Wittgenstein

Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956)

On certainty (1969)

Wittgenstein left a huge nachlass. The first 70 pages of the Tractatus are about language and logic. The last five pages are about ethics, aesthetic, and life. In the first Wittgenstein philosophical outlook, language and mind are mutually inclusive, but in the later outlook, language stands alone as the only possible way to mind. According to A.W.Moore, Wittgenstein wrote that "eternal life belongs to those who live in the present". Wittgenstein also believed that propositions always entailed public language, to what Sraffa replied by an outward scratching of his chin with the tip of his fingers.

Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993)

p44

"For Witt, what confers on the speaker's words the meanings that they have is not a mental constituent of a composite act that he performs, but the context, which includes his knowing the language to which his sentence belongs: he does nothing but utter the words. For Husserl by contrast something occcurs in the speaker's mind: a mental act, although not an independent act, but one that is an integral part of a composite act, part physical and part mental."

p128

"Davidson affords an extraordinarily clear example of the fact that, for analytical philosophers faithful to the fundamental axiom, the theory of meaning is indeed fundamental to philosophy as a whole: his writings on a remarkably large range of topics start with an exposition of his general views on the form of a theory of meaning, and go on to draw consequences from them to the topic at hand. Witt, by contrast, in his later writings eschewed any general theory of meaning, believing that any attempt at a systematic account of language must force diverse phenomena into a single form of description which would perforce distort many of them, and that therefore only a piecemeal approach is possible: but he too believed that the aim of all philosophy is to enable us to see the world aright by attaining a commanding view of the workings of our language, and hence of the structure of our though."

p163

"Describing the use of a sentence, as Witt understood the matter, consists in saying under what conditions we should be disposed to utter it, to what criteria we should appeal to decide whether the statement so made was true, what might subsequently compel us to withdraw it, what we commit ourselves to by making such a statement or by accepting it as true when made by another, what we take to be the point of making it or of having that form of words in our language at all, and what responses to a statement of that kind are considered as required, or, if none are required, as at least appropriate. That is to say, the use of an expression should be characterised, not in terms of a conception of truth-conditions that guides our use, but directly: we have, that is, to describe the actual use that we make of the expression--when we employ it, how we respond to another's employment of it; and this must be stated by reference to circumstances that we recognise as obtaining--for instance, criteria that we can effectively apply. The use so described competely embodies the meaning of the expression involving that expression to be true, or equivalently, the state of affairs asserted by such a statement to obtain, is required."

Gregory Currie on Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein, Frege and the Vienna Circle (Blackwell) in TLS, February 17-23 1989, p.163

The author criticizes "analytical philosophers": concentration on themes, abstraction from historical circumstances.

"Conventionalism" is "the view that necessity is the product of our linguistic choices."

Comment

This is contradictory: choice cannot define necessity because necessity implies only one possible representation.

Webster's: "Conventionalism [is] a theory that regards the principles of logic, mathematics, or science as conventions or as true by convention."

Convention: "An agreement or decision about basic concepts or principles (as geometric axioms) voluntarily but not altogether arbitrarily arrived at though based neither on physical experiments nor on a priori judgements."

"Having rejected the idea that Wittgenstein was a radical conventionalist Baker must explain the basis for the demand that conventions be consistent...The world is fully described by the totality of true propositions. As a consequence, the limits of language are the limits of the world."

Comment

1) The "world" here implies a controversial "realist" version.

2) Otherwise, "true propositions" means all thought, because our intuitions are "true" (e.g. our fantasies etc.).

"Any theory which describes the relationship between language and the world must be standing outside language...The overall metaphysical [view] of the relationship between language and reality lies outside our grasp, for it lies outside language."

Richard Jeffrey on Frank Plimpton Ramsay, Philosophical Papers and On Truth: Original manuscript materials (1927-1929) from the Ramsey Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, edited by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, TLS, May 17 1991, pp.5-6

"But on the whole, Ramsey's work is quite disjoint from Wittgenstein's. His path-breaking deflationary account of truth appears fully formed in a paper on propositions read to the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1921: `The most certain thing about truth is that "p is true" and "p", if not identical, are equivalent. This enables us to rule out at once some theories of truth such as that "to be true" means "to work" or "to cohere" since clearly "p works" and "p coheres" are not equivalent to "p"'."

