[2.4.] Ludwig Wittgenstein.[1]

 

[2.4.1.] General Introduction.

 

·         He was born 1889 in Vienna, Austria, to parents of Jewish origin; Ludwig was one of nine children.

·         The Wittgenstein family was extremely wealthy, comparable to the Carnegies and the Rockefellers in the United States; Ludwig’s father was an industrialist (a steel magnate).

·         1908: enrolled at Manchester University as a student of aeronautical engineering, and while there designed a jet-reaction airplane engine

·         At Manchester, he became interested in mathematics, and then the philosophy of mathematics. He read Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, and through that worked learned of Frege.

·         In 1911, he traveled to Jena to meet Frege, who recommended that he go to Cambridge to study with Russell, which he did, from 1911-1913. While there he developed intense relationships with Russell and other important figures. Russell wrote the following about an early encounter with Wittgenstein:

 

At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said ‘Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?’ I replied ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know. Why are you asking me?’ He said, ‘Because if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.’ I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfilment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him ‘No, you must not become an aeronaut.’[2]

 

·         Leaving Cambridge, he built for himself an isolated hut in Norway where he worked on his philosophical ideas.

·         In 1914, he joined the Austrian army. He fought in WWI but never stopped taking notes to record his philosophical thinking.

·         He was taken as a prisoner of war by the Italians in 1918. While a prisoner, he completed the notes out of which he would construct his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was published in German in 1921, and shortly thereafter published in English, with an introduction by Russell. It is the only book by Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. The main topic of the book is the relation between language and the world, and in this work he put forward his picture theory of meaning (which we will discuss soon).

·         After the war and the completion of the Tractatus, he stopped doing philosophy. He thought he had solved the problems he had been working on and that he had nothing else to say. He gave away his inheritance and worked around Vienna at a number of jobs (gardener, teacher) for almost a decade. During much of this period he was depressed to the point of contemplating suicide.

·         In the mid- to late-1920s, while still in Vienna, he became associated with a group of philosophers called the Vienna Circle (whose members included Rudolf Carnap), who were concerned with issues in philosophy of language, mathematics and science. He never became an ongoing member of this group, but his work influenced them tremendously. (We will study them soon.)

·         This inspired him to return to philosophy. In 1929, he moved back to Cambridge as a research student. He submitted the Tractatus (which had already gained an international reputation) as a doctoral dissertation and was awarded the Ph.D.

·         He gave seminars at Cambridge through the 1930s and 40s, developing his later philosophy. This involved a rejection of his earlier work, as well as of traditional philosophy as a whole.

·         In 1935, he returned to his hut in Norway for about a year. There he began work on another book, Philosophical Investigations.

·         He returned to Cambridge in 1937, and two years later was made Professor of Philosophy. But then WWII began, and (having already become a British citizen) he served as a medical orderly.

·         After the war, he returned to teaching, but only for a couple of years:

 

After the war he returned to his duties as professor, but as always he was unhappy in a formal academic routine. He thought university life led to hysterical artificiality. Writing to a pupil to congratulate him on his doctorate of philosophy, he said ‘May you make good use of it! By that I mean: may you not cheat either yourself or your students. Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s what will be expected from you.’ He described the life of a professor of philosophy as ‘a living death’ and after acting as a professor for only two years he resigned in 1947.[3]

 

·         He moved to Ireland, and there he completed Philosophical Investigations in 1948, but refused to publish it; he did, however, give permission for it to be published after he died.

·         He died in England in 1951, from cancer, and Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953.

·         He is buried in Cambridge, at the Ascension Perish Burial Ground.

·         In addition to the Tractatus and PI, there is quite a bit more of his work in print, material taken from his own notebooks and from lecture notes transcribed by his students.

·         His work in the later period of his life touches on lots of different areas of philosophy in addition to the philosophy of language, including philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion.

 

Most historians of analytic philosophy split Wittgenstein’s work into two periods and treat the work of those periods almost as if it was written by two different philosophers:

·         the earlier Wittgenstein, exemplified by Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [an excerpt from this is on electronic reserve and is the reading for today]

·         the later Wittgenstein, exemplified by Philosophical Investigations [an excerpt from this is on electronic reserve and is the reading for Wednesday; another is in your textbook].

 

 

[2.4.2.] The Metaphysics of the Tractatus.

 

Wittgenstein wanted to achieve an explanation of how linguistic meaning is possible.

 

Although he greatly admired Frege, he wanted to do this without using Frege’s distinction between sense and reference.

 

The theory of meaning he developed in the Tractatus is known as the picture theory of meaning. Its core idea is that a sentence is meaningful when it pictures the world. (We will discuss this view in detail next time.)

 

Before we look at that theory of meaning, we have to look at the metaphysics on which it is based.

 

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein made the following metaphysical claims:

 

1. The world consists of facts.

 

2. A fact is the existence of a state of affairs,[4] i.e., it is a fact that a given state of affairs exists.

 

3. A state of affairs consists of objects arranged in some specific way.

·         An example that illustrates what Wittgenstein meant here: my mug being on top of the desk. It may be a fact that my mug is on top of my desk; if so, it is a fact that the state of affairs of my mug being on top of my desk exists. In this example, the mug and the desk are analogous to objects, and the fact that the mug is on the desk is analogous to a state of affairs.

·         However, this mug-on-desk analogy is only an analogy. The “objects” mentioned by Wittgenstein are not physical objects, but something more basic... so basic that Wittgenstein could not given any examples of them. It was his view that there must be such simple objects, combined into states of affairs, in order for meaningful language to even be possible.

 

4. Facts are the ultimate logical constituents of the world. They are non-divisible; they cannot be logically analyzed into anything simpler.

