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The Wittgenstein Fallacy (J. Stanley)

In the comments section two posts down, my friend Aidan McGlynn cites Michael Dummett’s famous quote making what I’ve come to call the Wittgenstein Fallacy. As Aidan writes:

Does the push away from conservative careful publishing mark a change
in the attitudes held by philosophers, or is it rather a response to
external pressures placed upon them by current system for advancing
one’s career in philosophy?…Dummett
noted in the intro to ‘Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics’ that
Wittgenstein wouldn’t have fared too well in the current climate, given
his reluctance to publish anything he’d written.

The Wittgenstein Fallacy is the claim that the profession of philosophy as currently practiced is somehow flawed, because a modern day Wittgenstein would not receive recognition or employment.

Would a modern day Wittgenstein succeed in our times? Wittgenstein was a student of Bertrand Russell at the height of his philosophical powers and professional reputation in the field, right after the publication of the Principia Mathematica and before he started publishing popular works. As a graduate student at Cambridge University, he not only dazzled Russell, but also Moore. Previously, he also had greatly impressed Gottlob Frege. He then went off to war, during which he wrote a book. After the war, the book was published, and immediately had a tremendous influence on the next generation of leading younger philosophers (such as Frank Ramsey and the emerging Logical Positivists). A modern day Wittgenstein would be, say, a graduate student at Princeton in the 1980s under David Lewis and Saul Kripke. His letter of recommendation from Lewis would note that Lewis abandoned a nearly finished book manuscript because of his trenchant criticisms. He would also have an outside letter praising his genius from a philosopher not at Princeton, who was admired by the very best mathematical philosophers (perhaps George Boolos?). As a very young man, right after graduate school, he would have written an enormously influential book, one that deeply influenced some of the best of the subsequent generation of younger philosophers and was soon recognized as a philosophical classic. He would also be bad-tempered, rather self-important, and not a very responsible colleague. Is the claim really that a modern day Wittgenstein wouldn’t have tenure somewhere really quite respectable? There are various reasons why the Wittgenstein Fallacy is pernicious. It should be put to rest.

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18 responses to “The Wittgenstein Fallacy (J. Stanley)”

