Wittgenstein (W) was born in Vienna in 1889, into a large and wealthy family. After being home schooled until he was 14 he attended Realshule at Linz, with contemporaries such as Adolf Hitler.
W read Russell’s Principles of mathematics, and through doing so, became acquainted with Frege, whom he eventually met, and following his advice, studied at Cambridge under Russell.
After living a solitary life in Norway, he enlisted for the Austrian artillery after the war broke out in 1914. During his time in the military, he devised a series of philosophical thoughts, which, during his imprisonment, he turned into his only philosophical book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book was published in Germany in 1921, and shortly afterwards in England, translated into English, with an introduction by Russell.
W’s book was the start of a type of rational thinking called logical positivism, greatly thought of amongst members of the Vienna circle, which I will return to later.
Kenny, in Philosophy in the Modern World calls Tractacus “short, beautiful, and cryptic.” It is written, not so much as a philosophical argument or theory, but simply as a series of statements. It is broken up into seven, short, declarative chapters, most of which are accompanied by a large number of footnotes. Chapter one, for example, states that: “The world, is all that is the case.” This is a relatively simple idea, that can be followed easily in terms of a cursory reading, but for any kind of logic to apply to it, we have to know what is meant by “the case.” chapter one, for example, is followed by several footnotes, including:
1.1: The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11: The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12: For the totality of facts determines what is the case and whatever is not the case.
Etc.
The footnotes are used to expand each idea, attempting to explain each opening statement. But in most cases the additional footnotes require more explanation themselves, this can result in there being over 50 footnotes, as there are for chapter three, each trying to explain the assertion that “a logical picture of facts is a thought” and often requiring that when a footnote explains another, it may not explain the assertion, so much as create more questions surrounding it. For example
3.12: I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign. And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world.
W is then forced to further explain his definition of a proposition, as without being truly defined, there can be no true logic.
3.13 A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it (The content of a proposition means the content of a proposition that has sense.) A proposition contains the form but not the content, of its sense.
Clearly this has not fully explained what he means, and is followed by further and further explanation, resulting in the aforementioned 50 plus statements, which are then followed by further chapters designed to help explain the previous ones.
Chapter three, ends with:
3.5: A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.
Chapter four picks up from this, and starts to explain what a thought is (A proposition with a sense). And chapter five discusses what proposition is. Chapter six moves somewhat away from the language side and begins to look at mathematics and logic as a way to explain a proposition:
6: The general form of a truth function if [p, E, N (E)]. this is the general form of a proposition
In this, P stands for all atomic propositions, E stands for any subset of propositions, and N stands for the negation of all propositions making up E.
Supposedly this says the same as a theorem produced by Henry Sheffer, that a logical sentence can be derived from a series of NAND operations concerning the totality of atomic propositions (a NAND operation being a logical operation on two logical values, which produces a value of true, if at least one of the prepositions is false)
Later in chapter six, W changes tack somewhat. Having spent most of the book attempting detailed definitions and explanations on almost everything he has discussed, he claims that there can be no proposition of ethics, as: “propositions can explain nothing that is higher.” he says that there is no way to put ethics into words, they are “transcendental” there appears to be some disagreement here as to what exactly W means by this. It is possible that logical positivists would argue against his assertion that any attempt to discuss them a meaningless endeavour. A logical positivist may argue that anything can be discussed can be defined. In “The new Wittgenstein” it is argued that W means, in a similar fashion to Kant, that if ethics are used in empirical sciences, they are destroyed. And they are also destroyed if attempted to use with synthetic, a priori judgements.
W begins to veer toward religious considerations. He talks of will, and its relation to ethics; as well as death, and what happens to the world after it: “…at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” “death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.”
It seems to me that in the final few statements of chapter six, W has given up any attempt at explaining each of his statements. It appears more as if he is simply jotting down thoughts that he cannot explain: “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does reveal himself in the world.” By “higher” he may mean God, in which case he is saying that God does not care about anything that happens in the world. This may explain the strange way the book ends. After explaining in great detail, his version of, essentially, how to think. He says firstly that there are things that cannot be explained, and that these are “mystical.” and then, that once you fully understand what he means, you will see that it is all senseless “He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.”
He ends his book with the bizarre chapter that consists of the single line: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Perhaps he is saying that he has covered everything of importance and nothing else is worth speaking of. Or that, once recognising that everything he has said, is senseless, there is no reason to talk about it anymore.
The Vienna circle was a group that followed much from W. they had a shared attitude of philosophy that revolved around what became referred to as logical positivism. Taken from Tractatus they asserted that all knowledge should be set to a series of rules using a language of science and rational reconstruction which replaced ordinary language with much better suited equivalencies. They claimed that logic and mathematics, along with science, were the universe of meaningful judgements, and nothing else was of any relevance, ethics, aesthetics etc. The influence of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle (coming from Tractatus), has spread across the world due to eminent philosophers having dispersed as a result of the second world war. The resulting work from those of the circle has contributed to advances in language (Ayer) as well as redefining the scientific method, with the verification principle which ensured a statement could either be analytic or capable of being verified. This was later discredited with falsification, which demands that to be scientific, a hypothesis must be able to be contradicted e.g. all swans are white, can be falsified as it is possible to find a swan which is not white.
Despite the apparent insistence by W that logical positivism was a misreading of his book, it is undeniable that the effect his book has been used as a focal point for many of the great jumps in philosophy and science of the twentieth century.
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