Abstract
Is there a logic of empirical reality? No member of the Vienna Circle would have answered positively to such a question; and Wittgenstein, who of course was apart, less than the others. My point here is, in a way, to show the internal reasons of this impossiblitiy especially in Wittgenstein’s thought rather than just accept the commonplace that logical empiricists in a stricter or looser sense defined themselves as opposed to any kind of mysterious link between logic and reality. One can legitimately doubt that these reasons are the same as the ones other Viennese philosophers would have advocated. Yet has the question even a sense in the context of his philosophy? Clearly, Wittgenstein’ s rather odd “empiricism” leads one to question the respective status of necessity and possibility before answering the question whether contingency proper can fit into a logical framework or not.
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Notes
repr. in Dilemmas,Cambridge 1953, pp. 15–35.
repr. in Aristotle, Modern Studies in Philosophy. A Collection of Critical Studies, ed. J. Moravcsik. MacMillan & Co, 1967, pp. 34–50.
in his Wittgenstein, Blackwell, 1983, see especially “Modal logic and the Tractatus” pp.183,especially pp. 188–189.
in Wittgenstein and der Wiener Kreis. Schriften III. Suhrkamp 1980, pp. 73.
I borrow this expression from Heidegger’s Sein and Zeit,1927.
This is the case of the schema “(3x)fx” which Russell proposed to read “fx is possible”, but for Wittgenstein it is not the right way to understand it. Against such a “statistical” (O. Becker, 1952, conception of modality in terms of frequences of probability, Wittgenstein says that to know that “fa” and “(3x)fx” are true, presupposes the meaning of “fa” (see 5.525 a) because meaning is prior (4.064). Concerning this reduction of modal concepts to the extensional language of quantifyers, according to a concept Hintikka among many others traces back to Aristotle (in Time and Necessity. Studies in Aristotle’s theory of modality. Oxford 1973), see G.H. von Wright, note 3 above pp. 189–190.
cf. “Über den xvptevov 2,oyoó des Megarikers Diodorus” (Berlin, 1682), repr. in Kleine Schriften,Berlin, 1910, Bd. I, pp. 252–262, after: Epicteti: Dissertations ab Arriano digestae,rec. Schenkl. Leipzig 1916 (edition Budé).
Philosophical Investigations 12, 2 April 1989. I thank Joseph Pearson from Northwestern University,Chicago, to have transmitted me a copy. It helps to realize how much G. Ryle is indebted to Wittgenstein in these passages of Dilemmas.
About this Rylian distinction (and its German corrsponding one “Unvermeidbare” l “ Unvermeidliche”) and the fact that modality here is relevant to statements rather than events, I refer to Hans Burkhardt’s paper: “Modaltheorien Wittgensteins” in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, Proc. of the 9th Int. Wittgenstein Symposium. publ. Wien, 1985, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 537–543. I thank him to have given me an opportunity to develop Wittgenstein’s rejection of a logic of future events, as clearly stated in 5.1361.
in Gesammelte Aufsätze 1926–1936, Wien 1938, Gerold. As a good reader of Lewis, M. Schlick seems to share with Wittgenstein a modern kind of Diodorean logical necessitarism if restricted to the realm of statements and relations between statements only, and in so far as relation between statements is not confused with relation between events.
in Philosophy of Science part one publ. in II (1936) and part two in IV (1937). See especially III, p. 423.
in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,Oxford, 1960. For a critical approach to Stenius’ Kantian reading of Wittgenstein, see my paper on Wittgenstein and Kant: “Are the limits of understanding the same ones as the limits of knowing?”, read on the 5th of Sept. 1990 at the Coll. on “Le Destin de la Philosophie Transcendentale” co-org. by F. Gil, J. Petitot and H. Wismann, Cerisy-La-Salle.
I have examined an aspect of this problem in my paper “Wittgenstein and Phenomenology or: two languages for One Wittgenstein”, in Grazer Philosophische Studien,vol. 33/34, 1989, p. 157.
see for instance W. Stegmüller: “...mit der Verwerfung des Synthetischen Apriorismus fällt für Wittgenstein der Unterschied zwischen dem logisch Möglichen and dem theoretisch Möglichen fort”, in Hauptströmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Stuttgart, 1976, p. 557.
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Soulez, A. (1990). Necessity and Contingency in Wittgenstein’s Thought. In: Haller, R., Brandl, J. (eds) Wittgenstein — Eine Neubewertung / Wittgenstein — Towards a Re-Evaluation. Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft, vol 19/1. J.F. Bergmann-Verlag, Munich. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-30086-2_16
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