Series

 A visit to Second Story Books led to the purchase of The Wittgenstein Reader, edited by Anthony Kenny. The book is a collection of excerpts from Wittgenstein's works. I have copies of most or all of the excerpted works; but it is worth seeing how a gifted editor will assemble pieces of an author's work to cast more light on one another.

In the chapter Kenny names "Intentions", there are paragraphs in which Wittgenstein discusses what it means to understand something. As an example of something to be understood, he gives the series of natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and the task of teaching it to someone. What he says about how we judge understanding here makes sense. Yet the paragraphs leave the impression that teaching someone the series could be a challenge. (Philosophical Investigations I, sections 143 and following.) I had read these paragraphs before, but today I thought of something else.

In the years of the Baby Boom, I was a second grader in a classroom of about fifty others. Our teacher's notion of restoring order when we made a disturbance--noise, notes, talking--was to tell us to take out a clean piece of paper and write the numbers from one to one hundred. Commonly, the quick writers got to one hundred very quickly, while those like me were in the upper twenties. Often, they made more disturbances, and the teacher would bid up the numbers. I believe that more than once she told us to write the numbers up to one thousand.

We all did it. (Well, as time allowed--some of us were under 300 when the bell rang.) She did not, that I remember, judge our understanding of the series. She may not have collected the papers.