higher-level… things. That is, the concept [consciousness] may well be useful. However, consciousness may still not be a thing or even a process (i.e., depending on definitions).

To Dennett (if not to Weinberg), consciousness isn’t anything above and beyond (to use Weinberg’s own words) “George’s behavior [and] what he says about how he feels”. (Saying things is a form of behaviour.) More accurately, consciousness isn’t above and beyond anything heterophenomenologists, scientists and/or philosophers could glean from George’s bodily behaviour, history and environment, his verbal statements, his brain and body, etc.

Jackson, Chalmers and Weinberg on Physical Entailment

The philosopher Frank Jackson’s position is also fairly close to Steven Weinberg’s, at least as it’s advanced in the following:

“But it is quite another question whether they must hold that θ a priori entails everything about our psychology, including its phenomenal side, and so quite another question whether they must hold that it is in principle possible to deduce from the full physical story alone what it is like to see red or smell a rose — the key assumption in the knowledge argument that materialism leaves out qualia.”

Frank Jackson’s first clause above (i.e., “that θ a priori entails everything about our psychology”) expresses a position which is similar to Weinberg’s. Yet, more concretely, Weinberg didn’t also believe (as we’ve seen with the discussion about George) “that it is in principle possible to deduce from the full physical story alone […] what it is like to see red or smell a rose”.

Thus, here we have a clash (or simply a difference) between entailment and deduction. More clearly, the physical may entail (to put it grandly) everything in the sense that without the physical (as well as everything about the physical) there would be no feels or (I dare say) qualia. However, from our current — and perhaps future — knowledge of the physical, we still can’t know everything.

[It may be questioned whether there can be such a thing as physical entailment for the simple reason that entailment is usually a logical term used exclusively about statements/propositions, symbols, equations, etc.]

Weinberg himself expressed this position (though he didn’t discuss consciousness or persons) in the following passage:

“Each science deals with nature on its own terms because each science finds something else in nature that is interesting.”

But he then continued:

“Nevertheless, there is a sense that the principles of statistical mechanics are what they are because of the properties of the particles out of which bodies are composed.”

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) also made a distinction between entailment and deduction. (He didn’t use the word “deduction”.) He wrote:

“I am making the much weaker claim that high-level facts are entailed by all the microphysical facts (perhaps along with microphysical laws).”

These “high-level facts” (or Weinberg’s “emergent higher-level concepts”) aren’t themselves “microphysical facts”. They are entailed by the microphysical facts. This means two things:

(1) Without x’s microphysical facts, there would be no high-level facts when it comes to x.

(2) x’s microphysical facts (along with their entailments) alone don’t tell us everything. (They don’t, in this case, tell us about x’s high-level facts.)

There’s still a slight divergence in terminology here.

Whereas Weinberg uses the (philosophical) term “emergent”, Chalmers uses the term “supervene”. But that’s not an immediate problem. It can now be said that Weinberg’s “emergent higher-level concepts” supervene on the lower-level microphysical facts…

Yet there’s still one problem here which has already been mentioned.

Weinberg’s concepts can’t supervene on anything (except in a vague or metaphorical sense). Only things, conditions, properties, etc. can do so. In any case, it’s clear that Chalmers himself wasn’t discussing concepts in the words quoted above. He was discussing higher-level “properties, facts and laws”. So concepts emerging at a higher level is very different to things emerging at a higher level. Indeed higher-level concepts can (as it were) emerge without any actual physical emergence.

So it’s clear that Weinberg’s words “emergent higher-level concepts” are metaphorical (at least the word “emergent” is). Indeed, elsewhere Weinberg concedes this when he tells us that “new concepts ‘emerge’ when we deal with fluids or many-body systems”. Weinberg puts scare quotes around the word “emerge”. This means that when, say, things get complex, then new concepts may — or will — emerge. That is, such new concepts may be required to understand and explain things. However, that complexity may not have also resulted in any genuine physical emergence.

Why The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper Gave Up on String Theory

Sheldon Cooper (of The Big Bang Theory) sorrowfully said that he’d “devoted the prime of [his] life to string theory” initially because it “seemed so elegant at the time”. He then came to “realize [that he] was just a simple country boy seduced by a big city theory with variables in all the right places”.

This piece is about the fictional character Sheldon Cooper (yes, he’s got his own Wikipedia page!) and his farewell to string theory. More particularly, it’s based on episode 20 of series 7 of The Big Bang Theory, ‘The Relationship Diremption’, in which Sheldon experiences a reverse Damascene conversion.

The character Sheldon Cooper is (or was) a theoretical physicist who studied at The California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He also studied for a year at the University of Keighley’s renowned Cooking and Media Studies Department in the United Kingdom’s Republic of Yorkshire…

So, I suppose, this is just a bit of fun.

However, I still agree with the “software architect” and prolific contributor to Quora, Viktor T. Toth, who stated the following:

“[T]his sitcom does a better job in some ways than many popular science documentaries that I have seen. So, while ‘accurate’ is not the word I would use, Sheldon’s description is not nonsense. [] One of the reasons why I like The Big Bang Theory is that it does not disrespect the science that it mocks.”