  1. OK, let's suppose Wittgenstein went on the job market in 1929 as he was finishing up his graduate work, using TLP as his dissertation. For his job talks during spring, 1929, he used "Some Remarks on Logical Form". He was examined on TLP by Moore and Russell, and granted the Ph.D. degree from Cambridge in June. We'll assume he had a very strong file, what with TLP and "RLF", and letters from Russell, Moore, Ramsey and Frege. However, most places were bothered by the gap from 1919 to 1929. "Granted he wrote a great book, but look–he's been out of the profession for a decade, teaching elementary school, working as a gardener, and as an architect!" And private phone calls to members of the Vienna Circle didn't provide too much reassurance: Apparently Wittgenstein could be very erratic, talking logic and philosophy one moment, and turning his back to read poetry the next. No one outside Cambridge was willing to take a chance on him, so he ended up staying on with a tenure-track appointment at Cambridge. It was a great place to be, but it was a bit embarrassing having to stay at his home department. Anyway, he started with degree in hand. So he comes up for his 4th year review in the Spring, 1933. Teaching looks fine. He has taught (what Cambridge considered to be) a full load–1 course per term. And he's even taken on an extra course–for mathematicians–during 1932-33. We won't get into his teaching reviews, except to say that they were mixed. As for research, he got RLF published in a good place (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society), though it was pretty short. Of course there's TLP, but that was his dissertation, and they were looking for a trajectory of new work beyond that. LW has been giving some presentations: The only one outside of Cambridge was a talk on generality and infinity in mathematics in July, 1929, to the Mind Association-Aristotelian Society. But he's also given a talk on ethics to the Heretics Club (November, 1929), a talk on the Foundations of Mathematics to the Trinity Mathematical Society (May, 1930), and a talk to the Cambridge Moral Science Club on Evidence for the Existence of Other Minds (January, 1930). Fortunately, G.E. Moore had been sitting in on all of his classes to this point, and though he can't exactly "follow" all of it, it strikes him as "quite important". LW gets by the 4th year review with a warning, that he needs to step up the publications. The next year LW's plan to keep teaching the extra class to the mathematicians gets changed. A week or so into the term he decides he needs to do something about publication, so he cancels that class–or rather, he tells most of the students to stop coming to class and he invites 5 to come to special sessions where he'll dictate his ideas to them, and they will write them down for him. He tells the dismissed students that they'll get a copy of the notes at the end of the year! Needless to say, this did not go down really well with them, but
    what could they do. So, starting in November LW began dictating 2-3 times a week for the rest of the year. At the end of the year he gets the department to print up 15 copies for him, bound in blue. Other faculty members raised some questions about the ethics of using students this way, but they were at least glad to have something in hand. LW's stuff goes out for tenure review in the summer of 1934. RLF is the only uncontroversial item included in the dossier. There is discussion about whether to include TLP, but that does not get included because it is simply his unrevised dissertation. There is also discussion about whether to include the Blue Book, and it ultimately gets included, with the explanation that he will be sending it out to publishers "soon". There is some debate about whom to choose as outside reviewers. Of course, Frege died 9 years ago, so he's out. Schlick is considered, though some have reservations about asking a European who is not familiar with the Anglo-American norms for writing letters of evaluation. Russell is no longer at Cambridge, so he is considered, though LW is no longer on good terms with him. In fact, when asked if there were any people he'd rather not have assess his case, LW already had used up his blackballs when he wrote "all of the philosophers at Oxford". This was unfortunate, because he could probably have gotten a pretty good letter from Ryle. In any case they finally asked Russell, Whitehead (who was now at Harvard and had, unbeknownst to them, become a Process philosopher), Susan Stebbing, Schlick, and Karl Popper, a hot-shot young philosopher who had just published "The Logic of Scientific Discovery."
    LW was turned down for tenure. He got mixed support from his own department, but the dean was unwilling to let TLP count for his case, since it was prior to his appointment. Apparently the letters were a problem too. Confidentiality precludes knowing much, but things seep out. Apparently Russell's letter included the line: "Wittgenstein…seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary." That was deadly. The contents of Whitehead's letter have never actually been decoded. Strong letters from Schlick and Stebbing would have probably outweighed Russell's,
    but then there was Popper's letter. Fortunately LW never knew Popper was asked to write a letter. LW's negative tenure decision was announced in early 1935. But he must have known which way the wind was blowing, since he began taking Russian lessons in 1934. In September of 1935 he visited the USSR to see if he could get work there doing something other than philosophy. He actually got 2 job offers to teach philosophy there (their standards were notoriously low), but he was sick of philosophy and turned them down. No other offers were forthcoming. He taught his Cambridge classes in 1935-36, finishing out his 7 years. LW went off to live alone in Norway in August, 1936. He died of hypochondria exacerbated by a bad conscience in 1937. (Actually, even if Cambridge had granted him tenure, it's doubtful he would have survived post-tenure review.)

  2. James,

    It's true that at many good philosophy departments in the United States, there is a rigorous vetting for tenure, where people make sure that everyone jumps through the appropriate hoops. But my claim was never that Wittgenstein would have gotten a job at a mid-rank philosophy department. Rightly or wrongly, there are a number of leading programs that are enamored with the idea of the genius whose work is too deep to publish (rightly, because I think good work is hard to do and there are certainly outstanding philosophers who have taken much longer to do it, and it would be a tragedy for the field if they had not received the opportunity; wrongly because the vast majority of geniuses in every discipline, including philosophy, have no problem producing a large body of work). Most philosophers who have received tenure at top departments in recent years have done so with vitaes thinner than a book and a subsequent article (much less one with the impact of the Tractatus), and in some cases far thinner. Nor am I convinced by your point that a tenure committee (especially one at a leading department) would discount the Tractatus. An outstanding *article* out of someone's dissertation that has had an impact can push someone through until full professor, as long as the person as the right je ne sais quoi about them (and of course Wittgenstein had that). Finally, the fact is that the profile that many top departments look for is quite different than that of a professionalized regular contributor to the journals. The same was true in Wittgenstein's time. The very same reasons that led him to be able to land a coveted job at Cambridge would land him a coveted job today. In fact, given the emphasis on *underpublishing* in some leading departments, there is reason to think that Wittgenstein may have published too much too early for a number of top jobs in today's market.

