β Scribed by William L. White
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
is a former student of both Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The two philosophers had one encounter that was brief and stormy ("the poker incident"). For years, Munz tried heroically to continue alone their unbegun dialogue and make their ghosts join together fruitfully. This book is a fascinating story of his experiences as their student and of his synthesis of their views.
Finding a valuable message in Wittgenstein was hard. Assuming that Wittgenstein's first book supports and his later works undermine positivism, Munz found in them a theory of meaning that he could fruitfully combine with Popper's magnificent fallibilist views of science and of politics. He regrets Popper's neglect of meaning. Popper had said that we have no reasonable theory of meaning, not even of the simplest idea that individuals and their names are linked by a naming relation-this relation is mysterious. The view of it as association, incidentally, is refuted in the autobiography of Helen Keller. She associated the word water with water yet with no idea of meaning-until it hit her in a flash.
It is a shame to spoil the fun of this lovely book. Yet I should mention some misascriptions. Munz says (e.g., p. 81f.) that Popper deemed certain assertions meaningless. Popper allowed meaninglessness only within specified formal systems. Also, Munz ascribes to Popper the view that science consists of refutable hypotheses that have withstood severe tests. This would exclude classical or Newtonian physics, which has been refuted. Yet Popper deemed classical physics scientific, since it is refutable.
Munz rightly differentiates between meanings in different speech communities and in different periods of one speech community, as well as between private and public meanings. And he views rules as permitting linkages between these different meanings as offering some ways of translation (he ascribes all this to Wittgenstein). The hypothesis that we internalize rules of speech supports this. Now since there are some rules we follow but cannot articulate, the idea that rules link private and public meanings rests on the further idea of a link between the private and the tacit senses of following a rule. For this we need rules about rules. Does Munz have them?
Links between diverse meanings obviously exist. What are they? Translation programs embody hypotheses linking public meanings; private meanings are different. In a celebrated communication to Jacques Hadamard, Albert Einstein confessed that after having solved a problem, he worked hard to find words to articulate it. Hence, this problem does not yield a general solution. Further, any future suggestion of a reasonable solution to it will be revolutionary. What will render solutions reasonable? Munz ends this book's first part with a hint at a reply to this in an imaginary dialogue between his teachers that serves as the book's heart (pp. 101-108). Strictly speaking, he suggests, Wittgenstein's views apply only to closed communities, and this helps solve some Popperian problems. Readers should examine this slim volume for its answer, perhaps rewrite the dialogue. For that they will have to see why we have no access to our sensations, let alone a privileged access to them, and why the faith in observation reports as the ultimate foundations of knowledge conflicts with the scientific tradition that dismisses unreproducible observations (Wittgenstein dismissed repeatability; p. 80). Here Munz draws philosophical conclusions. Right or not, they include many enjoyable insights.
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