Lecture 2: Early Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle, Carnap

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) –Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Perhaps the most influential work of C20th philosophy – published 1922:

  • Consists of numbered propositions in 7 sets. Proposition 1.2 belongs to the first set and is a comment on proposition 1. Proposition 1.21 is about proposition 1.2, etc.
  • 7th set has only one proposition: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

Some important/representative propositions from the book:

1 The world is all that is the case.

4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality.

4.0312 ...My fundamental idea is that the 'logical constants' are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts.

4.121 ...Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it.

4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said.

4.5 ...The general form of a proposition is: This is how things stand.

5.43 ...all the propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing.

5.4711 To give the essence of a proposition means to give the essence of all description, and thus the essence of the world.

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Two competing sets of interpretations

  • “classical” – associated with the E. Stenius, G. E. M. Anscombe, and the Oxford Wittgensteinians – P.M.S. Hacker and (for a while) G. Baker
  • “resolute” – associated with Cora Diamond, James Conant, and the New Wittgenstein collection

The ongoing dispute is reflected in the fact that the two main internet encyclopaedias (SEP, IEP) have entries for LW that take opposing approaches, and ignore/reject the alternatives.

“CLASSICAL” READING

SEP gives a version of the standard “classical” reading, which allows us to view LW as continuing/improving Russell’s logical atomism.Here are the core claims of Wittgenstein's logical atomism (from SEP entry by Ian Proops):(

(i)Every proposition has a unique final analysis which reveals it to be a truth-function of elementary propositions ((Tractatus 3.25, 4.221, 4.51, 5);

(ii)These elementary propositions assert the existence of atomic states of affairs (3.25, 4.21);

(iii)Elementary propositions are mutually independent — each one can be true or false independently of the truth or falsity of the others (4.211, 5.134);

(iv)Elementary propositions are immediate combinations of semantically simple symbols or “names” (4.221);

(v)Names refer to items wholly devoid of complexity, so-called “objects” (2.02 & 3.22);

(vi)Atomic states of affairs are combinations of these simple objects (2.01).

LW is seen as offering a theory of linguistic representation that focuses on isomorphisms between propositional language and reality at the level of logical structure – the ‘picture theory of linguistic representation’

Raises two key sets of problems or questions:

1. How should we understand the status of the structural modelof realityvis a vis language?

  • as a metaphysical ontology of facts (and fact-defined objects) (cf. Plato, Leibniz, Perzanowski) revealed through language but independent of it?
  • as a presuppositional ontology – only implied as a necessary condition for the possibility of other things (e.g. propositional claims expressed in human language, or thought generally) (Stenius – Kantian interpretation)?

2. How to understand the “ethical turn” and the later passages– the idea that what is most important is unsaid, and that truths about logic (i.e. that there are logical as well as empirical limits to language and reality)are nonsense when stated, and can only be shown, not said

  • Hacker defends the idea that there are such truths– but saying this, or saying that such truths can only be shown, seems self-contradictory, as this would itself be the sort of thing that would then count as nonsense when said
  • “classical” readingstend toneglect LW’s remarks about the book having an ethical significance

“RESOLUTE” READING

IEP gives a version of the more recently developed “resolute” reading, which encourages us to view LW as rejecting Russell’s paradigm of analytical philosophy as a form of high-level conceptual-theoretical inquiry modelled on the natural sciences (summarized from IEP entry by Duncan Richter(

  • LW told Ludwig von Ficker that the point of the Tractatus was ethical.
  • In the preface he says that its value consists in two things: "that thoughts are expressed in it" and "that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved."
  • At the end of the book he says "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical".
  • He seems to be saying that the essence of the world and of life is: This is how things are. One is tempted to add "--deal with it."
  • seems to fit what Cora Diamond has called his "accept and endure" ethics
  • but he says that the propositions of the Tractatus are meaningless, not profound insights, ethical or otherwise
  • The "picture theory" denies sense to just the kind of statements of which the Tractatus is composed, to the framework supporting the picture theory itself.
  • If the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsensical then they surely cannot put forward the picture theory of meaning, or any other theory. Nonsense is nonsense.
  • However, this is not to say that the Tractatus itself is without value. Wittgenstein's aim seems to have been to show up as nonsense the things that philosophers (himself included) are tempted to say.
  • Philosophical theories, he suggests, are attempts to answer questions that are not really questions at all (they are nonsense), or to solve problems that are not really problems.

