Abstract
To what extent did mature Wittgenstein disagree with young Wittgenstein? Some of the continuity between them was unavoidable. They shared the therapy that anti-philosophy is supposed to provide. Young Wittgenstein criticized Russell to the point of making him abandon his major research project that included the search for certainty. This search followed two major ideas, logicism and logical atomism (Bar-Elli G: Analysis without elimination: on the philosophical significance of Russell’s ‘On denoting’. Matar and Biletzki (eds), pp 167–81, 2002, 170). Both failed. Young Wittgenstein persisted. His system was version of neutral monism cast in the language of modern logic.
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Notes
- 1.
This alludes to the meeting Russell and Wittgenstein had after the first world-war. It ended in total miscommunication.
- 2.
- 3.
Russell 1998, 439, report to the Council of Trinity of 8th May 1930 on Wittgenstein’s work. This document is significant as it presents Russell then as still hoping to see Wittgenstein discuss mathematics usefully.
- 4.
Russell’s preface to Gellner [1959] 2005 was no surprise; nor was his letter to the Times of 9 November 1959 that responds to Ryle’s refusal to have Gellner’s book reviewed in Mind.
- 5.
The dichotomy between truth by nature and truth by convention is historically most significant; since 1905 it is outdated. Many works on language take it for granted; they are thus outdated too. Quine stressed this fact repeatedly.
- 6.
In detail, things are much more complex than they look. The matrices comprise x, y, z, etc. F, G, H, etc., 1, 2, 3, etc.: F1(x), F1 (y), etc., G1(x), G1(y), etc.; etc. F2(x,y), etc.; etc. F3(x,y,z), etc. a, b, c, etc. (x), E(x), and the connectives of the statement composition calculus. As Paul Benacerraf (1973) has noted, this should be available prior to the construction of abstract set theory as the foundation of mathematics, yet it refers to (infinite) sets that require abstract set theory for their proper management.
- 7.
Two Lord Russells declared jointly that the one of them is not the other. Joint letter, The Times of London, February 25, 1959.
- 8.
Russell [1959a] 1995, 9 dated his earliest logical atomism as 1899–1900 (as a variant on Locke’s empiricism). He could then not develop it for want of tools and a clear problem. That crude version served his cooperation with Moore (against idealism) and then his refusal of Moore’s theory of judgment. Almost every discussion of Russell of logical atomism refers to a different version of it; see the impressive Bostock 2012 and Hager 2012 , 9, 56. All this testifies to Russell’s generosity to Wittgenstein (Bostock 2012, vii, 72).
- 9.
Quine considered the existence of sets the same as the existence of pieces of furniture. Bunge said the same about collectives and institutions. As distinctions are never objectionable, it is easy to postulate diverse kinds of existence. Already tremendously precise Lejewski 1954 has invited such a move.
- 10.
Neutral monism looks to positivists attractive as it looks ruthlessly empiricist. Less ruthless versions of empiricism lose this asset by allowing continuity and thus allowing what Reichenbach 1944 , 21 called inter-phenomena and outlawed – due to uncertainty or to the uncertainty principle. (He was vague on this, the central point of his book.) Ruthless empiricism admits as given only sense experiences. Young Wittgenstein advocated a version of it. This was brave but doomed to fail. He gave it up after he returned to Cambridge. His thesis, metaphysics is meaningless, lost its positivist background and thus became baffling. Followers then declared it sheer commonsense. It is what Popper presented as Wittgenstein’s neutral monism. (Anscombe 1971 rejected Popper’s ascription of neutral monism to Wittgenstein as more definitive than warranted. Later, Hintikka 1996 , 127 refuted her argument. Popper’s ascription prevails. See Jacquette 1997, 37 and Craig 1998 , Art. Neutral Monism.) Here mature Wittgenstein differed from young Wittgenstein. (PI, §654 presents as Urphänomene what TLP, §3.262 presents as what shows itself). In 1929, Wittgenstein published his paper that showed how far we are from solving the problem of induction. He then realized that the number and characters of the co-ordinates that he postulated for allowing science to store its data are neither a priori valid nor a posteriori valid: they are themselves products of observation. This Borges elaborated on in his “New Refutation of Time” (Agassi 1970) .