Stephen Toulmin on Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A life: Young Ludwig (Duckworth), in TLS, September 2-8 1988, p. 947

"In all his philosophical work, Wittgenstein sets out to map the scope and limits of linguistic expression, and to show how we are tempted to overreach those limits...Between Kant and Wittgenstein, the locus of debate focused on the scope and limits of `representation'".

"...[T]he Tractatus has a single unifying aim--to map the scope and limits of `language in general' in the way that [Heinrich] Hertz had mapped the scope and limits of physical theory; and in doing so to show why (in Wittgenstein's view) `value issues' could not help being ineffable...So, the account of linguistic representation in the Tractatus, based on the model of `pictorial' representation, entails nothing about the theory of knowledge or the philosophy of mind."

Malcolm Budd on David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon) in TLS, February 3-9 1989, p.115

"The principal aim of Wittgenstein's enigmatic early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is to establish the limits of expression of thought in language...The Tractatus presented the restrictive egocentric thesis of the solipsist with a dilemma: either his ego is identified independently of the objects it faces or it is not. If, however, the identification is independent, it must be by reference to the solipsist's body, so that his thesis is self-refuting; if, on the other hand, the identification is not independent, the thesis is empty...Because there is no room within the concept [solipsism] for the ego as owner of experience, the solipsist really does have no alternative but to place his ego in the common world, thus abandoning his solipsism."

Comments

(1) Pure ego does not exist: awareness is never empty.

(2) Solipsism of this sort is either incoherent or it is purely verbal.

(3) Assuming it isn't, how about a blind man?

(4) I exist in the world; therefore, I am, rather than: I think, therefore I am.

"The conclusion of the private language argument is that it is not possible for someone to make discriminating references to the different types of sensation he experiences without relying in any way on his body or its physical environment."

Comment

This is an elementary statement of physicalism, but recent research on the localization of sensation in amputees shows that it is mistaken.

Post-Tractatus views

"For the later Wittgenstein therefore not only is there no objective reality, but there is no simple meaning. Any sentence as proposition has as many meanings as there are contexts."

Phillips

"For Wittgenstein, basic propositions are not foundational. They enjoy their status within practices where they are held fast by all that surrounds them."

Arthur C. Danto on Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius (Cape), in TLS, October 19-25 1990, p. 1115

"...[H]e was consistently persuaded, as Nietzsche had been and the Positivists were, that there are no objective philosophical truths...[H]e went on to declare the cognitive bankruptcy of the Tractatus itself, in its strained effort to talk about what it was its chief thesis to state that could not be stated."

"`Words have meaning only in the stream of life' is one of his deepest teachings. At the front [during WW1], Wittgenstein continued to struggle with certain questions of logic, those which in effect make up the first past of the Tractatus--but his work was interrupted with a question, `What do I know about God and the purpose of life?'--which he answered, `The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.' And `To pray is to think about the meaning of life.' These thoughts find a place in the Tractatus in shattering formulations."

Wittgenstein: "The philosophical problem should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to--the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

Comment

(1) This statement is reminiscent of Beckett's characters trying to stifle consciousness.

(2) The connection between consciousness and philosophy is explicit here and it indicates the essential futility of Wittgenstein's efforts.

Somewhere, according to Hacker and perhaps others, Wittgenstein argues that representation is valid even when it is not true in the correspondence sense because it is about the way things are not which is part of what they are. This is an expression of the paradox of awareness. It is likely to be found in the Tractatus. However, it sounds strange coming from an analytical philosopher. What Wittgenstein is doing in this argument is trying to escape the psychological constraint of representation. If you posit representation you must also posit error, and this is not compatible between Wittgenstein's idea that logic imbues the world and its representation.

And there is something even more fraught. When Wittgenstein says that a representation can represent the way things are not he is falling headlong into the endless hole of regress, because it implies a representation of a representation and so on. For instance: A implies -A; A = (A and -A); (A and -A) implies -(A and -A); this implies its negation; and so on. Now, I do not deny that a representation can be vacuous and still seem valid as representation. But in my view it is not valid as the representation of something but as representation itself. Cognition tells us this without the need for some central perspective determining in which sense representation is or is not valid. Cognition allows us to distinguish between what is mere representation and what is the valid representation of something. In sum, it allows the distinction between the bases and the contents of propositions.

A third problem here is that the Wittgenstein argument we started with is inimical to the linguistic turn, for representation of the sort Wittgenstein is bandying about here is implicitly mental content without recourse to language, and if the linguistic turn means anything it is that language is the only means to understand mental content. It is implicit in Wittgenstein here that there can be a process of cognition different from its subsequent linguistic expression, because as soon as nonsense is expressed it must be grasped as nonsense and not as the valid representation of the way things are not.

