Abstract
John O. Wisdom (1947) says, [new-style] analytic philosophy has resulted from a radical change in our theory of definition, and the resulting devaluation of the place of essential definitions in science and philosophy. Most traditional and most current metaphysics are deeply involved with essential definitions. This invites the support of the proposal of Stuart Hampshire to salvage as much of metaphysics as possible. It is the proposal to correct Wittgenstein’s erroneous demand to oust all metaphysics by limiting it to the demand to oust metaphysical systems that rest on essential definitions, and to rectify logic accordingly. This is tantamount to the suggestion to oust the pretense to know what scientific theories will win assent and keep it to the end of days. It is possible to restrict further: whenever possible, we should reinterpret essential definitions to read them as conjectures. Perhaps surprisingly this proposal tallies with comments made by even the most ardent and significant members of the analytic school, such as Neurath and Carnap, not to mention Hintikka: insofar as metaphysics was ancillary to science, they all agreed, they did not object to it. This concession fully reverses their radicalism. It was a great loss that they ignored Wisdom. The limitation of anti-metaphysics to anti-essentialism is a modification that tallies with the current pervasive dissent from Wittgenstein in the analytic school, namely, the rejection of any grammatical criterion of demarcation of metaphysics Wittgenstein-style. This allows for the possible recognition of the value of some metaphysics.
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Notes
- 1.
Ben-Yami 2017 , 408 cites Wittgenstein’s explicit dissent from Plato’s view of knowledge – the one that Popper has christened the theory of essential definitions. In the passages that Ben-Yami cites, Wittgenstein declared that he had no theory of knowledge, only instances of knowledge. This way Wittgenstein obviously took back his early doctrine of showing: what young Wittgenstein said only shows itself the mature Wittgenstein considered an unsayable universal: observation imposes truth-value; whatever mature Wittgenstein showed he could say, and it was particular. What should intrigue Wittgenstein biographers is that he had his mature philosophy articulated in 1932 at the latest. True to it, he spent his last two decades in diverse illustrations of his opinions on diverse philosophical questions while repeatedly rejecting all articulations of the opinions he wished them to illustrate. His reference to Plato’s theory of knowledge is thus not to any doctrine but to his having a doctrine to begin with. This is my reading of Russell’s view of Wittgenstein’s mysticism as dominating his thinking in general.
- 2.
See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Articles on Neurath, Carnap and Hampshire . Essential definitions restated as hypotheses are often false. Whereas the debate rages about the question, are we really good/bad, the hypotheses that we are good/bad are obviously false. Nevertheless, we can ask, does goodness prevail in crucial moments as optimists say or are the pessimists right? This once-essentialist question is interesting.
- 3.
Plato’s term is “eidos”, meaning shape; Aristotle’s term is “ousia”, meaning substance or essence. To avoid ambiguity, Quine has suggested the quasi-medieval term “quidity” or “whatness” for idea-or-essence.
- 4.
The distinction between old-style and new-style analyses is neither exclusive nor exhaustive. In particular, both traditions include discussions of whether the verb “exist” is a predicate.
- 5.
Young Wittgenstein claimed to have done so by constructing a system with a very poor language plus some observation terms like names of colors or sounds, and nothing else: not even nouns or proper names.
- 6.
Unlike definite descriptions, Linsky observed, proper names are ad hoc. Hence, Kripke 1972 , 127 was in error when he recommended conflating them.
- 7.
Wittgenstein said, he loved clarity, meaning, he wanted all vagueness cleared, even if it is harmless (Sass 2001, 110, 115) , yet he never complained about the vagueness of the ordinary copula.
- 8.
The most remarkable exceptions being Boole’s and De Morgan’s notes on it.
- 9.
“No Scope for Scope?” Perhaps Hintikka’s failure to raise interest in scope is due to his view that the only way to handle scope properly was to reform Frege’s theory of the quantifiers: others found it prudent to wait for less radical a solution.
- 10.
See the first three lines of the first chapter of Boole’s The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, p. 15: “…every conceivable class of objects weather actually existing or not…”
- 11.
The word “entail” differs in logical and in legal discourses. Legally one may speak of actions entailing obligations, for example. Not so in logic, where only statements entail statements. Of course, it is easy to see similarity here, but let us ignore it.
- 12.