Vienna Circle(German: Wiener Kreis) – Logical Positivism/Empiricism

A group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed in the 1920s that met regularly in Vienna to investigate scientific language and scientific methodology.

  • distinguished by its attention to the form of scientific theories
  • belief that the logical structure of any particular scientific theory could be specified quite apart from its content
  • formulated a verifiability principle or criterion of meaning

= a claim that the meaningfulness of a proposition is grounded in experience and observation

  • statements of ethics, metaphysics, religion, and aesthetics considered assertorically meaningless
  • as a result, advocated a doctrine of unified science
  • no fundamental differences were seen to exist between the physical and the biological sciences or between the natural and the social sciences.

The founder and leader was Moritz Schlick(1882-1936) – epistemologist and phil. of science.

  • Others were: Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann;
  • among the members of an equivalentgroupin Berlin were Carl Hempel and Hans Reichenbach.
  • In 1929 Hahn, Neurath and Carnap published the manifesto of the circle:
  • WissenschaftlicheWeltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (A scientific world-view. The Vienna Circle).
  • in that year the first in a series of congresses organized by the group took place in Prague
  • In 1938, with the onset of World War II, political pressure was brought to bear against the group, and it disbanded, many of its members fleeing to the United States and a few to Great Britain.
  • Karl Popperhad contacts with the Vienna Circle, but did not belong to it
  • the Tractatus was discussed, and there were several meetings between Wittgenstein, Schlick, Waismann and Carnap
  • The Circle was very active in advertising the new philosophical ideas of logical positivism. Several congresses on epistemology and philosophy of science were organized

Long before the verification principle entered Circle’s discourse in the late 1920s, the thought expressed by Mach’s dictum that “where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned” (1883) was accepted as a basic precept. Responsiveness to evidence for and against a claim was the hallmark of scientific discourse.

Schlick (1926) convicted metaphysics for falsely trying to express as logically structured cognition what is but the inexpressible qualitative content of experience.

Carnap (1928b, §7) moved towards a formal criterion by requiring empirically significant statements to be such that experiential support for them or for their negation is at least conceivable.

  • Meaningfulness meant possession of “factual content” which could not, on pain of rendering many scientific hypotheses meaningless, be reduced to actual testability. Instead, the empirical significance of a statement had to be conceived of as possession of the potential to receive direct or indirect experiential support (via deductive or inductive reasoning).

Wittgenstein discussed the thesis “The meaning of its sentence is its verification” in conversations with Schlick and Waismann in 1929/1930:

  • For Wittgenstein, this probably more like a constitutive principle of meaning
  • But in the Circle, employed as a demarcation criterionagainst metaphysics
  • the Wittgensteinian version of the meaning criterion required conclusive verifiability (which Carnap’s of 1928 did not), but it also allowed for verifiability in principle only (i.e. it did not demand actual verifiability)
  • Like Carnap’s notion of experiential support, this criterion worked with the mere conceivability of verifiability.

Led to split between supporters of a more liberal approach (Carnap) and conservatives who wanted a stricter criterion (Schlick):

  • liberalization meant the accommodation of universally quantified statements…
  • butSchlick followed Wittgenstein’s suggestion to treat them instead as representing rules for the formation of verifiable singular statements.
  • Hahn pointed out that hypotheses should be counted as properly meaningful as well and that the criterion be weakened to allow for less than conclusive verifiability.

But other elements played into this liberalization as well:

  • problem of the irreducibility of disposition terms to observation terms
  • disagreement about whether verifiability/support in principle turned on what was logically possible or on what was nomologically possible as physical law
  • differences about whether the criterion of significance was to apply to all languages or whether it was to apply primarily to constructed, formal languages
  • Schlick focused on logical possibility and natural languages
  • Carnap came to focus on nomological possibility and constructed languages

Disagreement about the status of the verification principle, and the worry that it could turn out to be self-refuting, led to a loss of momentum…

A strong neo-Kantian influence meant that the analytical-synthetic distinction was treated as very important, but this ran into problems due to criticisms by Tarski, and in Quine’s famous attack, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) [see later lecture on American analytical philosophy]

Carnap in the US

In his first great work, Der logischeAufbau der Welt (1928; The Logical Structure of the World), Carnap developed a version of the empiricist reducibility thesis according to which all terms suited to describe actual or possible empirical facts are fully definable by terms referring exclusively to aspects of immediate experience, so that all empirical statements are fully translatable into statements about immediate experiences.