Russell equated philosophy and science. He believed that this proposition had its justification in logical atomism. For Russell logical atomism was expressed in logical forms. For Wittgenstein logical atomism was linguistic. Logical forms were tautologies. Wittgenstein realized after the Tractatus, where he was ambiguous about the issue, that logical operators are not topic-neutral, i.e., it is not possible to be logical and still claim that a is blue and a is red. This was the refutation of logical atomism. Wittgenstein held that there is a reciprocal relation between the logic of the world and the logic contained in syntax. However, such a relation did not exist between logical forms and the way the world is. His reliance on language did not mean that linguistic utterances were necessarily valid or that the principle of bivalence applied to all propositions.

Finally, Wittgenstein discerned a distinction between inference in logic and inference by logic. The former entails formal logic, the latter applied or intuitive logic.

Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Sraffa anecdote that changed the course of Wittgenstein's thought was that Wittgenstein was arguing that propositions were linguistic and logical. Sraffa gave him an instance of a proposition that was neither linguistic nor particularly logical, i.e., the Neapolitan expression of disdain, after which Wittgenstein ceased trying to refine the Tractatus idea of the logical representation of reality. Subsequently he concentrated on the linguistic expression of the world. Personally I read the anecdote as showing that propositions need not be linguistic and that we can have a mental means for interpreting symbols.

Witt: "Entonces la ciencia de los fenómenos mentales presenta este enigma: No puedo observar los fenómenos mentales de los demás y no puedo observar los míos propios en el sentido estricto de `observar'. De manera que ¿dónde estamos?"

Monk: "Lo único capaz de disipar la niebla es una investigación conceptual, un analisis de la manera como se utilizan palabras como `intención', `disposición', `esperanza', etc., que muestre que estas palabras obtienen su significado a partir de una forma de vida, de un `juego de lenguage', algo muy distinto a la descripción y explicación de los fenómenos físicos."

Monk: "Una causa corriente de confusión era que, aunque comenzaba con una cuestión que aparentemente se refería a un fenómeno (`¿Qué es pensar?'), acababa siendo una investigación de la manera como utilizamos las palabras (como por ejemplo `pensar')."

Monk: "Más concretamente hay elementos en el desacuerdo de Brouwer con el logicismo de Russell que habrían despertado la simpatía de Wittgenstein. Brouwer rechazaba la idea de que las matemáticas podían o tenían que fundarse en la lógica. Además rechazaba la idea de que las comprobaciones lógicas fueran esenciales en las matemáticas. También rechazaba la objetividad de las matemáticas en el sentido en que se entiende normalmente: por ejemplo, para Brouwer no hay una realidad matemática independiente de la mente acerca de la cual los matemáticos hagan descubrimientos. El matemático, en opinión de Brouwer, no es un descubridor, sino un creador: las matemáticas no son un corpus de hechos, sino una construcci[on de la mente humana."

Although at the start of his career Wittgenstein did recognize that there can be a mental representation of reality, his most consistent position on mind was that it did not matter because it was inaccessible as such. If it could be shown that the concept of a private language was unsustainable, then talk of mind and introspection were groundless. By private language Wittgenstein meant a language used by only one person. Such a language could not have communicable rules. If a language does not have a grammar, it is unintelligible. Such a language cannot exist, and if it does not exist, then the private-language knowledge of mind is impossible. The private-language argument was based on a rule-following argument according to which it is not possible to follow a rule no one else in principle follows, for it would not then be possible to distinguish between following the rule and merely thinking that one was following it. Basically, a rule like a grammar must be shared. Since private language implies non-sharing, it has no rules, and if it has no rules, it is unintelligible. Another argument against a private language was that in an "ordinary" language pointing to objects or ostensivity is possible, however rude, but a private language of the mind cannot point to mental events: without ostensivity politeness maybe but no language. Therefore, private language is not a language and there is no reality in Cartesian introspection. One final argument rounded out Wittgentein's oppostion to psychologism. It was about solipsism, or the idea that we can only truly know what we have in our minds. Solipsism entails a private language. If solipsism is impossible or incoherent, then there is no private language. According to Wittgenstein, solipsism implies the strict separation between the self and the physical world, but the reference of self must be to its own body and thus the separation breaks down.