·         E.g., if it is a fact that my mug is on my desk, then, on Wittgenstein’s view, the fact that my mug is on my desk cannot be broken down into anything simpler, like the mug and the desk.

·         This reflects his logical atomism:

 

logical atomism (df.): language and/or the world consists of ultimate logical “parts” that cannot be broken down any further.

 

Note, however, that Wittgenstein himself never used the phrase “logical atomism” to describe his theory.

 

5. A state of affairs has logical structure: it is composed of objects in certain relations with one another.

·         Imagine the state of affairs consisting of two objects, A and B, being next to each other. Although this state of affairs consists of objects in relation with one another, and thus has a structure, the fact that A is next to B cannot be broken down—the fact is absolutely simple.

 

 

[2.4.4.] The Picture Theory of Meaning.

 

With the metaphysical background in place, we can now examine the early Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning. The passages in blue, numbered 2.141-2.21 are quotations from the Tractatus; the bold claims numbered 1 through 6 are my own statements of the central ideas of Wittgenstein’s theory.

 

2.141      A picture is a fact.

 

A. It is possible for one fact (the existence of a state of affairs) to picture, or represent, another fact.

 

 

2.15        The fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate way represents that things are related to one another in the same way.

 

2.17        What a picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—correctly or incorrectly—in the way it does, is its pictorial form.

 

 

B. It is possible for one fact to picture another if the two facts have the same “pictorial form” or structure.

 

The following illustrates how this is supposed to work. Assume that the letters listed below are used as follows:

 

c = the chair	m = the mug	w = the watch
L = being larger than	T = being on top of	S = being silver
b = the book	d = the desk

 

Suppose it is a fact that cLb (i.e., suppose that the state of affairs of the chair being larger than the book exists).

 

In addition to being a fact itself, the fact that cLb is capable of picturing another fact. For example, the fact that cLb is capable of picturing the fact that mTd (the mug on top of the desk).

 

For the one fact to picture the other, their structure must be the same. A fact of the form wS, for example, cannot picture mTd or cLb — its structure is not the same as the structure of either of those facts.

 

Now, given that one fact (e.g.,cLb, the fact that the chair is larger than the book) has the same structure as another (e.g., mTd, the fact that the mug is on the desk) and is therefore capable of representing it, how can the first fact come to actually represent the second?

 

2.1514   The pictorial relationship consists of the correlations of the picture’s elements with things.

2.1515   These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements, with which the picture touches reality.

 

C. One fact actually pictures another when the objects and relations of the first fact are correlated with the objects and relations of the second fact.

 

For example, we can take the relation being larger than to be the name of the relation being on top of. We can take the chair to be the name of the mug, and the book to be the name of the desk. In this way, the elements of cLb and mTd come to be correlated with one another, and the first fact becomes an actual picture of the second.

 

 

2.21        A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false.             

 

D. A fact can describe or misdescribe another fact, i.e., it can be true or false.

 

If cLb pictures mTd, then it is possible that that “picture” is true, i.e., if c names m (the chair names the mug), L names T, and b names d.

 

But that “picture” can also be false, e.g., if c names d, and b represents m, then cLb would state that the desk is on top of the mug. If the mug is actually on the desk rather than vice versa, then what cLb says is false.

 

 

So far, we’ve only considered how one fact can picture another fact. But the point of Wittgenstein’s theory is to show us how a piece of language, like a proposition, can be meaningful. So we still have to see how Wittgenstein answered this question about language: how can a proposition (e.g., the proposition expressed by “The cat is on the mat”) picture a fact? The answer is:

 

 

E. Propositions can picture facts, because propositions themselves are facts.

 

A proposition just is the fact that certain words are arranged in a certain way. For example, the proposition expressed by “The cat is on the mat” is itself a fact: the fact that “is on” comes after “The cat” and before “the mat.”

 

 

F. A proposition, which is itself a fact, can describe or misdescribe another bit of reality, i.e., it can be true or false.[5]

 

And for Wittgenstein those are the only two options; on this he agrees with Russell and disagrees with Frege.

 

SUMMARY: The possibility of linguistic meaning is explained by the existence of states of affairs with structured elements, i.e., it is explained by facts.

·         A proposition is the fact that a state of affairs exists, namely, the state of affairs of bits of language being structured in a certain way.

·         So a proposition can represent/picture another fact if that fact and the proposition share the same logical structure.

 

 

[2.4.5.] Elementary Propositions.

 

A critic of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning might complain that the theory does not seem to reflect what is going on in the grammar of ordinary language.

 

But Wittgenstein would agree with this point, since he does not take his picture theory of meaning to apply to language in its perceptible aspect.

 

On his view, the surface grammar of a proposition spoken or written in English (or any other language) does not share the structure of the fact that the proposition represents.

 

In other words, the logical structures Wittgenstein describes in the picture theory are not apparent in the surface grammar of language.

 

Rather, an ordinary proposition is capable (in principle, if not in fact) of being analyzed into a number of much simpler “elementary propositions”—and it is these elementary propositions that represent (or misrepresent) facts by picturing them.

 

Wittgenstein was so convinced that linguistic meaning requires the sort of picturing described above that he was not bothered by the fact that he was never able to analyze a single proposition to reveal the elementary, picturing propositions hidden beneath its surface grammar or to analyze a single state of affairs to reveal the objects of which it consists.

 

 

Stopping point for Monday February 9. For next time, read (on e-reserve) Phil Investigations secs 1-27a. In this reading Wittgenstein frequently refers to ostensive definition:

 

ostensive definition (df.): when someone defines a term by providing one or more examples of a thing to which the word refers; e.g., I point to a number of desks and say “desk.”