Sheldon Cooper and String Theory

Sheldon Cooper had been committed to string theory since he was a young teenager (or, perhaps, since he was a foetus?) and remained committed to it during 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory. The character Leonard Hofstadter himself said (in the episode featured here) that Sheldon had been working on string theory “for the last twenty years”. That would take Sheldon back to 1994, when he was only 14. (Despite being a lowly experimental physicist and Sheldon’s best friend, Hofstadter could make people literally disappear, turn treacle into pure gold and reverse time in his bathroom.)

Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter

Of course it needs to be said from the very start that Sheldon Cooper (or a real flesh-and-blood equivalent) being unhappy with his own research into string theory isn’t itself an absolute indictment of the theory. After all, if science is a communal activity, then string theory must also be a communal activity. Thus, one single individual giving up on string theory shouldn’t count for much — even if that individual is a self-proclaimed genius.

That said, not only Sheldon Cooper was unhappy with string theory back in 2014. Many physicists — including several Nobel prize winners — had already argued that string theory is a scientific dead-end. Yet, here again (i.e., as with Sheldon-the-individual-physicist), it’s not the case that simply because some — or even many — physicists are unhappy with string theory, then that must also mean that it really is a dead-end.

[Note: M-theory isn’t mentioned in this episode. However, a theoretical physicist working in 2014 would certainly have known about it. Indeed Sheldon himself refers to things which seem to be taken straight from M-theory, which dates back to 1995.]

Sheldon Cooper’s New Position on String Theory

Sheldon Cooper stated his new position (i.e., in 2014) on string theory in the following way:

“All right. I’ve devoted the prime of my life to string theory and its quest for the compactification of extra dimensions. I’ve got nothing to show for it, and I feel like a fool.”

He continued:

“I know. As hard as this is, I have to move on. I can’t keep postulating multidimensional entities and get nothing in return. I have needs, too.”

[For those nerds who’re interested in the “compactification of extra dimensions” and “multidimensional entities”, see here and here.]

Sheldon then gave a retrospective account of his youthful conversion to string theory:

“[String theory] seemed so elegant at the time, but now I realize I was just a simple country boy seduced by a big city theory with variables in all the right places.”

This chimes in with what many physicists themselves have stated over the last couple of decades.

Sociologically, it was indeed the case that in the 1980s (although Sheldon himself wasn’t born until 1980) many talented young physicists were encouraged (by their professors and teachers) to take up string theory.

Barry Kripke and Sheldon Cooper

Interestingly and kinda on the same theme, Sheldon’s rival, Barry Kripke, classed himself (in the same episode) as a “stwing pwagmatist”. What on earth is that? Kripke explained:

“I say I’m gonna pwove something that cannot be pwoved, I appwy for gwant money, and then I spend it on wiquor and bwoads.”

To which Sheldon responded:

“Do you think he is right? Am I wasting my life on a theory which can never be proven?”

All this happened largely as a result of the monumental claims and grand promises of string theory.

And now those formerly-young physicists are middle-aged (or older) tenured professors who’ve spent their entire professional lives devoted to string theory. (This is unlike Sheldon himself, who was about 33 — looking about 6 — in this 2014 episode.) So what else could these professors now do? And if they were to do something else, then would they still be able to pay their mortgages, go on as many holidays, etc?

Some of these issues can be found in Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. This book also contains a chapter called ‘How Do You Fight Sociology?’, which is relevant here. (This chapter’s title could be misread as being against sociology — it’s not.)

Lee Smolin on the Sociology of String Theory

Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics was written eight years before Sheldon’s own rejection of string theory in 2014.

In his blog post ‘Response to Criticism’, Smolin wrote the following:

“To discuss some sociological issues in contemporary academic science which I argue are slowing the progress of science, and to propose solutions to them.”

In The Problem With Physics itself and on string theory specifically, Smolin wrote:

“String theory is a powerful, well-motivated idea and deserves much of the work that has been devoted to it. [] The real question is not why we have expended so much energy on string theory but why we haven’t expended nearly enough on alternative approaches.”

It’s worth noting here that Smolin’s (as it were) sociological view of string theory isn’t original to him: it dates back to at least 1987. In that year, American theoretical physicist and string theorist David Gross made the following controversial comments (as quoted by Peter Woit — see later) about some of the reasons for the popularity of string theory:

“The most important [reason] is that there are no other good ideas around. That’s what gets most people into it. When people started to get interested in string theory they didn’t know anything about it. [] So I think the real reason why people have got attracted by it is because there is no other game in town. All other approaches of constructing grand unified theories, which were more conservative to begin with, and only gradually became more and more radical, have failed, and this game hasn’t failed yet.”

The theoretical physicist Peter Woit (in his book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law) also viewed the academic, sociological and intellectual hegemony of string theory as being bad news for the future of fundamental physics. And perhaps even more sociologically, he argued that string theory’s popularity was at least partly a result of the financial and political nature of academia. More importantly and narrowly, the hegemony of string theory was partly — or even mainly — down to the mad academic competition for scarce resources.

