What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to?

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein (Philosophical Remarks, §64).

‘I have a pain’ is a sign of a completely different kind when I am using the proposition, from what it is to me on the lips of another; the reason being that it is senseless, as far as I’m concerned, on the lips of another until I know through which mouth it was expressed. The propositional sign in this case doesn’t consist in the sound alone, but in the fact that the sound came out of this mouth. Whereas in the case in which I say or think it, the sign is the sound itself.

A thought is a proposition with sense

Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz. Someone made a video of this, and I felt so sorry for it (only 43 views) I felt compelled to link to it.



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Was Wittgenstein a rejectionist?

The Phoenician Maverick helps me out of the mid-week posting famine with this post on whether Wittgenstein was a 'rejectionist' with respect to the question why there is anything at all.

Just a point on the quote: it is Kenny paraphrasing Waismann's note of what Wittgenstein may have said, i.e. it is Wittgenstein's voice here, not Kenny', as Bill seems to suggest in his point #4. Otherwise I agree with him that Wittgenstein's position rests on the saying/showing distinction which is in turn closely connected with the Frege-Russell account of existence. Whether I agree with that position is something which I decline to talk about for the moment. Altissimum enim est huiusmodi negotium et maioris egens inquisitionis.

Wittgenstein on negation

Plato suggests the following problem in the Theaetetus:

In judging one judges something; in judging something, one judges something real; so in judging something unreal, one judges nothing; but judging nothing, one is not judging at all.

According to Anscombe* Wittgenstein returned to this problem again and again throughout his life. It presents a formidable challenge to his picture theory of language. He thought, in his early work, that in a proposition we supposedly put together a picture of the world just as in the law-courts of Paris of the early twentieth century, a car accident is represented by means of dolls. So how do we get a picture of negation?

What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it - correctly or incorrectly - in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality. So what reality does a negative proposition represent? What is the reality represented by 'snow is not black'? According to Wittgenstein, the negation operator 'not' does not make a picture at all, but simply performs a truth functional operation on the picture given by the corresponding affirmation. The picture he drew in his early Notebooks (above) shows this clearly**. And in the Tractatus he writes (my emphasis)

4.0621 But it is important that the signs 'p' and '-p' can say the same thing. For it shows that nothing in reality corresponds to the sign '-'.

Determinatio negatio est. Determination is negation. By drawing a circle in the sand we delimit all the sand on the beach outside the circle as well as all which is inside.

Does this help us to understand how the concept of negation is learned?  Is negation a concept at all?

*G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (London 1971) p.13
**Taken from a nice paper by Robert Pippin here about this subject.

Wittgenstein on why anything exists

The Maverick has picked up my post on Siger, which itself picks up an earlier post of his.  Is Siger's approach 'rejectionism'? "The rejectionist rejects the question as ill-formed, as senseless."  Or is it 'Theologism'? "There is a metaphysically necessary and thus self-explanatory being, God, whose existence and activity explains the existence of everything other than God."

Bill mentions my remark about Wittgenstein, but I can't locate the paper I was thinking of. It was after the Tractatus and either shortly before or shortly after he returned to Cambridge, and it began with the question of why anything exists at all.  I can clearly remember looking at it (in Bristol in the early 1980s), but can't locate it.

Meanwhile, I did find an interesting snippet which I quote at second hand from Anthony Kenny's book Wittgenstein.  My emphasis:

Logic depends on there being something in existence and there being facts; it is independent of what the facts are, of things being thus and so. That there are facts is not something which can be expressed in a proposition. If one wants to call there being facts a matter of experience, then one can say logic is empirical. But when we say something is empirical we mean that it can be imagined otherwise; in this sense every proposition with sense is a contingent proposition. And in this sense the existence of the world is not an empirical fact, because we cannot think it otherwise (WWK* 77).

Bear in mind that this is Kenny paraphrasing Wittgenstein. But it looks like a genuine form of 'rejectionism' to me.  Is it true?

*Ludwig Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, shorthand notes of F. Waismann, ed. McGuinness, Basil Blackwell, 1967.

On donkeys and deformed thinking

I found the Wittgenstein quotation I was thinking of, which is in the Logic Museum here.

"Mathematical logic" has completely deformed the thinking of mathematicians and of philosophers, by setting up a superficial interpretation of the forms of our everyday language as an analysis of the structures of facts. Of course in this it has only continued to build on the Aristotelian logic.

It's what he says about Aristotelian logic which is the interesting one. There's a school of thought in the medievalist world according to which Aristotelian (scholastic) logic is somehow more faithful to ordinary language than modern mathematical logic. Wittgenstein would clearly have disagreed. I have also been looking at the donkey sophism in Worcester 13 again. The problem is that 'every man's donkey is running' has the form 'every A is B', where A = man's-donkey and B = running. According to Aristotelian logic 'every A is B' and 'every A is non-B' are contraries, they can't both be true at once. But clearly the ordinary language sentences 'every man's donkey is running' and 'every man's donkey is not running' can both be true at the same time, namely in the case where every man has two donkeys, one of which is running and the other of which isn't. It's not a problem for ordinary language at all. But it is a problem for the Aristotelian formalism of the sentence. In that formalism every sentence has two terms, joined by a copula and a quantifier attached to the subject term. It is a procrustean bed which fits our actual thinking very badly, in some cases.

I also noticed this other comment by Wittgenstein in the same place:

The curse of the invasion of mathematics by mathematical logic is that now any proposition can be represented in a mathematical symbolism, and this makes us feel obliged to understand it. Although of course this method of writing is nothing but the translation of vague ordinary prose.

What on earth does he mean by that?

I was amused by this post from the Maverick which attempts to classify the various forms of nominalism. I particularly liked the idea of 'mad dog nominalism' – a form of the genre that collapses into linguistic idealism.

I pointed out in the comments box that there is a further ingredient in Ockham's nominalism, namely the thesis that by ignorance of logic we are led astray into certain false and fantastical beliefs. This is not a million miles from Wittgenstein.

[Philosophical problems] are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. [Philosophical Investigations ~109]

Augustine on language

More Augustine: The commentary on the Sermon on the mount, in parallel Latin-English. And The Teacher (De magistro), in Latin only at this point, except for a short paragraph at the beginning which I have tackled. It is an enquiry into the nature of language and signs, very difficult. Wittgenstein, as practically everyone knows, was profoundly influenced by Augustine, although I don't know if he had read this piece. When translated, it will be the first English version on the webs.

Wittgenstein on identity

Tractatus 5.5303 - "Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.