Saturday, December 22, 2012

Guns

I've been working on a post about guns, trying to find something interesting in the way gun-rights advocates have responded to the Newtown massacre, but all I really have to show for it is a set of links to good articles by other people. And other people have done that better, so I'll just link to the links here.

Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking has perhaps the best combination of links and comment that I've seen.

Jean Kazez makes a lot of sense here (although I think I'm closer to being a liberal ideologue than she is--access to deadly weapons pretty much is the whole problem, it seems to me, although no doubt we could do better with mental illness too).

And although it might be too obvious to mention, Brian Leiter has good posts here, here, and here (plus a couple of others that I'll let you find for yourself).

Lincoln

Spielberg's Lincoln is worth seeing, but far from being the great achievement some people seem to think it is. It features very good actors, and manages to maintain dramatic tension throughout, despite the facts that we all know what's going to happen and that it's two and a half hours long. That's some achievement. But there's something trashy about it all the same. Two things, to be precise (three if you count this kind of complaint, but I'm not historian enough to judge its merits): some of the acting is better suited to the stage than the screen (what Kate Masur found moving I found contrived), and Lincoln himself is presented as a kind of prophet or god rather than as a man. He's like a cross between Heraclitus and Moses (played by Alvin Plantinga). Everything he says is wise or at least wise-sounding, albeit perhaps sometimes too deep for others to understand. His longer speeches are all accompanied by music apparently designed to let us know we are witnessing greatness, and distracting us from the actual meaning of his words by working so hard to prompt the desired emotional response. No doubt Lincoln was a remarkable man, but I wonder whether he (as presented here) would be credible as a man at all without the distraction of the music. No one talks like that all the time. (Not even Heraclitus or Moses, I would think.) I wonder what non-US audiences will make of it.  

Friday, December 21, 2012

Brogaard on relativism and expressivism

Berit Brogaard's "Moral Relativism and Moral Expressivism" is a funny paper. It's nice and clear, shows an impressive familiarity with the literature (sometimes, anyway), and deals with big issues like the nature of emotions, relativism, and expressivism in ethics. But it's surely wrong on most if not all of these big issues.

Brogaard gives virtue ethics as an example of "the view that there is one fundamental moral principle that determines what is right and wrong in all circumstances" (p. 539). Her characterization of virtue ethics is based, supposedly, on Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy." The third sentence of that paper states its second thesis: "that the concepts of obligation, and duty‑-moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say‑-and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of "ought," ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible..." So it's a bit odd to identify Anscombe's view as an example of the view in question. That is, it's strange to treat a view that rejects the concepts of moral right and wrong as being a view about what determines what is morally right and wrong. And a better understanding of virtue ethics might have made relativism seem less attractive to Brogaard, since she arrives at it (in this paper, at any rate) by a process of eliminating other theories, such as virtue ethics.

But what about emotions, relativism, and expressivism? Emotions, she says, are "perceptual representations of body changes that occur in response to external stimuli" (p. 545). As she presents it this is something like the standard view these days, or her twist on the standard view. Apparently everyone has been more or less convinced by William James' counter-intuitive theory. It seems like a funny way to characterize an emotion like sadness or happiness though. Why think that emotions are representations of anything? Why think that they are perceptual? What if I experience bodily changes not in response to external stimuli? Can't perceptual representations of these changes then be emotions? Imagine I am afraid of the dark and quake at the prospect of having to go into the basement. My quaking is fearful. I quake with fear. But my thinking about going into the basement is fearful too, and I do it with fear. Neither my quaking nor my thinking is my fear. And though each is done with fear, this fear is not some other thing that exists without them. If I am not thinking of anything that frightens me and show no physical symptoms of fear (ruling out the possibility that I might be afraid subconsciously) then it makes no sense to say that I am experiencing the emotion of fear. Perhaps Brogaard is thinking that emotions are felt, and that feeling is a kind of perception. So there must be something to be perceived, and this can only (or is most likely to be) our own bodily changes. But feeling an emotion is not like feeling a carpet. It is just having the emotion. I haven't looked into all of Brogaard's arguments, or those of others whose work she builds on, but something seems to have gone wrong here. (Phil Hutchinson would have something to say about this, I imagine.)

