[2.4.6.] The Tractatus is Meaningless.

 

It is a consequence of his picture theory of meaning that much of what passes for meaningful utterances in ordinary language really isn’t meaningful at all.

 

Such propositions cannot be analyzed as the picture theory requires, they do not picture the world (even incorrectly) and so they are, strictly speaking, meaningless.

 

On his view, much of philosophy is meaningless in exactly this way:

 

4.003                      Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language.

                                (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.)

                                And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.

 

 

6.42                        So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.

                                Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

6.421                      It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

                                Ethics is transcendental.

                                (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

 

6.52                        We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

6.521                      The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

                                (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

                                There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

 

And that includes the Tractatus.

 

6.53                        The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54                        My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

                                He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

7                              What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. [1]

 

 

But we must be careful here. Wittgenstein did not hold that philosophical claims, including the bulk of the Tractatus, are gibberish.

 

Such claims may be, strictly speaking, meaningless or senseless in that they are unsayable, given the picture theory of meaning. But for Wittgenstein, this does not mean that they are gibberish. Although the Tractatus is senseless, it is nonetheless possible to understand it. He opens the preface of the Tractatus as follows: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.”[2]

 

 

[2.4.7.] The Purpose of Philosophy.

 

If the bulk of what passes for philosophy is meaningless or senseless, then how should philosophy proceed? What is its purpose?

 

Wittgenstein tells us:

 

4.111                      Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.

                                (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)

4.112                      Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.

                                Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

                                A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.

                                Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions.

                                Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. [emphasis added]

 

So the purpose of philosophy is to clarify our concepts. As we will see, this view of what philosophy is supposed to do influenced the members of the Vienna Circle.

 

 

[2.4.7.] The Later Wittgenstein’s View of Language.

 

Like the Tractatus (1921), the Philosophical Investigations (1953) asks: what is it for language to have meaning? How can we mean things by words?

 

The answer of the Tractatus was that language has meaning because any proposition can (in principle) be analyzed into basic components that name different objects in the world, and thus the proposition is a picture of a state of affairs.

 

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein attacks this view and suggests a different view of language altogether.

 

 

 

 

[2.4.7.1.] Rejection of the Picture Theory.

 

Wittgenstein was moved to abandon the picture theory of meaning, and the attempt to give a single account of meaningful language, by an incident recounted in the following passage, which describes a conversation he had with Piero Sraffa, a Cambridge University lecturer in economics:

 

One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form,’ the same ‘logical multiplicity,’ Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?” Sraffa’s example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same ‘form.’ This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.[3]

 

Wittgenstein came to see the picture theory as much too limited:

·         he didn’t reject it as being completely false;

·         he just thought that it described only one of the many different ways in which language works.

·         He uses the following analogy to describe his mistake:

 

It is as if someone were to say: “A game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . “ – and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others. You can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those games. (PI 3)

 

In other words, the picture theory of language accurately describes one sort of language, but it does not describe every meaningful piece of language.

 

But he did not attempt to replace the picture theory with another account of what all meaningful language has in common. He believed that no single, universally applicable account of meaning is possible.

 

 

 

[2.4.8.] The Augustinian Theory of Language.

 

Philosophical Investigations opens with a long quotation from the Confessions of Saint Augustine (354-430 CE)[4]:

 

                When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.

 

Wittgenstein then explains two assumptions about language made by Augustine (PI 1b, the second paragraph of section 1):

·         “the individual words in language name objects”

·         “sentences are combinations of such names”

 

And he says these two claims are “the root” of the following “idea”:

1.      “Every word has a meaning.”

2.      “This meaning is correlated with the word.”

3.      A word’s meaning “is the object for which the word stands.”

 

This is an early version the picture theory of language that Wittgenstein had articulated in the Tractatus.

 

Much of the PI is devoted to showing how these ideas about language are false and illustrating the confusion that they can cause.

 

 

[2.4.9.] Meaning as Use.

 

At PI 1c, Wittgenstein challenges claim (3), that a word’s meaning “is the object for which the word stands.”

 

He points out that this theory does not acknowledge that there are different kinds of word:

 

If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like “table”, “chair”, “bread”, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. (PI 1c)

 

On his view, for many expressions, the meaning of that expression is not some object for which the expression stands. Rather, its meaning is its use in the language in which it occurs.

 

In other words, the meaning of some expressions is simply the way in which people use those expressions.

 

This is illustrated with the example of the expression “five red apples,” written on a slip of paper given to a grocer. The grocer, in receiving the slip, acts in a certain way: he goes to a drawer of apples and removes five red apples, counting them as he pulls them out: one, two, three, four, five.

 

But what is the meaning of the word “five”?—No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used. (PI 1d)

 

Wittgenstein’s point is that we can thoroughly understand the meaning of “five” without asking questions like “What does ‘five’ stand for?” or “What object does ‘five’ name?” In this example, the meaning of “five” is nothing but how it is used by the grocer.

 

Assume for the moment that there is such a thing as what Frege called reference (Bedeutung)... Say that “red,” “apples,'' “five,” etc. stand for simple objects, and that when connected in such a way they form pictures. Wittgenstein grants this, but asks, “Who is interested in pictures?” What is important to language is that something can happen. Even if correlating the word with something will help somehow in understanding language, it still is not what understanding language is all about. The brute relation between name and named is dead; it doesn’t do anything.

 

The idea that meaning is use is central for the later Wittgenstein and something that marks a deep difference between the earlier and later Wittgensteins.

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday February 11. No new reading for next time. We will finish our coverage of Wittgenstein. Start preparing for your text (one week from today) if you have not already done so!