In addition, in his book The Road to Reality, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose had this to say:

“The often frantic competitiveness that this ease of communication engenders leads to bandwagon effects, where researchers fear to be left behind if they do not join in.”

Some readers may now be wondering if the “string theory revolution” was itself a Kuhnian paradigm shift. The same readers may also wonder if it will take another revolution to shift away from string theory. That said, these claims may include a too broad and vague use of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift. (Smolin himself discussed Kuhn on six different pages in The Problem With Physics.) And it will especially irk those physicists and philosophers who don’t accept this Kuhnian notion in the first place. Indeed it will also irk those string theorists who don’t see string theory as a paradigm shift at all. (String theory might well have been very important and also a huge advance in physics, yet still not have been a paradigm shift.)

In terms of Sheldon’s own history, psychology and sociology, his conversion to string theory was itself utterly contingent and based on happenstance.

Sheldon and the Emotional Appeal of String Theory

                                                                                                     God

In the episode ‘The Relationship Diremption’, Sheldon admitted that he “didn’t seek out string theory”. Instead, string theory “just hit [him] over the head one day”. In detail:

“A bully chased me through the school library and hit me over the head with the biggest book he could find.”

That book was on string theory.

Of course this biographical account is a joke… with an element of sociological and psychological truth.

Like many physicists, the fundamental and all-encompassing nature of string theory appealed to the young Sheldon. Indeed this is the kind of thing which drives many theoretical physicists. For example, take someone like Michio Kaku and his — to be rhetorical for a moment - obsession with finding a “theory of everything” (what Kaku calls “the God Equation”), which, like Sheldon, dates back to his childhood.

Sheldon himself expressed his position in his usual highfalutin and dismissive way in the following:

“You want me to give up string theory for something that’s less advanced? You know, why don’t you break up with Penny and start dating a brown bear?”

So clearly Sheldon was still (i.e., in this episode) having second thoughts about giving up string theory.

Many physicists — and commentators! — might have said (at least in 2014) that Sheldon made the wrong move. They might have argued that most worthy theoretical physicists still knew that string theory is the only feasible way of going beyond the overall framework of quantum field theory. Indeed they’d have gone further than that and also have argued that when it comes to a unified theory, there’ve been no other viable alternatives to string theory. Basically, then, they’ll have stated that there’s simply no alternative to string theory… In fact many string theorists, over the years, have stated precisely that!

Of course string theorists — who include several Nobel prize winners — have fought back against all the criticisms. Among other things, they’ve told us that string theory has led to many important breakthroughs in both mathematics and in physics.

Sheldon and Fowler’s Super-Asymmetry Theory

Amy Fowler Fowler and Sheldon Cooper

Perhaps the biggest joke at string theory’s expense (in The Big Bang Theory) is the story of Sheldon Cooper and Amy Fowler Fowler publishing a paper on what they called “super-asymmetry”. This theory was meant to be true of (or refer to) precisely nothing in the actual (or real) world, but which nonetheless won them a Nobel Prize.

Of course super-asymmetry doesn’t actually exist in physics. What’s more, super-asymmetry (even if real) wouldn’t — strictly speaking — be a purely string theory… theory. However, it would still be closely related to string theory.

All that said, the script writers of The Big Bang Theory did talk to their “science consultant”, Professor David Saltzberg. They requested that Saltzberg come up with a fictional theory which was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

This is how Don Lincoln (a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) put it:

“To begin with, there is no real theory called Super Asymmetry. However, there is a theory called supersymmetry, which is a very popular extension of the standard model of particle physics — our best current theory of subatomic matter. While there has been no experimental confirmation of supersymmetry — which proposes that every particle identified in the standard model has a supersymmetric partner — it is well enough regarded that there exist over 10,000 scientific papers on the topic. So, except for the poetic license on the name change, we’ll give them that.”

Dr. Saltzberg himself put it this way:

“Theoreticians love symmetrical equations, but the world around us is clearly asymmetrical. What theoretical physicists often do is create a theory with lots of symmetry, but then break it, to explain our world. [] The brilliance of Sheldon and Amy was to include asymmetry into their theory from the start.”

At the end of the series, Sheldon and Amy win the Nobel Prize (see here) for their super-asymmetry theory.

Final Note

It’s now worth stating that in 2017 (i.e., some 4 years after the episode featured in this piece) Sheldon Cooper still seemed to be flirting with string theory. (See series 11 episode 13, The Solo Oscillation.) For example, his renewed excitement about string theory occurred during a conversation with Penny.

In that conversation, Sheldon explained (in response to Penny’s questions) that there are no knots in more than four dimensions. (See the mathematics here.) So, instead, he thought of them as sheets or branes. This shows us a partly fictitious addition to string theory (partly because branes were first discussed as early as the 1980s), which rode alongside the many (still fictitious?) additions which have been constructed by real-life string theorists.