    It's true that Wittgenstein's professional career was interrupted by World War I. I assume that if a similar event happened today, where many philosophers went off to war, departments would be understanding about the disruption it caused in people's personal lives. It would be all the more impressive to a tenure committee that Wittgenstein managed to write an outstanding book during that period.

  3. I'm of two minds about this topic. On the one hand, I think Jason is clearly right that someone like Wittgenstein *could* get a very good job in today's market and that, at the right sort of institution, that person could even get tenure. Without naming any names, I bet that many of us could even give lists of people who, it seems, have had just such a career trajectory in recent years.

    That being said, I think the following scenario is equally likely. Our Psudo-Wittgenstein goes on the market in a year in which the relevant top departments don't happen to be hiring in his area (maybe they're all looking in ancient or in medieval). Since his letters are quite impressive, he does get a job, but it's at a somewhat less elite school with a more normal tenure process. When he comes up for tenure, his dean is inclined to heavily discount his one book (since it's just his dissertation) and several of his outside reviewers have some negative things to say about his work (e.g., as in James Klagge's comments). Further, although many of his graduate students think he's brilliant, the accounting majors in his introduction to philosophy classes find him quite impenetrable. Locally, the case is viewed by the administration as an *obvious* tenure denial. (And, of course, once our Psudo-Wittgenstein been tainted by a tenure denial at a mid-level university, his chances of getting past the university committees at any elite institution go down dramatically.)

    Now maybe it's just pessimism on my part, but this scenario seems at least as likely as the more optimistic scenario sketched by Jason.

  4. Can you imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein kowtowing to the lackeys who run today's universities? (I know if I had his money I would have told a few to get lost a long time ago.) Would he be willing to treat his students as customers- even the ones who are only using his courses as stepping-stones to diplomas? (It is said that no one dared walk into his classroom once he started his lecture.) Teach from the same textbook as every other philosophy instructor? Water down his subject matter so that the answers to his test questions can be memorized beforehand? (When I’m feeling intrepid, I relate to my test-anxious charges his maxim that to do philosophy “one must be willing to descend into the primeval (conceptual) chaos and feel comfortable there.”) And let’s not even get started with the eccentricities. The hair-pulling incident alone would have gotten him blacklisted. (Wanna have some fun? Let’s set up a fictional account for Professor Wittgenstein at Rate Your Professor and post some reviews of his courses. The malcontent running the site deserves to be messed with anyway.) Maybe he would have been given a post teaching graduate students by some well-connected fan of his work- with the proviso that he not stoke the fire during colloquia. Then again, how many of today’s busy professionals would be willing to tolerate unannounced, late-night visits by a supposedly suicidal graduate student? (I always thought he was just twisting Russell’s arm. And then there's my personal favorite: chafing at Mrs. Moore's insistence that her husband not spend more than 90 minutes philosophizing with him while convalescing- "he oughta die with his boots on.") In any event, Professor Dummett’s point is well taken: the capitalists ruin everything they put their greedy hands on.

  5. Just to be provocative: the suppressed premise of this discussion seems to be that because Wittgenstein *might* not have gotten tenure now that this counts against current profesional practices. But doesn't this depend on one's view of Wittgenstein and his merits? I would have thought so.

  6. Jason wrote:

    "the profile that many top departments look for is quite different than that of a professionalized regular contributor to the journals."

    "In fact, given the emphasis on *underpublishing* in some leading departments, there is reason to think that Wittgenstein may have published too much too early for a number of top jobs in today's market."