In 1935 Carnap moved to the US. Although he was not Jewish, he had been vulnerable to persecution by the Nazis for his social-democratic political beliefs.

During the 1940–41 academic year, Carnap was a visiting professor at Harvard University and took part in a discussion group that included Russell, Tarski, and Quine.

For Carnap, some issues cannot be adequately dealt with by considerations of ordinary linguistic usage:

  • theyrequire clarification by reference to artificially constructed languages that are formulated in logical symbolism and that have their structure and interpretation precisely specified by so-called syntactic and semantic rules.

Carnap developed these ideas in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934) and Meaning and Necessity (1947).

One idea in logic and the theory of knowledge that occupied much of Carnap’s attention was that of analyticity:

  • held that the statements of logic and mathematics, unlike those of empirical science, are analytic—i.e., true solely by virtue of the meanings of their constituent terms—and that they can therefore be established a priori (without any empirical test).
  • kept trying to formulate a precise characterization and theory of analyticity
  • vs. Quine, who argued that the notion of analytic truth is inherently obscure and the attempt to delimit a class of statements that are true a priori should be abandoned as misguided.

In his article “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950),Carnap proposed that we should distinguish between internal and external existence questions.

Let us say that, “with respect to various expressions, a linguistic framework is a set of rules for using for those expressions”; then:

  • An internal question is a question about whether x exists given a linguistic framework of rules governing the use of 'x'.
  • An external question is a question as to whether it would be useful to adopt the use of 'x' with those rules.

A linguistic framework is a set of linguistic conventions which determine the way in which we settle existence problems of a certain sort.

  • A straightforward example of such a linguistic system would be an axiomatised mathematical system, in which an existence problem is settled only by deduction from the axioms of the system.
  • The sort of existence problem thus settled would be what Carnap calls an internal question. The "linguistic framework" itself, however, remains to be justified.

The question of the existence or otherwise of the total system of entities (e.g. of numbers in general, rather than of some particular number), which one might say is presupposed in the linguistic framework and by the asking and answering of internal questions, is the external question.

  • internal questions are straightforward and philosophically uncontentious
  • external questions, which are generally those at issue in philosophical ontology disputes, are meaningless.

The external question should not be asked.

  • Instead we should ask whether or not any given linguistic framework is acceptable,
  • The answer should be based solely upon the utility of accepting the framework.

In effect, Carnap reduces the criterion for settling existence problems to two, the linguistic and the pragmatic:

  • We must either settle existence problems by reference to preexisting linguistic conventions, or we must produce a justification in terms of pragmaticutility for such linguistic innovation as we propose.
  • An appeal to "ontological insight" of some sort is not satisfactory.
  • No amount of argument can justify a usage which is neither conventional nor useful.

Carnap’sPrinciple of Tolerance states that for theoretical and scientific purposes, pluralism is acceptable with regard to both languages and logics.

Linguistic pluralism:

  • verbal disputes are not really theoretical disputes about the domain we are describing, but at best practical ones about the most useful and efficient ways to use words, given our goals

Logical pluralism

  • rather than trying to figure out which is the best logic a priori from first principles (in philosophy), we should let logicians develop languages as they like, and then make our judgements based on how things turn out (vs. Quine on first-order vs. second-order logic)

Recommended reading, listed in order of difficulty:

English-language:

ELEMENTARY:

S. P. Schwartz, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy from Russell to Rawls, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; Chapter 2

INTERMEDIATE:

A. Stroll, Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, Columbia University Press, 2000; chapter3

ADVANCED:

S. Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1. The Dawn of Analysis, Princeton University Press,2003; parts 3-4.

Polish-language:

ELEMENTARY:

A.Nowaczyk, Filozofiaanalityczna, PWN, 2008;rozdz. 5-6.

INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED:

T.Szubka, Filozofiaanalityczna. Koncepcje, metody, ograniczenia, WydawnictwoUniwersytetuWrocławskiego, 2009.

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