The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy

[p. 399]

Wittgenstein cum suis.

Some readers may have wondered why they have not encountered a single word about the most ubiquitous exponent of the philosophy of language, Wittgenstein. The reason is very simple: he and his colleagues cannot contribute much to the basic topic of this book, the foundations of social decision-making, mainly because their writings are not directly translatable into, or applicable to the functional view of information in general and of language in particular. Let me explain.

Take for instance Wittgenstein's conclusion of his ‘Tractatus’: ‘Worüber man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ If that ‘worüber’ is totally irrelevant to social decision-making, then we can ignore it in this book. In decision-making the rule for keeping mum would be: ‘Worüber man nicht reden muss, darüber darf man schweigen!’ If, on the other hand, that ‘worüber’ is a decisive element of whatever decision we have to take as a society, then the saying should be: ‘Worüber man nicht schweigen kann (oder darf), darüber muss man reden.’ Question: can we talk in any meaningful way about all subjects relevant to social decision-making? The answer depends on the criterion we use to define ‘meaningful’.

Let me in a nutshell say how I read his Tractatus. Facts are facts, they just are. Whatever we add beyond pointing at them is of our own making. If we have agreed on a language with a vocabulary pointing at those facts, and a syntax and semantics defining expressions and giving them a meaning, then we can talk about facts, and the expressions we use come quite close - in terms of clearness of meaning - to the activity of pointing to the facts themselves. We can expect others to attach - at least as far as we can notice - the same meaning to the same expressions; we can think about these expressions without losing track of what we are doing, and thus come to conclusions.

As soon as we talk about other subjects, which are not facts or statements about facts, in a language as defined above we lose track of the meaning, we have no way of knowing what meaning other people attach to what we say; nor do we have any way of knowing that the meaning we give to their messages is the meaning they intended to convey. In fact, we cannot know if we talk about anything real at all. That applies to unquestionably metaphysical subjects such as morals or aesthetics, but - and this is a real, practical, problem - it also applies to the language itself. As soon as we attempt to talk about the meaning which we must attach to our conventions of vocabulary, syntax, and especially semantics, we are building on shifting sand. We can talk in a logical way about facts, but we cannot do so about logic.

In his ‘Investigations’, Wittgenstein retreated from this extreme scepticism, but it is not quite clear by what he replaced it. And one can hardly expect otherwise. For as soon as we take a more functional view of knowledge and communication, progress in that field depends on progress in the understanding of how people create knowledge and how they learn a symbolic language. That is the field of a very young science, not of philosophy.

[p. 400]

In a democracy, social decision-making must confine itself to subjects affecting the interests of members of that society. The individual norms, morals and aesthetics - which underlie the opinion of the individual as to where his interests lie - are irrelevant in a democracy inasmuch as we have to take them for granted. The discussion in a democracy is almost wholly about facts. As explained in Volume One, the precision of language, the overlap of meaning, is adequate if it allows us to take a decision, i.e. to rank the decision alternatives, in such a way that any disagreement as to the adequacy of the decision rests upon perceived differences in interest, and not upon different perceptions of the facts. It is usually possible to talk in a meaningful way about such subjects, at least if there is a will to communicate. In the eventuality that the current language is deficient in vocabulary, syntax or semantics, we can improve it until it qualifies.

The Wittgenstein of the ‘Investigations’ comes closer to the view of communication as the culturally developed (i.e. learned) overlap in individual meanings which in turn presupposes the shared ‘forms of life’ to which he referred when writing on p. 226 ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is (so one could say) forms of life.’ But we do not today accept the current forms of life as given. What is missing in Wittgenstein's work is the notion of will, and the ‘unifying’ influence of common circumstances such as physical laws. In short the role of information as the basic element of life. Again, these notions pertain more to science than to what Wittgenstein considers philosophy.

In short, Wittgenstein's philosophy does not affect the major propositions of this book. That would probably also have been his own conclusion as he would classify the problems my book deals with as scientific rather that philosophical and in his view one should be careful to keep these two apart.

This is an appropriate place for a remark of a more general nature. The scepticism of philosophers of language partly derives from an exaggerated emphasis on language as a precondition for thought. I have encountered the assertion that no real, or at least deductive, thinking is possible at all except in some language. That is an unwarranted (and unsubstantiated) conclusion. I know, because much of my thinking is done in images, and in systems and sequences of images, which I then have to translate into one of the four languages in which I am fluent. Which one I choose depends largely on my (imagined) interlocutor. I am of course unaware whether there are other people who think that way or are able to. I know that I do it much more than my acquaintances. The reason probably is that right from the start I was raised a multilingual. Also, already as a very young boy I was more interested in how things function than in how to influence, or communicate with, people, a neglect which I later came to regret. While I am a living refutation of the statement that conscious, reflective, thinking can be done only in a language, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the statement that without a symbolic language there can be no development of the ability of reflective think and deductive thinking much beyond that of a primate.