Ludwig Wittgenstein

2020-02-01 0 views

Introduction

Russell is in continuity with the 19th century empiricists, particularly John Stuart Mill, those empiricists and their attention to objective empirical scientific knowledge as expressed in the hypothetical deductive method. That is to say scientific explanations have the structure of a deductive system based on a broad general hypothesis, which in Russell comes through in his logical atomism. And the universal extension of the scientific method. This movement of 19th century to Russell into the early 20th century represents the kind of scientism as it’s called which counts the scientific method as the only acceptable method for giving us a reliable knowledge. And it is this which then comes through in early Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein of the “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus”, the later Wittgenstein represented by his book “Philosophical Investigations” is different. The early Wittgenstein follows Russell in this regard as does the logical positivism of the 1930s and 1940s, the sort of positions represented by A.J. Ayer, though he moderates the appeal to science and hypothetical deductive method in some ways.

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus)

Russell’s Preface

What Russell’s introduction seems to say is that what Wittgenstein is doing is what Russell himself had held out for in his logical atomism. What actually Russell says in the preface is that the book starts with the relationship between words and things, showing how traditional philosophy arises out of ignorance and the misuse of language, and that’s the theme that runs through the positivists, runs through Wittgenstein, both early and late and one which Russell certainly agrees with. Russell goes on to say that what we need, because of the misuse of language, is an ideal language, one in which every noun refers to just one fact so that no word can ever be used to refer to two different things. A strictly logical language in which the atomic facts are described simply by atomic propositions. Russell says this is what Wittgenstein is doing.

Wittgenstein’s Preface

In his own preface to the book, this is what Wittgenstein says, the book deals with problems of philosophy, and shows why these problems are posed is that logic of our language is misunderstood. By logic of langue he is referring to the logical structure of language, the logical form that it had, the subject predicate form. Subject - predicate form asserts facts, words which are signs, names don’t assert anything. So the whole sense of this book can be summarized into the following: What can be said at all can be said clearly, what we cannot talk about clearly we must pass over in silence. The aim of the book then is to stake out the limitations of what language can say and show us how it says it. It’s a book about the logic of language.

Picture Theory of Meaning (First Segment)

Notice what he’s saying, the world is the totality of facts, not of things. A fact is the existence of the state of affairs, it’s likely to be complex, like molecular and atomic facts. States of affairs are combinations of objects and things, and things are simply constituents of states of affairs. His point is that words name things. Things are constituents of states of affairs, and facts are state of affairs. The thing pertinent to the confusion of language is that one word can be used to name many different things. However, we picture facts to ourselves. The picture of mental state is a model or reality, but in the picture there are elements of the picture that represents objects, things. So what we have is things or objects represented by the elements in the picture by which we represent to ourselves the facts. But in addition to the picture being a mental model, the picture itself is a state of affairs, there must be something identical in the picture and what it depicts. But what sort of identity is there between the mental picture and objective state of affairs? It’s the logical form, we need a logical form to language which can be identical to the logical form of the objective state of affairs. So number three a logical picture of facts is a thought, like a proposition, that can be perceived by the senses because the proposition can be heard, can be read, be it a simple or complex proposition referring to atomic or molecular facts as the case may be.

Two things about the first segment. He’s making use of Russell’s logical analysis and logical atomism. Second this is known as Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning. Mental representations, thoughts, are pictures corresponding to states of affairs. If we reflect for a moment on the nature of meaning, meaning can be simply denotational, what in logic we call the extension. What he’s doing is emphasizing almost completely that the denotational meaning of language in as much as states of affairs seems to be empirical objects, this becomes an empiricist theory of meaning. The antecedent of which is John Stuart Mill. What does the word matter refers to empirically? Permanent possibility of sensations. What does the mind refers to empirically? Permanent possibility of reflections. The theory that was state by David Hume. If you cannot translate this philosophical language into the language of empirical facts, it’s meaningless. And it’s precisely this empirical theory of meaning which in the logical positivism of Ayer comes out as the verifiability principle of meaning. The anti-metaphysical strain of 19th century empiricism recurring in 20th century positivism.

Sign & Symbols (Second Segment)

A word is a sign, one of the same sign can be common to two different symbols. The word can be used to symbolize different things. In this way, one of the most fundamental confusions are easily produced and philosophy is full of it. His book “On the Concept of Mind” in which he suggests that it’s simply by means of misunderstanding about the logic of language that the word mind has come to be used to refer to an entity, an immaterial part of a human being whereas the logic of language properly understood is such that mind refers simply the certain brain functions. To avoid such error, we mustn’t use the same sign for different symbols, what we need is a sign language that’s governed by logical syntax. Most propositions and questions found in philosophical works are not false, they are just nonsensical, they have no sense, no meaning. A non-sensical use of language is the use of language that has no empirical referent. So in logical positivism you’ll find it stated that metaphysical language is nonsensical, or anything that doesn’t pass approval of the verifiability criteria of meaning is nonsensical, it has no empirical referent.

