Wittgenstein was invited to meet with members of the Vienna Circle, an informal group of people who were interested in the philosophy of science. Many members were at least sympathetic to Logical Positivism, the view that only verifiable assertions have meaning.
A verifiable assertion is a hypothesis, something the scientists in the crowd liked. You can test a hypothesis and go with the evidence: thumbs up or thumbs down.
The Logical Positivists asserted that any assertion that was not verifiable was neither true nor false but meaningless. The arts were not revered in this crowd.
Wittgenstein liked hypotheses but thought that the scientific method was only one of many ways in which language can be used meaningfully. Wittgenstein often used the word serious in talking about people who did meaningful work. Instead of speaking of good and bad people, Wittgenstein spoke of serious people.
I was reminded of that when I ran across a line from Wallace Stegner:
What anyone who speaks for art must be prepared to assert is the validity of non-scientific experience and the seriousness of non-verifiable insight.
It’s the same idea that Wittgenstein had, I think, in different language. Here’s the way Stegner put it:
There are questions that science not only cannot answer but doesn’t know how to ask.
Stegner was making the case that Americans shouldn’t abandon the arts and humanities in a headlong rush toward mathematics, science and engineering. Sadly, he was making the case in the 1950s.
I think speaking seriously about the arts and humanities is an important thing to do — an ethical thing to do in these times. Sadly, some discredited ideas hang around for generations.
• Wallace Stegner’s essay “One Way to Spell Man” appeared in The Saturday Review, May 24, 1958. I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 137-42. The quotations are on pp. 140 and 138.
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