    Could you please elaborate, for the benefit of those of us who don't have inside knowledge about what happens in elite department hiring committees? In particular, how does that cohere with the pressure on graduate students to publish nowadays? Or does such pressure only apply to those who are likely to get hired by mid-rank (rather than elite) schools?

  7. i gotta say that this is a bizarre counterfactual that sheds little light on professional practices as they exist today. here's what i've heard: philosophy is very clique-ish, especially among the youngish metaphysicians and epistemologists, and there is a whole lot of stuff quickly produced on small problems-of-the-moment, mostly in M&E and often hashed out in phil review.

    i can't really think of a problem with the latter feature of the profession. maybe there are alternative ways things could be that are better than how things are. but what would that be? i guess one thing that would be nice is more professional acceptance of those who produce a few beautiful, thoughtful pieces of philosophy every few years. after it, it's *philosophy* and not science. (sorry to burst your bubble, paul b.) still, i don't think that the issue-of-the-moment business is really such a bad thing — lots of neat (and that's all they are: neat) papers get written on this stuff and it's fun to read them. and, most people who produce infrequent but marvelous papers are rewarded with good jobs and tenure.

    now, the former feature of the profession is really unfortunate. for, it tends to lead to graduate students from northeast universities – princeton, rutgers and nyu primarily – having a shot at employment that is better than their admittedly superior training would merit. why? well, because they all hang out together, they all invite each other to conferences and to give papers, they all date each other, etc. graduate students from arizona, michigan, texas, stanford and chapel hill (to name a few top 10 programs not in the northeast) simply don't get invited (and are neither financially nor politely able to tag along) to the innumerable little conferences and social events thrown by nyc-area ultraelite. this is not morally wrong. but the in-group dynamics and the social capital that comes from being a member of such a group can be a little bit tawdry. such is life, though.

    on the other hand, when the clique-ishness combines with the issue-of-the-moment feature of the profession, we might get problems: certain folks who are neither part of the clique nor work on the issue of the moment will be doubly threatened with getting frozen out of the important activities of the profession. alas.

    in the end, philosophy remains a pale male northeastern profession, with more women coming in but not nearly as many as a lot of other professions. and as far as people of color go… well…

    maybe the clique-ish stuff is just another manifestion of the old problems philosophy faces. or, it could be a product of an infantilization of the current generation of grad students and assitant/young associate professors so that even professional academics in their thirties still conceive of themselves as being in high school (after all, most of them have not since matriculating to day care ever left the warm bosom of some school or other).

    as far as what would have happened to wittgenstein? who the hell knows? here's a guess: he'd get hired at princeton, he'd be given tenure, he'd be a terrible teacher and a worse member of the philosophical community, he'd probably insult and abuse the administrative staff, and the department would hold on to him for dear life lest they lose a point in the leiter rankings.

  8. Hi Jason,

    I'd like to second Naomi's request for clarification on the notion of 'underpublishing'. What's the logic behind such an emphasis? (It's pretty opaque to an outsider like myself.)

  9. Dummett was presumably thinking of the UK job market. These days, it's more or less unthinkable that Wittgenstein would get a permanent academic position in the UK. No UK university can afford to give a permanent position today to someone who can't be submitted for the R.A.E. — that is, the (UK government funded) Higher Education Funding Council's "Research Assessment Exercise" — which requires at least 4 publications in the relevant 7-year period. As it would be said on any UK appointment committee today, Wittgenstein just "isn't RAE-able."

    So Dummett's empirical claim seems to me correct, at least about the UK. Still, I have my doubts about Dummett's evaluative claim. Even if people like Wittgenstein wouldn't get permanent jobs in the UK today, there may well be compensating benefits to a system that creates such a strong incentive to publish at least 4 publications every 7 years.

