Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein
Philosophers seldom change their mind about anything as much as Wittgenstein did about language. The shift from his early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to his later work, Philosophical Investigations, is as radical as the move from modern to post-modern philosophy. Wittgenstein leaves behind the view that we can come to know the structure of reality by studying the structure of language, and embraces the idea that language tells us more about ourselves than the world outside us. Lee Braver traces the steps of this incredible transformation. Few philosophers have given rise to an entire movement, far fewer to two. Along with Heidegger, Wittgenstein counts among this select number in the 20th Century. Wittgenstein capped his early career with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a dense cryptic book whose truth he found “unassailable and definitive” in finding “on all essential points, the final solution of the problems” (T Preface)--until he came back years later to assail its solutions. He returned to give not just different solutions, but an entirely different take on the nature of knowledge, reality, and what philosophical views about such matters must be like. These two phases of his thought shaped much of roughly the first half of analytic philosophy’s history. The Tractatus brings Frege, Russell, and Moore’s logicism to its culmination and inspired the Vienna Circle. His later work, generally represented by the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, is a foundational work of the ordinary language philosophy practiced by Austin and Ryle and, despite his personal hostility to naturalism, contains elements that pushed analytic thought in that direction where Quine and others then took over. One of the central topics Wittgenstein changed his mind about was on the question of realism - whether we can know the world as it really is and whether our language can map onto reality. SUGGESTED VIEWING Language and power With Kehinde Andrews, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, John McWhorter, L. A. Paul Kant had put this question on a new revolutionary footing by turning the inquiry away from its exclusive focus on the object of inquiry–reality–to the subject of knowledge–the inquirer. His transcendental idealism argues that our mind interacts with what it knows, making it impossible to ever know reality as it is in-itself but only as it is for-us. We can never see the light in the refrigerator turned off because the only way to see it is by opening the door, which turns it on. The standard origin story of analytic philosophy traces it to Russell and Moore use of Fregean logic to overcome Kant’s predicament. “The study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy… [which] in our own day, is becoming scientific through the simultaneous acquisition of new facts and logical methods” (Russell 1929, 259–60).___The Tractatus uses logic as a decoder ring of reality: once correlated, we can read the deep structure of reality from the rules of logic.___Logical analysis brought philosophy to maturation the way math did for physics, allowing it to put away the childish things of its past by “clear[ing] up two millennia of muddle-headedness about ‘existence,’ beginning with Plato’s Theaetetus” (Russell 1945, 831). In particular, logic enabled him to avoid anything that remotely smacks of Kantian anti-realism. The idea that “the mind is in some sense creative... is essential to every form of Kantianism” but “all knowledge must be recognition, on pain of being mere delusion; Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians” (Russell 1996, 450–51). Only thus is it the world that our philosophy is capturing and not our own shadows on the wall.The Tractatus uses logic as a decoder ring of reality: once correlated, we can read the deep structure of reality from the rules of logic. We get to logic through language since all language must obey logic, or else it would be unintelligible, so if we understand language, we can understand logic, and if we grasp the system of logic, we can project that into the structure of the world.Ultimately, the function of language is to say what the world is like, with all other linguistic activities parasitic on this central one. Using a Kantian-style transcendental inquiry, Wittgenstein argues that whatever is required to say that anything is the case–the conditions for the possibility of saying the world–must hold as well. Asserting (or denying) what is the case succeeds only if the assertions can picture or mirror the states-of-affairs they assert. States-of-affairs are made up of parts whose arrangements determine what is the case–the cat is one part and the mat another; their arrangement is one of a number of possible spatial relationships (cat on mat, mat on cat, side-by-side, etc.). An assertion can only represent the fact that the cat is on the mat if it is composed of corresponding parts whose arrangement reflects that of the objects. Thus, we have a strict parallel between the configuration of basic propositions in our language and of states-of-affairs in the world.___Instead of going through the front door of examining reality through our own idiosyncratic faculties, an avenue blocked by Kant, logic gives us a backdoor into metaphysics via the language we speak everyday.___Logic represents the structures that structure language’s structure–the vocabulary at the base of all vocabularies, the grammar governing all grammars–meaning that it captures the fundamental composition of all that is the case and all that could be. Each unit of language (propositions) tells us how a particular piece of the world (states-of-affairs) is like; language as a whole shows us how the world as a whole–to the very limits of possibility–is. “Logical form… is mirrored in [propositions].... Propositions show the logical form of reality” (4.121). Logic then is the deliquescence of the fog of language into clear drops of logic. “Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental” (6.13).Instead of going through the front door of examining reality through our own idiosyncratic faculties, an avenue blocked by Kant, logic gives us a backdoor into metaphysics via the language we speak everyday. While languages may be relative to cultures and time periods, like the forms of our mind organizing experience anthropocentrically, they all must share the same logic form, thus revealing the deep nature of reality underlying all varying opinions about it. “Logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. If we know the logical syntax of any sign-language, then we have already been given all the propositions of logic” (3.124). Logic liberates thoughts from thinkers so absolutely that not even God can contravene it (5.123). Wittgenstein’s two early influences–Frege-Russellian logicism and Schopenhauerian ethics–merge in this logical realism, as logic allows us to fade into a pure will-less spectator who merely gazes upon the rigid symbolic machinery of the universe–a logical beatific vision. SUGGESTED VIEWING Getting everything, losing everything With Maria Balaska, Anders Sandberg, Massimo Pigliucci Wittgenstein’s later work still pursues the same question—how do we succeed in meaning anything?—but instead of focusing on the inherent logic in all language and the autonomous operations of the crystalline clockwork of meaning, the emphasis is now on the “we” who mean. Now he “stick[s] to the subjects of our every-day thinking” (§106) by “talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” (§107) in order to resist getting “dazzled by the ideal” (§100). Rather than peering through the vapors to discern the ultimate structure of reality, Wittgenstein now sees philosophy as “a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding” (§109)--a seduction into believing that it makes sense to talk about “ultimate” structures and the one true method of discerning them.Wittgenstein describes this bewitchment in quite Kantian terms, for instance, in discussing the Tractatus’ identification of the core function of language.Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (4.5): “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.” —– That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it (§114).He had earlier seen this as a profound discovery about language, but now he locates it in the surface of his approach. The demand that language have but one ultimate function was, so to speak, an a priori requirement he imposed on his study of language instead of an empirical result derived from it. “The crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not something I had discovered: it was a requirement” (§107).___Instead of blithely assuming we are directly gathering information from the object of our examination, we must turn our gaze around to critically examine the tool by which we are conducting our examination.___He compares it to “a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off” (§103). This analogy was in fact coined by Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (based on lectures from 1941-42) to explain Kant’s anti-realism.“If you always wore blue spectacles, you could be sure of seeing everything blue (this is not Kant’s illustration). Similarly, since you always wear spatial spectacles in your mind, you are sure of always seeing everything in space. Thus geometry is a priori in the sense that it must be true of everything experienced, but we h...