Brogaard's relativism has a Humean flavor. Moral principles are only ever true relative to a moral judge, she says, and "An action possesses the property of being wrong relative to a moral judge if and only if the action triggers a particular kind of negative moral state in the judge" (p. 546). So an attempt to kill me that I do not recognize as such is not right or wrong relative to me, because it does not trigger the relevant "negative moral state" in me. I don't know what "wrong relative to me" can mean, therefore, except "regarded as (or perhaps felt to be) wrong by me." And in that case, are we really talking about wrongness any more? If I wonder whether some course of action I'm considering would be wrong can it be true that what I'm really doing is trying to get some perception of my body into focus (assuming that a "negative moral state" is some kind of emotion)? I suppose that wondering whether something is wrong might be the same as trying to figure out, or understand clearly, how I feel about it. But the question is still how I feel about it (so the proper focus is not myself) and how I feel about it (and aboutness is not a causal relation, so the proper focus of my inquiry is not any physical effects).

She counts it as a consideration in favor of her view that, according to it, it would be true for a pro-choice person to say, "If I had had a negative moral attitude toward abortion, abortion would have been wrong." She also thinks it is "not [...] that unintuitive" (p. 548) to say that "It is morally permissible to murder people" is true when uttered by a serial killer. Again it seems to me that something has gone badly wrong. How can anyone possibly think that something that is (in their view) morally acceptable would have been morally unacceptable if only their own feelings about it had been different? (There are cases where this could happen, but they are irrelevant to the point. For instance, if I am grieving and you make a questionable joke that amuses me then I might think that it would have been wrong of you to make that joke if it had not made me laugh. But that's not the kind of situation at issue here.) A person like that would have to think of themselves as something like God dictating what is good and what is evil, or else they would have essentially no grasp of the concept of morality at all. To take a crude example, if I felt that torture was OK then the conclusion that follows is that I would be depraved, not that torture would be all right in that case. 

Following Hume again, Brogaard thinks that morals produce or prevent actions, and that they must therefore be something like emotions. But is the judgment "stealing is wrong" anything like that? If I were seriously tempted to steal, would repeating this (very thin) moral fact to myself have any motivating force whatever? I think it would be a joke. Moral propositions don't, it seems to me, have any power to produce or prevent actions. (Which is not to say that ethical considerations have no motivating power. But such considerations are typically thoughts about people, relationships, and thick moral concepts.)

She claims also that "Bad art does not trigger the same emotions in me as morally reprehensible actions" (p. 553). It does in me, at least sometimes. What makes art bad is often pretentiousness, sentimentality, or vanity. And those are moral failings. 

The end result is this (to my mind) bizarre claim:
Moral and aesthetic emotions have a different phenomenology. The reason for this is presumably that they represent different physiological changes to the body state. (p. 554)    
'Represent' here seems to mean something like are caused by. Which might have some truth in it, although it seems odd to say that crying made him sad rather than that sadness made him cry. If I think about a massacre and start crying, but only feel sad when I think about my own tears, then I am not sad about (or at) the massacre.

There seems to be an awful lot of metaphysical weirdness crying out for Wittgensteinian therapy here. Can that be right? I don't fully trust my judgment on this because I know I haven't done my homework (I've only read Brogaard's paper once, don't know much of the literature she cites, and don't have her paper in front of me now), and Brogaard is quite eminent. Can someone like that really be as wrong as she seems to me to be? Or have I just misunderstood?

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Wittgenstein's Ethics in the Koder Diaries

I have now revised the paper previously known as "Wittgenstein's Ethics" and called it "Wittgenstein's Ethics in the Koder Diaries." It's on academia.edu here.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

My review of Klagge's Wittgenstein in Exile in The European Legacy

Just in time for Christmas!