  10. Aidan and Naomi,

    One view of the matter is the following (in fact, it's one I think I share). It's a mistake to rush into print. We all have so much to read, that it is incumbant upon members of the profession to craft their work in such a way so they publish only their very best material, rather than partially finished thoughts. Just as there is an aesethetic component to mathematics, so there is an aesthetic component to philosophy. In mathematics, the goal is to produce elegant proofs, and in philosophy, the goal is to produce crafted, polished work. Pressure on graduate students to publish is unhealthy and detrimental to the profession, because graduate school is a time to learn how to turn unpolished thoughts into carefully constructed arguments. That is a process that takes years to learn (as it takes years to produce a good piece of philosophy — or so I find). So I do not encourage my graduate students to publish. I encourage them to learn their field comprehensively, develop an original view, and learn the necessity of rewriting the same paper 50 times.

    One reason to talk of "leading departments" in this connection is the following. My graduate students have a certain luxury; they are at Rutgers. If I was at another program that didn't have such a good track record placing students, I would have to give different advice. Unless you are at a small handful of departments, it is in your best interest to devote some of your graduate student career to publishing something. I wish the situation were different, because I do not think it is good for philosophers or philosophy to rush into print.

    But this wasn't what I was addressing in the comment. I was addressing another issue. There is a view (less and less common nowadays) that is associated with some followers of Wittgenstein. That view is that philosophy is so extraordinarily hard to do that virtually any publishing whatsoever is a sign of failure to recognize its profundity. My comment was specifically directed at proponents of this view. I wanted to suggest that by tenure time Wittgenstein would have published considerably more than those tempted by this view would consider credible for someone who was properly paralyzed by profundity.

  11. I'm willing to admit in the abstract that a slow-publishing "genius" might get tenure now at a top department. My reason for using the actual case of Wittgenstein and importing current standards into it is that it provides a discussably concrete possible world. My question is whether Wittgenstein–when he would have actually come up for tenure–would have been known to be a genius by enough external reviewers, plausibly chosen by his department, to get recommended for tenure. It is easy to look back on him 55 years after he died and say how influential his work has been. But what was its impact, even counting TLP, outside his own department in 1934? I think that's an interesting open question. Frege and Ramsey were dead; Russell was no longer enamoured; Schlick was enthused….
    For those interested in LW's actual circumstances, he had given up his share of the family fortune after WW1, and from then on lived only on his own earnings and occasional support from friends. Even so, he gave up his position after WW2 so he could write, without any visible means of support.
    (BTW, please note that the e-mail address given with my original posting was mis-punctuated.)

  12. James Klaage asks a reasonable question: what was the impact of Wittgenstein's work in 1934? We can begin (emphasize "begin") to get some idea of the answer in the following crude empirical manner. Search for "Wittgenstein" in the 25 philosophy journals in JSTOR, using a publication date of 1933 or earlier. You will find 49 articles and 14 reviews (2 of the Tractatus), of which 22 articles and 7 reviews appeared in Mind alone. These pieces were authored by a wide range of people, including Ramsey, Feigl, Russell, McTaggart, Wisdom, Ayer, C.I. Lewis, Broad, E. Nagel, Hook, and Blanshard, as well as many others whose names might be less familiar today but who were significant at the time. This seems to me to support the view that by 1933 the importance of the Tractatus was pretty widely recognized.

  13. Michael,

    Thanks very much for doing the detective work! That's a hugely impressive literature on a recently published book. Twenty two articles discussing it in the major philosophy journal in the field, only a few years after its publication, is a staggering amount. And as you point out, the major figures in professional philosophy both in the United States and Britain were responding to it (e.g. Lewis, Hook, Blanshard, Nagel, Feigl, Wisdom, Ayer!). Off the bat, the only books by then-young philosophers with even close to that sort of impact I can think of in the last 35 years are Kripke's *Naming and Necessity* and Chalmers's *The Conscious Mind* (there are probably a few others). But even in those illustrious cases, it's not clear that the works generated responses from such a broad swath of the leading lights of professional philosophy as the Tractatus did in its time. I think that clinches the case for the conclusion drawn by Stephen Hadley, namely Wittgenstein would "get hired at princeton, he'd be given tenure, he'd be a terrible teacher and a worse member of the philosophical community, he'd probably insult and abuse the administrative staff, and the department would hold on to him for dear life lest they lose a point in the leiter rankings."