To make language more reliable Frege invented predicate logic with its truth-functional operators and quantifiers. Russell also found language unreliable. In fact, he proposed a curious thesis about the origin of meaning being ambiguity. I don't really really know how far he adopted Frege's notations if at all. Wittgenstein instead believed that language expresses logical relations and that it is through the analysis of usage that we can "clean" it of "impurities". He was concerned with what is licit and not licit in the use of language. In fact, for Wittgenstein all philosophy came down to this endeavour, and this apparently was a belief he held all of his life.

"As the logical theory of the Tractatus collapsed, Wittgenstein assailed the associated metaphysics of logical atomism. The world does not consist of facts rather than things; rather, a description of the world consists of statements of facts, not an enumeration of things. But a statement of a fact is just a true statement, not a description of a configuration of objects concatenated like links in a chain. Facts are not concatenations of objects in reality, for one cannot point at a fact, only point out a fact. Unlike concatenations of objects, facts have no spatio-temporal location. And to point out a fact is to point out that things are thus-and-so--that is, to make a true assertion." (Hacker, p.78)

Malcolm Budd on Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell), in TLS, March 13 1987, p. 277

"Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the Hintikkas's book is that which purports to explain Wittgenstein's views about `private experience'. They maintain that Wittgenstein's `private language argument' constitutes a criticism not of Cartesian metaphysics but of Cartesian semantics. They argue that Wittgenstein conceived of sensations as real events that are private `in a perfectly straightforward Cartesian sense', but that he held that we can use language to name or describe these private events only by means of a public framework: a `private object' can be spoken of only by means of a public correlate. Accordingly, although sensations are private events, sensation-language can never be essentially private but must also be publicly understandable."

Comment

The distinction between "language" and "public framework" is not clear. Suppose I say I am experiencing a "colic". Some one else may not associate a colic with the symptons I describe. A GP could decide on the correct use of the word colic. All talk of sensation implies a "public framework". All we are talking about here is of the use of words and the use of words always implies a public framework. If I still disagree, I can either invent a word that gains acceptance or find another usage precedent. But in the end, my colic must have some publicly acceptable verbal correlate, unless my experience is unique. Admittedly semantic debate could go on for a long time, but at some time the ambiguity has to cease. If it doesn't, we are in the realm of psychology. Why do I persist in my claim that my colic is unique? I am perhaps a hypochondriac. And so on.

(D) David Papineau on Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum: the Compound "I" (Blackwell), in TLS, February 23-March 1 1990, p.293

Is subjectivity reliable? Does it exist? Wittgenstein's argument against subjectivity [i.e. introspection, awareness, etc.] was that if its yields were so self-evident then there was nothing to discover through it.

Comment

(1) Must the fact that we use a public language mean that our private thoughts are necessarily useless or that we cannot reason about them?

(2) Aren't all significant philosophical statements radically "intuititve"? Descartes cogito, for example? Even Dennett's "multiple drafts"?

Robert J.Fogelin on Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (Routledge) in TLS, January 19-25 1990, p.73

Budd himself: "It is not just that essentially private objects cannot play any role in a public language-game: there cannot be a private language-game with words for essentially private objects."

[But there are no such private objects?]

Fogelin on Wittgenstein's originality: "[T]he revolutionary implications for philosophy of replacing deduction and explanation by description."

[Doesn't every description imply deduction and explanation?]

Wittgenstein's concept of grammar can be read as the equivalent of our concept of intuitive logic, as can be inferred from this interpretation in Hacker: "`Logical form' does not reveal the objective logical structure of things, since they have no such structure. They can be said to have a nature or essence, but that is determined by grammar, by the rules of the use of the expressions in question, which lay down what it makes sense to say, and is not answerable to reality for truth or correctness."

Wittgenstein distinguishes between formal logic and grammar, and he uses grammar and not intuitive logic because of his anti-mentalistic prejudices.

Word games

The ambiguities of language, which so exasperated Frege, correspond roughly to the the word games used to demonstrate the opacity of mind. Just as the Cicero/Tully equivalence can be used to refer to the opacity of mind, so Russell used the Scott/Waverly equivalence for roughly the same purposes, as in the propositions: "George III met Sir Walter Scott; he would like to meet the author of Waverly". Closer to the ambiguities of language is the Morning Star/Evening Star play on words invented by Frege. Another equivalence is the winner at Austerlitz/the loser at Waterloo. These are classics in analytical thought.