Jessica Feinstein of the Taylor & Francis Group writes:
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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Therapy and common sense

This is probably well known, but I don't remember ever reading it or thinking of it for myself before. In Anna Boncompagni's "The Mother-tongue of Thought": James and Wittgenstein on Common Sense she points out that:
It might be worth noticing, that the German expression for common sense, gesunder Menschverstand, implicitly links common sense to health, as gesund means healthy.
She also quotes Wittgenstein saying that "a philosopher is one who must heal in himself many diseases of the understanding, before he can arrive at the notions of common sense," and:
Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer. But the commonsense answer in itself is no solution; everyone knows it. One must not in philosophy attempt to short-circuit problems.
I'm not sure exactly what I have learned from this (if I tried to say I suspect it would not sound like anything new at all, not even new to me), but I think I might have a deeper understanding of the importance of common sense for Wittgenstein as a result. 

Truth with a capital T

Does anyone ever defend this idea? I can't think of a time when I've heard someone refer to "truth with a capital T" except to reject the idea. And if that is always the case, if no one ever claims to believe in truth with a capital T, why does anyone bother to reject the idea? What is being rejected?

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The crisis of the humanities

This kind of story ("The message from Tallahassee could not be blunter: Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors.") makes me think that the humanities are in crisis. And people often say they are. But what is the nature of the crisis, and what has caused it?

Apparently Florida's Governor Scott wants students to pursue "job-friendly degrees." But what these are will change. In the worst case you might begin a degree in Job-Friendly Studies only to find out that jobs are hard to get in that area by the time you graduate (perhaps because everyone else had the same idea too). In the best case you might graduate into a good job because of your choice of major, but still find that the industry's fortunes change over time, not always for the better. You also might find that you don't like the major you have chosen and don't do well in it (either because you don't like it or because it's too hard, which might be why such a lucrative major was under-subscribed in the first place). You might find that you don't like working in that area. For all of these reasons it seems a bad idea to try to push students into degree programs that don't appeal to them. The free market seems pretty good at dealing with this kind of issue. 

Washington & Lee University's President Ruscio believes that there is an "increasing need to prepare students for careers and jobs." Is the need really increasing? If so, why? Of course the economy is in bad shape, but we know what caused that, and it wasn't too many students choosing to major in the humanities. (I like some of Ruscio's ideas, but this line stood out as questionable to me.) If there is a greater need now for colleges and universities to prepare students for the job market it seems to come from the general culture, not from the economy. People expect job-preparation in college, partly because college is often advertised as a ticket to a higher income. But the seemingly obviously practical choice is often not actually a practical choice. Business, for instance, is not a good choice of undergraduate major, even though that's where the money is. (That is, there is money to be made in business, but Business majors do not appear to be the ones who make it.) So what should students study? The short answer is: whatever they choose. That way they will enjoy their studies more and probably earn higher grades. And those who care most about making money can choose to major accordingly, probably in something that will prepare them for medical or law school, or else in Engineering. 

Many students still choose to major in the humanities, and that's OK. This table suggests that Philosophy majors earn more than majors in any other liberal arts (I'm counting Economics as a social science). They earn more than Biology, Chemistry, and IT majors, for instance. Also more than Business Administration majors. But is this because studying Philosophy makes you more valuable to employers, or causes you to be perceived to be more valuable, or is it because Philosophy majors tend to be smarter than others, and intelligence is valuable to employers (or at least leads to promotions and higher salaries)? Surely it is the latter. If the economy needed more Chemistry majors they would earn more, wouldn't they? Maybe I've bought into too much economics, but if there is anything to this supply and demand stuff then we should either leave students to choose their own majors or else be much more careful about which majors we push. All majors in science, technology, and mathematics are not equal. And manipulating students into majoring in Chemistry (mid-career median salary $79,900 according to the Wall Street Journal) or Biology ($64,800) rather than Philosophy ($81,200) makes no sense. Or none that I can see, at any rate.