Arguably, already Aristotle realized that; and already the stoics developed an early version of the logic of propositions; yet it remained marginal; a kind of curiosity. All that remained of it that signified somewhat was the modus ponens.
- 13.
Existentialists revived this terminology in talks on the possibility to alter character (=essence). This is a new use of an old name; it is responsible for much confusion.
- 14.
Since this distinction is a part of Aristotle’s rhetoric, it was often ignored; the transition from syllogism to enthymeme was then furtive; not surprisingly, then, its rejection was tacit. Kant’s theory of judgment went together with his austere view of logic that forced logicians to increase precision gradually and thus dismiss Aristotle incidentally. The most striking instance of change follows the comparison between Mach’s dismissal of paradoxes and the view of them a major catastrophe that ensuing logic took for granted.
- 15.
Kant declared logic, arithmetic and geometry complete and final. He included Newtonian mechanics within geometry (Prolegomena §38). He wished chemistry to be scientific (i.e., worded mathematically).
- 16.
This contrast connects with another: Russell gave up the hope to establish certainty; Wittgenstein did not.
- 17.
“In pure logic, which, however, will be very briefly discussed in these lectures, I have had the benefit of vitally important discoveries, not yet published, by my friend Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein” (Russell 1914, end of Preface);
“In the above remarks I am making use of unpublished work by my friend Ludwig Wittgenstein” (Note 55, appended to the remark that the logical constants are not names).
- 18.
Proof: the assertions “x possess the property p” and “x does not possess the property p” contradict each other unless “x exists” is false. This sounds unintuitive but examples for it are abundant: mermaids are both human and non-human; the impossible event will happen at the end of the days.
- 19.
The Pickwick Papers by Dickens (1837) introduces the term “in a Pickwickian sense” that means not really.
- 20.
Daniel Cohen observes this. The great Wavy Gravy – once a poet named Hugh Romney , and always called Mr. Gravy by the New York Times – ran a campaign “Nobody for President”. Because it was almost a truism that “Nobody cares about you” “Nobody will solve income inequality” “Nobody gives a damn” and so on, so that by the time these truisms add up, one almost had a picture of NOBODY (Ms. Nobody let us say) that captured your vote. “Nobody’s perfect”. In the Bay Area Wavy Gravy is still a historic (hippie) and compassionate activist icon.
- 21.
Leading philosopher Husserl called “bracketing” his act of suspending judgment about existence.
- 22.
Hilbert had developed a formal presentation of geometry in 1899. Whitehead and Russell developed a formal language in 1910. The contribution of Frege was most significant for both. He was the first to state the distinction between a formal system and a formal language and even came close to having developed the first formal language proper in his 1879 Concept-Script: A Formal Language for Pure Thought Modeled on that of Arithmetic.
- 23.
The liberty to use terms freely should be obvious but still is not. Lewis Carroll has voiced this:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
- 24.
Were Shakespeare’s neologisms natural or stilted? Some he meant as stilted yet they became common. So is the vulgar “am I right or am I right?”
- 25.
TLP used a funnier formula: neither a nor a, which is the same as non-a. He did that since he wanted to use one undefined symbol, Sheffer’s dagger (for neither-nor).
- 26.
Are dialects, jargons, pidgin, creole, koiné, Swahili, are these stilted or natural? Is PMia a kind of pidgin?
- 27.
Kant declared the law of causality synthetic a priori knowledge. Russell tended to agree. Young Wittgenstein agreed but forbade saying so. This raises the question, did he allow saying this in ordinary language? His Philosophical Investigations assiduously ignores this question. What does his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus say on this? Advocates of “the new Wittgensteinian approach” discuss this matter (Crary and Read 2000, 225–6) , especially Putnam . I wish I could report what he says on it.
- 28.
- 29.
For more detail see Leonard Linsky 1967 , Ch. 4. Pelletier and Bernard Linsky, 2009 , 60 find “much in common between empty proper names and improper descriptions, from an intuitive point of view. … And whatever account is given for non-denoting proper names should also be given for improper descriptions … In any case, we should care about the present King of France”.
- 30.
The Polish school of logic, incidentally, denied that: they found somewhat informative even the most trivial of tautologies, all humans are human. In this study this is overlooked and the Russellian or Wittgensteinian idea is here taken for granted.
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Agassi, J. (2018). The Waning of Essentialism. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Synthese Library, vol 401. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00117-9_3
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