- 11.
TLP, §1.1: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”; §4.1272: “Wherever the word ‘object’ (‘thing’etc.) is correctly used, it is expressed … by a variable name. … [Otherwise] nonsensical pseudo-propositions are the result.” Wittgenstein said a few times that one cannot say that x. This usually means, one cannot say “x” in truth; here it means one cannot say “x” meaningfully: it is meaningless. This, as Popper has observed, illustrates Wittgenstein’s deviation from the ordinary meaning of “meaning”.
- 12.
Monk 1990 , Chapter 4 said, the master-apprentice roles of Russell and Wittgenstein reversed early in the day. This hagiographic claim rests on the information that Russell aaccpeted criticism of Wittgenstein. It has conter-examples from other critically-minded teachers. It nonetheless won great popularity. The hagiographic character of any commentary is apparent in its disregard for serious, honest, obvious criticism.
- 13.
TLP, §1.1: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”; §4.1272: “Wherever the word ‘object’ (‘thing’ etc.) is correctly used, it is expressed … by a variable name.” “The world we live in is the world of sense-data, but the world we talk about is the world of physical objects” (Wittgenstein b, 82, cited in Hintikka 1996 , 71–2 and by others). “We primarily observe things, not observations. But the act of observation may be inquired into and form a subject of study”. Dewey 1929 , 12 rightly denied this: “We primarily observe things, not observations”, he observed. “But the act of observation may be inquired into and form a subject of study”. Thus, neutral monism is dead.
- 14.
Wittgenstein did endorse the rules, even while declaring them meaningless and thus unassertable. Here his concept of ineffability differs from mysticism. It is amazing how many confusions this prompted.
- 15.
Russell narrates that Wittgenstein refused to admit what he could not see rhinos in Russell’s chambers, and he even refused to admit that there was no rhinos in Russell’s chambers. Russell adds that he suggested Wittgenstein should look under the bed. (In different versions, the animal is a rhino or a hippo, the place is a residence or a lecture room, and the place to look under is a bed or a desk.) This is a bit unkind, of course, as is the parallel story of the refusal of Dean Swift to open the door to Bishop Berkeley as a response to his anti-materialism. This conduct is unkind, yet it is the commonsense criticism of the strict empiricist demand to ignore the unobservable as unserious.
- 16.
TLP, §5.62: “… what solipsism means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.” In a discussion of this paragraph where commentators read it to mean the same as TLP, §5.6: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” Hintikka 1958 makes Wittgenstein commonsense rather than puzzling.
- 17.
Wittgenstein spoke of the ideal language, of the colloquial or the vernacular, and of language. Norman Malcolm added shared language and denied that Wittgenstein had any concern for it: his concern was the characterization of language. It is, he said, following rules (Malcolm 1989, 12). This is insufficient.
- 18.
This is a new, idiosyncratic meaning of the expression “my world”. I will not try to fathom its meaning.
- 19.
Anscombe 1990 ; 2011, 18*. Wittgenstein said his ambiguity and inability to communicate his thoughts was a curse (Scharfstein 1980 , 330). It was the inevitable outcome of his demanded not to try to say the unsayable (TLP, §7). This demand is not his invention: it is ubiquitous: all gurus who sanctioned it referred to the limitation of language; they did not discuss it, however, much less the barring of metaphysics. The central innovation of Wittgenstein is his claim that the western scientific traditional demand to bar metaphysics is demonstrable. In his mature writings, he took back or at least ignored logic yet he sought certitude.
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Agassi, J. (2018). Young Wittgenstein. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Synthese Library, vol 401. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00117-9_8
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