  14. anonymous philosophy professor

    Jason wrote:

    "… it is incumbent upon members of the profession to craft their work in such a way so they publish only their very best material, rather than partially finished thoughts. … In mathematics, the goal is to produce elegant proofs, and in philosophy, the goal is to produce crafted, polished work"

    Let's see if I understand this: we should only publish our very best material; so people like Tim Williamson, who has lots of very good ideas and some very brilliant ones, he can only publish the very brilliant ideas? Someone with lots of bad ideas and a few mediocre ideas, she gets to publish the mediocre ones if they are sufficiently polished?

    Shouldn't good departments just try to hire people who publish a lot of good philosophy? It doesn't matter if it's their best stuff or their worst stuff, doesn't matter if they have polished it for years or written it sober or inebriated – good philosophers are people who produce a lot of good philosophy. There are many ways to do that. Someone who only writes something good once every 3 years is clearly not as good a philosopher as someone who writes something good every month.

  15. In response to the anonymous philosophy professor:

    I understood Jason to be articulating the idea not that out of all of their work, philosophers should only publish what is best, but rather that for each given piece of work, philosophers should only be content publishing it when it is the best that they can make it. If that's what he meant, then I agree with it. Ultimately, my goal is not to get something into print, but to get people to read it, appreciate it, and respond to it. Only a small proportion of what goes into print can generate a significant response, so the bar is clearly higher and it takes a long time to learn how to aim at it. I certainly think there are good to very good philosophers who don't set high enough standards for themselves, and could otherwise be outstanding.

    But on the other hand, I do think that there is another, perhaps less savory, reason that Jason did not mention, for the best students in the top graduate programs not to publish, even if they are ready. It is that junior hiring decisions by top departments of each other's students can sometimes be driven partly by hype, and hype requires lack of evidence. The more you publish, the higher the chance that someone can point to something or other in your work that they don't like, and the smaller the chance that your letter-writers can oversell the idea that your work will be much better by the time it is finished. That looks like an excellent pragmatic reason for a small number of students not to publish while in graduate school, but I don't think it reflects as well on the profession.

    Finally, on the comment, "Shouldn't departments just try to hire people who publish a lot of good philosophy?" One clear feature of the profession seems to be that given two candidates, each of whom has produced a lot of good work, but one has produced more good work and also some quite mediocre or even poor work, many people will prefer the one with less but more consistent work. If the goal is to hire philosophers who produce more good work, then this looks irrational. But if it reflects a lack of judgment on the more prolific philosopher's part, then perhaps it makes sense. I'm not sure what I think.

  16. As usual, wonderful topic Jason! Thanks for starting it. And thanks to James Klagge for contributing the first comment. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

    Before I prepared my comment, I searched this thread with the keyword "citation". It was not to be found (Note 1). So my comment (or question) will be this: A and B are two equally productive philosophers, vis-a-vis their publication record. (Assume that this can be objectively decided. We can even assume that they've published in the same journals at about the same times articles of almost equal word count.) Rather than comparing them on the number of their publications, don't you think they should be compared on the basis of *good* (Note 2) citations they received for their work? (e.g., as reported in Citation Indices)

    Note 1. I must say that reviews of LW's work by fine philosophers has been mentioned by Michael Kremer. This is obviously analogous to a citation. However unless one reads these reviews, it is not clear whether the they are all positive; see my next note.

    Note 2. There are good citations and bad citations. You can cause a lot of citations on behalf of Lenin by showing what a bad philosophy book he once wrote.

  17. Varol Akman,
    Actually I only mentioned two reviews of LW's work. The rest were standard citations — that is articles and reviews of other people's work mentioning LW. Some of these articles were direct responses to the Tractatus, others mentioned it in passing. I did not do a careful study!

  18. Varol,

    Lenin's philosophy book wasn't discussed or cited in articles by Ramsey, Feigl, Russell, McTaggart, Wisdom, Ayer, C.I. Lewis, Broad, E. Nagel, Hook, and Blanshard! Well, maybe Hook. But not the rest!

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