Marjorie Perloff quotes Robert Weisbuch, "a distinguished professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation," who declares:
Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities–it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it– is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries. . . . As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable.
More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities–with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever–has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.
Perloff agrees with this last point. But I'm not so sure. Are people really bored with History (think of the interest in the movie Lincoln)? Or with Philosophy (people never seem to stop asking the "big questions" or caring about what makes sense)? What I think people might be bored with is English, and not literature but precisely the obsession with theories such as deconstruction and Marxism that seemed to dominate the study of English in recent decades (I'm thinking especially of the 1980s, but the desire to be able to refer knowingly to whoever is trendy, especially if they are French (or Zizek) seems to have persisted). I don't mean this as an attack on French philosophers. It isn't (necessarily) their fault that they have been made into bandwagons. Perloff offers little by way of remedy for the humanities generally (her focus is on literary studies), but her essay is well worth reading: she rejects faux interdisciplinarity and the conversion of literary studies into cultural studies in ways that I find persuasive. Here are some of the best bits:
The downside of the equation between cultural studies and literary studies is that, carried to its logical conclusion, cultural studies can dispense with the literary altogether. Studies of consumerism, for example, can be based on the analysis of shopping malls or Home Depot layouts; no literary texts are required. Teen culture can be explored through music, film, and computer games. Current social mores and cultural constraints can be profitably studied by examining Internet discourse. And so on. Everything, after all, can be a text and so why not a golf course? A skating rink? A theme park? "Professor X," I read in the Bulletin of a leading university, "specializes in 20th-century American literature, film and cultural studies. . . . She has begun a . . . book-length project that reads important post-World War II Hollywood films as public relations maneuvers, with which the studios sought to create a benign impression of a beleaguered industry and to shape the nation’s social and economic agenda during the difficult process of reconversion to a peacetime economy."
Such studies are regularly designated as "intThe Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is a ‘public relations maneuver," designed to mask ‘the difficult process of reconversion to a peacetime economy’, then the discipline in question is cultural history in keeping with the critic’s primary purpose, which is to unmask a particular social and economic agenda. Related disciplines applied might be economics and political science–specifically, the trauma of postwar reintegration for those whose "best years" were, ironically enough, on the battlefield where they could perform the heroic actions denied to them in their prior peacetime existence.
But there is one discipline that clearly isn’t involved here and that is literature–or, for that matter, film–as artistic practice. [...]
[...] And as such, the study of poetry or film or drama is difficult to justify as more than an after-school "extra." For surely if the object is to learn how U.S. culture was restructured in the postwar years, there are more accurate indicators than individual Hollywood movies.
Her proposed solution is this: "what is urgently needed in the "Humanities" today is more knowledge of actual art works and a great emphasis on induction." She may be right (I'm not sure I understand what she means about induction, although it has to do with recognizing that not just anyone who can read can thereby read a poem properly, just as not just anyone who can hear can listen properly, critically to a symphony, and that becoming a skilled reader requires both education and lots of practice), but she's clearly talking about literature and the arts, not such humanities as History and Philosophy. So what about them?

Stanley Fish writes:
The only thing that might fly — and I’m hardly optimistic — is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies — legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others — that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.
And when I say “explain,” I should add aggressively explain — taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce.
The real problem is surely the myths, pretensions, and hypocrisy that Fish identifies. There's the crisis, although surely it was ever thus. Myths aren't new.

