Highbrow

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an interesting chap and well worth reading, although he only published one book during his lifetime. We could probably describe him as highbrow without too much argument.

The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

But suppose we compare him with someone more popular, more accessible and less obviously highbrow. Novelist Edith Wharton for example.

But that was always his way: the least little fragment of fact was enough for him to transform into a palace of dreams, whereas if he tried to grasp more of it at a time it remained on his hands as so much unusable reality.

Edith Wharton - The Gods Arrive (1932)

To my mind Edith Wharton was more broadly astute than Wittgenstein, with wider insights into the human condition. Her novels bring that out even though they are of course fiction. Yet in an important sense there is no such thing as fiction because even fiction is rooted in a language and a reality any reader must understand.

Wittgenstein's ideas tended to be too theoretical for him to bother with certain insights which are there to be grasped by most of us. He refined his thinking too far, pared away too much in a passionate quest for ultimate truth which he never actually achieved. In later years he seemed to gravitate towards viewpoints which were almost mundane and perhaps this too reflects a reality where the human condition is essentially mundane. Easily grasped but easily evaded too - for various reasons.

Popular isn’t necessarily shallow and does not necessarily occupy some lower sphere of human insight. Even now we are too hierarchical in our ideas and our thinking and the drawback of that is obvious. Too many experts go beyond their expertise.

I've lived long enough to doubt whether any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more beautiful theories.
Edith Wharton - The Quicksand (1902)

Unwelcome ideas - part XIII

In his book Dreaming, published in 1959, the philosopher Norman Malcolm put forward an interesting idea on dreaming. At the time, psychologists were investigating dreams by studying sleeping subjects wired up to various recording devices. One of their discoveries was that rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep seemed to be accompanied by dreams. If a sleeping subject was woken during REM sleep, the subject was more likely to report that they had been dreaming than subjects woken when REM was not taking place.

So you might think it was a simple enough step for psychologists to link REM with dreaming, which is what they did and still do to this day. However, Malcolm didn't think this link was valid for reasons connected with  Wittgenstein's concept of language games. He thought psychologists had changed the everyday meaning of dreaming and dreams, in effect playing a new language game with them. He accused psychologists of using REM to give dreams and dreaming a new and illegitimate scientific meaning.

In simple terms, this is Malcolm's main argument :-

Let us first suppose an alternative explanation to the REM theory of dreaming, always remembering that this theory says dreams occur during REM sleep. But suppose dreaming doesn't occur while we are asleep at all, but is simply a jumble of images caused by waking up. Suppose dreams occur during those few seconds where you pass from an unconscious sleeping state to full consciousness. Whether this conjecture is valid or not, how would you disprove it in favour of the REM theory?

The short answer is that you can't because of the nature of sleep. At the time there was lots of argument back and forth and in the end, Malcolm went his way and the psychologists went theirs. But from an experimental design point of view, the theory that REM and dreams occur at the same time cannot be proved. The logic of being asleep means you can't report your dreams until you are awake. You can never report what is going on inside your head during REM sleep.

Malcolm's argument is unanswerable to this day. In practice it is no longer an important argument, because psychologists have opted to ignore it. Norman Malcolm's ingenious and unanswerable argument has become a footnote to the history of unwelcome ideas.

Source - Wittgenstein A Social Theory of Knowledge by David Bloor published in 1983.