So then if most of the propositions and questions found in philosophy are nonsensical, what job is left for philosophy other than shutting up? The response is that philosophy is the critique of language, analyzing the use of language in order to determine whether or not they have empirical meaning, whether or not they have any sense. If they do, then whether they are true or false can be decided by the appropriate empirical sciences. Philosophy is not in the business of deciding the truth of anything. If all meaning is empirical, then the truth of proposition is a scientific matter, not philosophical.

So philosophy becomes, as it were, the logic of language switchboard which accepts calls asking can you help me with this confusing sort of topic and shuttles the calls plunge them into different sciences. It follows that the totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science. Remember scientism is the view that only scientific knowledge is worthy. A scientific exclusivism which is being touted in the 19th century empiricists, here again in early Wittgenstein and in logical positivists.

But philosophy is not one of the natural sciences, it aims at the logical clarification of thoughts, it’s not a body of doctrine, but an activity. So you should no longer, according to Wittgenstein, talk about somebody’s philosophy as if it’s a body of doctrine. You talk rather of people who are doing philosophy.

His point is that philosophical propositions do not picture reality, science does that. Science could only tell us about what can be thought and spoken in empirically verifiable ways. So science cannot tell you metaphysical matters, religious matters unless by purely empirical means. And he says that everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and what cannot be thought clearly on that we must keep silence.

In as much as he’s advocating scientific empiricism, he’s obviously going to run into the problem of induction. It’s on the assertion on the uniformity of nature that all inductive reasoning hinges. Here’s what he says about this: the so called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic since it’s obviously a proposition with sense, and proposition with sense is one that refers to empirical data, the law of induction is referring to the uniformity of empirical data, so it’s not a law of logic. What about the law of causation which underlies the law of induction in traditional philosophy, the law of causation is not a law but only the form of the law, the law of causation generally in mechanics, physics etc., there is no the law of causation in general, it is simply the form of which particular causal laws participate. So it’s stressing the logical structure of these laws. The procedure of induction has no logical justification, but only a psychological justification. There’s no compulsion making one thing because another thing happened, there’s no causal necessity, the only necessity that exists is a logical necessity. So the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomenon.

What about moral values? In the world of empirical facts everything is as it is, everything happens as it happens, in it no value exists, because value is not an empirical fact. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens in the world. So it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. What is a proposition? Statements about state of affairs, empirical facts, so there are no ethical propositions. Propositions can express nothing that is higher than facts. What is an ethical law of the form “Thou shalt”? When such a law is laid done, one’s first thought is: what if I do not? It’s clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms, so our question is about the consequences of an action and it’s unimportant those consequences shouldn’t be events but there must be something about the question we posed, there must be some ethical reward and punishment that reside in the action itself. What then is the function of ethical language? Wittgenstein doesn’t come out and tell us. The logical positivists would say that ethical language is purely emotive. This leads then to the emotivist theory of ethics.

Death he says is not an event in life, we don’t live to experience death, so there is no empirical knowledge of death. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. But there’s no guarantee of temporal immortality of the human soul survival after death. It’s always been intended, there is some riddle solved by my surviving, the solution of the riddle of life in that case would lie outside of life itself, outside of space and time. The solution of the problem of life and its meaning is seen in the vanishing of the problem, because with death it vanishes, no life, no problem.

The correct method in philosophy must really be the following, to say nothing except what can be said, that is, propositions of natural science, and then whatever someone else wanted to say, to demonstrate that someone had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his language. What we cannot speak about in empirical propositions we must pass over in silence. What he’s really saying I think underneath all of this is that the problem of the meaning of life is an empirically meaningless problem, a meaningful problem is one which is asking factual questions. But if you get an extended definition of empirical, then future experience could in principle count.

“Tractatus Logico Philosophicus” was published in 1921, and in 1945 he published “Philosophical Investigations”, in that book he tells us that the picture theory of meaning is meaningless, and that comment of his gave rise to the self referentiality criticism of the verifiability theorem. Namely that if to be verifiable a proposition has to be empirically accessible, but the verifiability of meaning is not empirically accessible, so it’s not verifiable. And that is one of the things that lead to the downfall of logical positivism. He also suggested that Russell’s dream of atomic propositions, individual units of thought is too vague, there is no clear criteria for atomic proposition and the notion of an ideal language is too artificial. And with that he abandoned this scientism, trying to narrow all meaningful discourse to scientific discourse and started talking about language games, that is to say there are variety of different language functions of which scientific type language is only one.

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