Finally, at least for now, here's another essay on the crisis, which says:
Search JSTOR for the phrase “crisis in the humanities.” Starting with the oldest articles first, I stopped reading at record 69 out of 217. The phrase first appears in a JSTOR journal in 1922, and from 1940 on becomes a steady stream of complaints. I think this is enough evidence to suggest that there has been a sense of crisis in the humanities almost as long as there have been departments of humanities. The organization of modern universities seems timeless, but the development of departments and disciplines as we know them now is a product of the late 19th century. Not only is the sense of crisis decades old and persistent, but for the most part the causes are as well. Students are choosing professional programs over the humanities; the sciences have the most authority and get the most funding; there are too many humanities PhDs; they’re evaluated by standards appropriate to the sciences but not the humanities.
This last sentence gives a pretty good summary of what people generally mean when they talk about the humanities being in crisis. If students' choosing professional programs is a problem we could close (or just not open) these programs, or explain to students and their parents why an ambition to be a lawyer is not a good reason to major in Pre-Law rather than Politics or History or Philosophy or English. Sciences surely get more funding because businesses give them grants, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. (Of course it's easy to see how it might create problems in some cases.) Too many PhDs is a problem, but the solution is relatively obvious. Universities should hire more professors or admit fewer graduate students. Scientists have more authority and receive more money? This shouldn't matter, unless it mean that sciences are being favored irrationally, because of a general sense by people with power and money that science is somehow better than the humanities. And this brings us back to Fish's point about myth and about the hubris of people who want to manipulate higher education without really knowing anything about the subjects involved. The crisis of the humanities is not within the humanities, in other words. It is an ethical crisis in people outside the humanities, and in those within who connive with them. Changing the humanities in order to cater to these people is just adding to the problem. Or so it seems to me.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Critical thinking

Like a lot of people, I often think that students should be taught critical thinking. But I realize that I have only a vague idea what I mean by this, and when I try to articulate the idea to myself its cloudiness quickly becomes evident. Mostly I think I have two things in mind: logical reasoning and an informed skeptical tendency. But there are problems with both of these, it seems to me.

I had to take a course in logic as an undergraduate and saw little point in it at the time. The reason we were given for having to take the course was so that we would be able to read papers that used logical symbols, but the symbols we were taught were not the ones most commonly used in readings we were assigned. And you don't need to take an entire course in order to know that this symbol should be read as 'or' and that as 'if ... then' (although translating from formal symbolism into ordinary language is not as straightforward as one might think). No one ever claimed, as far as I can recall, that studying logic would make us any more logical than we already were, any better at reasoning. Perhaps it does have that effect, but I've seen no evidence that it does, and this would surely be widely advertised by logicians if it existed (or have I just committed some fallacy right there?). I believe that argument mapping has good effects, but I haven't looked into it much. That's because I don't teach critical thinking, although if I did I expect I would start here and make my students do some mapping. Basically the (apparent) problem with teaching logic is that one course in anything is not likely to make a lasting difference to students, and if you're going to have students reason logically then you might as well have them do so about some particular subject, and then what you have is not a course in logic but a philosophy course on whatever area of philosophy you have chosen to focus on in the course. Perhaps it wouldn't even be a philosophy course, although if the primary focus is logical reasoning then I don't know what else it could be. In short, maybe logic should be taught across the philosophy curriculum rather than in a dedicated course. As David Papineau says:
I’ve long been unsure about the point of normal introductory logic courses.  It is doubtful they do anything to improve argumentative skills, and they tend not to leave time for any philosophically significant metalogic.  Of course, they are a necessary prerequisite for those who are going to go on in logic.  But for the many who aren’t, it is not obvious what the philosophical payoff is.
The problem with inculcating an informed skeptical tendency is that what's in question seems to be a virtue rather than some quantity of knowledge, and developing a virtue is going to take much more than one course.  It's easy enough to educate students about the bias of Fox News, but (or because) they already know this. The ones who watch it will continue to do so, and will insist (rightly) that other news sources have their own biases. People generally know how to be skeptical when they want to be. It's developing that will in the right way that's the tricky part. I don't want my students to be skeptical about global climate change--they should trust scientists more than that. I don't want them to believe that 9/11 was an inside job by the US government--they should trust the government more than that. But should they believe everything that scientists tell them? Should they always trust the government? No. It might help if they knew more about how science is done, about how many scientists believe in man-made climate change, and if they knew something about the science of climate change itself. But how much of that could be covered in one general course on critical thinking? And what would prevent any students whose minds were changed as a result from starting to believe in some other irrational theory (or some other excuse to do nothing about climate change)? It seems to me that, once again, the habits of mind we're looking for need to be encouraged and developed across the curriculum.

