A World of Questions & Answers—Part IV
The Fabric of the World
Introduction
Today’s somewhat more philosophical post, recapping and continuing our reflections on Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic, is intended to provide a bridge between our discussion so far (in “Questioning Truth” and in Parts I, II and III) on the one hand, and our discussion in forthcoming instalments of our current article, “A World of Questions and Answers.”
There, in the coming weeks, we will be going on to explore how Collingwood’s conceptions relate to the new epistemology E2, the dangers of rationalism, and the nature of explanation, along with the application of all this to the very practical business of understanding and creating change.
Brief though it is, and unavoidably abstract and synoptic, today’s instalment, pivotal to a full understanding of our subsequent discussion in this article, may well take a week to properly sink in before we start digging deeper.
As an experiment, you might want to try thinking about today’s concluding thoughts as you go about your daily business in the week ahead, both at work and outside.
If you would in the meantime like some further reading relating to the ‘bridge’ we provide today, you might want to see our earlier article in Change, “The Metaphysics of the Physical World.”
—The Editors
A World of Questions & Answers—Part IV: The Fabric of the World
The World as the Totality of What is the Case
Wittgenstein, in the two opening lines of his 1922 epoch-making philosophical treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, certainly seemed to be getting off to a promising start:
The world is everything that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
However, almost immediately after that promising beginning his argument started to go off the rails.
But Only a Question-and-Answer Complex Can be the Case or Not
Indeed it soon becomes clear, from our post-Collingwood perspective,1 that much of what follows after the first two promising lines of this youthful work (which Wittgenstein completed when he was 29, and from whose conclusions he soon resiled), cannot be quite right.2
For as we have seen, “what is the case,” what is true, can only be whatever is the right answer to any specific question that has been asked by someone, or could have been asked. Truth or falsehood applies not to propositions, statements, considered in themselves, but to the whole question-and-answer complex.
As we saw in Questioning Truth, for Collingwood,3 what is the case, what is meant in calling a statement “true,” is that the statement belongs to a question-and-answer complex “which as a whole is ‘true’ in the proper sense of the word.”4
Within any question-and-answer complex, the statement we call true “is an answer to a certain question” which we would “ordinarily call a sensible or intelligent question, not a silly one,” and it must be “the ‘right’ answer to that question.”5
We can only speak of “truth” at all as applying to the whole question-and-answer complex, where the answer must, moreover, be the right answer to the very specific question that is being asked by a particular questioner in a particular context. And it can only be considered the right answer insofar as it constitutes “a link, and a sound one,” in a whole chain of questions and answers, a particular inquiry taken as a whole.
What is more, Collingwood argued, both the question and the answer in any question-and-answer complex that is actually capable of being true or false as a whole, “had to be relevant or appropriate, had to ‘belong’ both to the whole and to the place it occupied in the whole,”6 which is to say the whole chain of questions and answers. Neither question nor answer can ever be considered outside of the specific context in which it is being asked.
But that is not all: Each such question, Collingwood insisted, “had to ‘arise’; there must be that about it whose absence we condemn when we refuse to answer a question on the ground that it ‘doesn’t arise’.”7
Relevance, like context, matters crucially in judging whether a statement is true or false. This is a far stricter, far more demanding criterion for truth than is applied in our usual ways of thinking.8
And as we saw previously, whether two statements contradict one another or not is impossible for anyone to judge without knowing the questions each was intended to answer, and the context in which those questions were asked by the particular questioner.
Acting Intelligently in a World of Questions and Answers
When we talk about “the world,” reality—what we are dealing with ‘out there’—we are indeed talking about the totality of facts, the totality of what is actually the case, the totality of what is true.
The world—in the sense of everything—is not only, as Toulmin pointed out, not “a place like any other place only a good deal bigger,” but by the same token, the world, all that we are dealing with, is also not the totality of things.
If, instead, “the world is the totality of what is the case,” then from a post-Collingwood perspective that statement can only mean the totality of true question-and-answer complexes, where we are only ever concerned with the right answers to the questions that have been asked in a particular context or might have been asked in a particular context.
Now as Stuart Hampshire argued, “description of reality is essentially inexhaustible… the inexhaustibility lies in the nature of description and identification, however restricted they may be.” Since reality is infinitely re-describable, there is no end to the questions we can ask.
Our knowledge only extends as far as (i) the questions we have so far asked in particular contexts, (ii) to which we have found what counts as the right answer—so far.
For all knowledge, all that we believe we know to be the case, is in principle defeasible as our wider knowledge advances, and as the context of our knowledge widens or alters.
Asking the questions that have not been asked is key to advancing our understanding of our situation, and getting right what we think we need to do.
We have quoted Josh Billings’s immortal observation before, and it is worth quoting again: “The trouble ain’t that people are ignorant, it’s that they know so much that ain’t so.” Much of what we think we know about what we are dealing with, we may come to see in a different light as soon as we start asking the questions we have not yet asked.
As soon as we start asking and answering different questions, and before we even do anything different or differently, we find ourselves dealing with what is literally a rather different world.
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
and indeed, from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s own later philosophical work, beginning in 1929. In the meantime however, to his everlasting chagrin, the earlier approach of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein was soon to reject had become highly influential in the genesis of logical positivism and in the subsequent course of 20th Century anglophone philosophy, and particularly through the work of the Vienna Circle, with whose ideas Wittgenstein had little in common. Of the better-known members of that influential group of philosophers and scientists, only Friedrich Waismann would follow Wittgenstein in rejecting his earlier approach to the philosophy of language and adopting the views whose mature statement is to be found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
From here on in, as it is neither relevant to our discussion nor easily conveyed, we will take our leave of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his technical distinctions and relationships he sets out there between facts, propositions, truth and falsehood, etc. To be perfectly fair to the early Wittgenstein, his “picture theory,” despite the fatal flaws in it he soon recognized, at least got part way along the right road in regarding facts as nothing more or less than pictures, models of reality we construct for ourselves and hold up against reality like a measure, a scale.
in An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 29
italics added
op. cit., p. 38
ibid., p. 37
ibid.
Where relativism about truth sets the bar lower for calling something “true,” the new epistemology thereby sets the bar even higher than on a traditional, rationalist or logical empiricist epistemology