Which means students need to be challenged to justify their beliefs more consistently. They need to be graded on their reasoning more and on knowing the right answer less. Which means less multiple choice and memorization, more papers, oral exams, etc. Which probably means smaller classes, more encouragement to teachers to challenge students even if students don't like it, and less pressure on teachers to do anything other than teaching (so that they have time to grade all those papers, for instance). It also means thinking less that a course or two can fix a major deficiency in anyone's education.

Having said all that, every time I visit the Critical Thinking on the Web site I start to want to teach a critical thinking course despite it all.      

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Talulah Gosh was a top celebrity

This is of interest to, let's just say, a select group only, but since I've talked about them here before I want to link to this story in The Independent about Talulah Gosh. I can't believe I never managed/bothered to see them live.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Reconceiving Medical Ethics

My review of Christopher Cowley (ed.) Reconceiving Medical Ethics is up at Metapsychology. Here's my conclusion:
Although it is not likely to change the face of medical ethics, the book does make valuable contributions to several debates within the field. It also brings out some of the problems with common ways of thinking about medical ethics, such as the idea that the end can justify the means, the desire to ignore as much as possible the religious beliefs of patients and medical practitioners, and the attempt to separate ethics from both legal and professional judgment, carving out areas of technical expertise where ethics supposedly does not belong. It could almost be said that the aim of the book is to bring ethics back into medical ethics. Certainly the way it points is worth exploring.    

Wittgenstein on dreams and film

Remarks from the Koder diaries (in Public and Private Occasions):
In one regard I must be a very modern person since the cinema has such an extraordinarily beneficial effect on me. I cannot imagine any rest for the mind more adequate to me than an American movie. What I see & the music give me a blissful sensation perhaps in an infantile way but therefore of course no less powerful. In general as I have often thought & said a film is something very similar to a dream & the thoughts of Freud are directly applicable to it. [pp. 29-31, May 1930]
One often thinks--and I myself often make this mistake--that everything one thinks can be written down. In reality one can only write down--that is, without doing something stupid & inappropriate--what arises in us in the form of writing. Everything else seems comical & as it were like dirt. That is, something that needs to be wiped off. [p. 35, May 1930]
And from the Conversations on Freud:
     Symbolizing in dreams. The idea of a dream language. Think of recognizing a painting as a dream. I (L.W.) was once looking at an exhibition of paintings by a young woman artist in Vienna. There was one painting of a bare room, like a cellar. Two men in top hats were sitting on chairs. Nothing else. And the title: "Besuch" ("Visit"). When I saw this I said at once "This is a dream", (My sister described the picture to Freud, and he said 'Oh yes, that is quite a common dream'--connected with virginity.) Note that the title is what clinches it as a dream--by which I do not mean that anything like this was dreamt by the painter while asleep. You would not say of every painting 'This is a dream'. And this does show that there is something like a dream language. [p. 43, summer 1942]
     It is characteristic of dreams that often they seem to the dreamer to call for an interpretation. [...] There seems to be something in dream images that has a certain resemblance to the signs of a language. [p. 45, 1943]  
     Suppose you look on a dream as a kind of language. A way of saying something, or a way of symbolizing something. There might be a regular symbolism, not necessarily alphabetical--it might be like Chinese, say. We might then find a way of translating this symbolism into the language of ordinary speech, ordinary thoughts. But then the translation ought to be possible both ways. It ought to be possible by employing the same technique to translate ordinary thoughts into dream language. As Freud recognizes, this never is done and cannot be done. So we might question whether dreaming is a way of thinking something, whether it is a language at all.
      Obviously there are certain similarities with language. [p. 48, 1943]             
I don't have much to say by way of commentary. I had thought that Wittgenstein said something about the grammar of film, which would have been interesting, but he doesn't. Still, perhaps it's worth bringing together these quotations in one place.