5.1.2.8 Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the “triple threat” of modern philosophers. For any of three separate accomplishments he would be famous. Although he was born a generation after Moore and Russell, they all contributed to the rebirth of modern Analytic philosophy (which uses precise, sometimes mathematical language to analyze issues). He laid down the precursors of what would become Logical Positivism, though he never considered himself a member of that school of thought. And, he led the way in defining modern Linguistic and “Common Language” philosophy, which is a dominant movement even today. Even the other Greats of his time considered him to be uniquely brilliant.

One of the richest men in Europe, he volunteered in the Austrian army during WWI, and spent many years as an elementary school teacher and gardener. From time to time he lit intellectual fires that radically reshaped 20th century philosophy.

His contributions fall into two periods marked by the publication of Tractatus, followed after his death by Philosophical Investigations. He is extremely difficult to interpret, and as many times as I have waded through his work and others’ analyses of it, I have emerged feeling like I just experienced something very important, but baffled by just exactly what it was. I will not try to do a comprehensive summary of his positions, but only to relate them to the question at hand – what is the external world and how does our perception of it function?

He was not a metaphysician, and in fact rejected metaphysics as a legitimate focus of philosophical speculation. He actually had very little to say about the nature of reality. It is his silence on the subject that makes him important to this discussion. For one of the giants of modern philosophy to regard it as an uninteresting question itself is interesting.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein's goal with this work was to define a logically perfect language, building on Russell's earlier efforts, with which to discuss philosophical issues. All complex domains (physics, math, dance, art, architecture, sports) have specific, highly tailored language that is used only in the context of describing the elements of that domain. But philosophy has traditionally used language and concepts from everyday life in incorrect and misleading ways to complicate issues that could and should be dealt with completely differently. Difficult philosophical problems result from abuse of language when it is misappropriated from normal, everyday use into an unfamiliar and shaky metaphysical environment.

He intended to develop a language appropriate to the task of discussing philosophical issues, and to delineate exactly what could and could not be discussed meaningfully using that language. Kant attempted to distinguish what could be known from what was forever unknowable and inaccessible. Wittgenstein's parallel task was to distinguish what could be said from what was unsayable and inaccessible. The point of this work was to draw a strong connection between language and the world (i.e., reality). He believed that when people attempt to gain certainty or to convey it to others by making controversial, confusing, or debatable propositions they are engaging in confused thinking and semantic nonsense that hinders understanding instead of helping it.

He laid out an approach that had these elements:

• The world is comprised of atomic, independent "facts" which constitute the elements out of which larger hierarchies of facts are built.
• These larger groupings of facts have logical forms defining their relationships.
• The human mind contains thoughts (logical pictures) which represent the external “facts” comprising the world.
• For those mental pictures to faithfully represent the external world, they must have the same logical form as those facts.
• That logical structure is built from language propositions which he expressed in a highly structured and tailored manner.

These propositions share a "pictorial form" with the reality they represent. They are correct or incorrect to the extent that they faithfully model the logical form of that reality. If the world were differently structured from the forms of our logic, we would not be able to express it in language at all. They express in a scientific way the experiences of sense data (impressions of the world). Other types of statements involving math and logic convey no new information, but are only tautologies. That is the limit of what can be expressed with any certainty or meaning – everything else is beyond our ability to speak sensibly. Only "true propositions" about the world are sensible and meaningful.

In his words, “most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false, but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical … it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all”. In other words, much of what is debated in philosophical terms is nothing but impressive, but empty, verbal gymnastics. He showed the limits of what could be discussed, leaving the rest to just be regarded in awe and mystery – the realm of poetry, religion, theater, relationships, and emotions. He did not denigrate those disciplines and experiences, but strongly believed that logical, philosophical thinking could not deal with them at all. The region of the inaccessible is important. It contains much of what we value in life. In fact, to him, these were the most important aspects of human life. However, philosophy has its limits, and his job was to define and clarify the bounds of what could discussed within its sphere. "What cannot be said maybe can be shown, and what can be shown cannot be said".

Much to the dismay, and sometimes delight, of other philosophers, he constrained and limited the range of issues to which their discipline could add constructive value. Instead, philosophy should be used to organize collections of propositions which represent the existence and non-existence of “states of affairs” in the world. This set of statements constitutes the entirety of natural science.

The founders of Logical Positivism (chiefly Carnap) took this to mean that only empirically verifiable sentences were meaningful, and on these grounds eliminated metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics from their curriculum. This philosophy rejects metaphysics, instead emphasizing that the goal of knowledge is only to describe the phenomena that we experience, which we can observe and measure, and to attempt to do nothing beyond that.

Not only were earlier philosophers in error by confusing logical and grammatical forms, they were also trying to say the unsayable. The activity of philosophy should be to show the limits of what could be said by saying some things very clearly, then stopping, and pointing towards the mystical that goes beyond the sayable. He criticized Hume’s extreme skepticism. “Doubt implies a question, questions imply answers, and answers imply that something can even be said about the issue. “ Hume tried to talk about the unsayable (God, value, skepticism). The solution to the nagging existential problems of life was the vanishing of both the question and the answer. There can be no answer to life, when there is really no question that can be meaningfully asked. As complex as his writings were, the overall gist of them were that he attempted to rigorously prove that certain things could not be conclusively described or decided using language, among them ethics, aesthetics, all things mystical, and metaphysics. So, the question of “is there an external world or not” is simply one that he would dismiss from the realm of philosophy. Is is not a question, but is built into his very first assertions in the Tractatus:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.

He concludes with a thought that encapsulates the entire book and is often repeated in other contexts, “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”. So, after much difficult propositional calculus and highly structured statements, he advised us to stop trying to talk about things that we will never be able to decide. Some things must simply be observed in awe and admiration. The metaphysics of reality falls into that category – in his view, philosophy had nothing to say about it.

Philosophical Investigations
By the time this later work was published Wittgenstein has changed his mind about much of what he earlier said in Tractacus, in particular the part concerning the need for a precise philosophical language. This was the beginning of his foray into “Ordinary Language" philosophy. Tractatus showed an isomorphism could exist between the "real" world and some ideal language. Philosophical Investigations showed that the quest for an ideal language and isomorphism is doomed. He had come around to the conclusion that there need be no isomorphism between words and reality - all that was required was that the words help the parties to a communication achieve whatever social goal they intended. He elaborated many other novel concepts regarding a new linguistic approach to thinking, but most of them don't bear on our central question here.

What is relevant is that he expounded the view that conceptual confusions involving our use of language are the cause of most problems in philosophy. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”. He no longer held the view that a highly tailored language would be needed, but that common language would do. By eliminating the confused tangle of mangled language, he was able to make philosophical problems just vanish. Words can trick us into mis-categorizing things. The grammatical form of the sentences in which philosophical questions are formed hoodwinks us into believing problems exist where there are none.

He cleared the table of philosophical double-talk by dismissing the majority of philosophical questions as simple misuse of language. He saw a human tendency to become trapped in the language we use to describe our ideas to such a degree that the ideas become more important than the reality that they may or may not actually refer to. In many cases, associations of ideas in the mind that seem to have meaning, significance, and import don’t have external referents in the real world. But the strength and vividness of the false ideas are just as strong as that which would accompany coherent and meaningful ideas. Confused use of language disguises the underlying logical form, and renders most philosophical questions into perplexing nonsense and obscure linguistic puzzles. He felt that he had shown that most philosophical problems were caused by linguistic errors and general faulty use of language, that when resolved cause the original question to vanish (for example, how much energy was wasted in medieval scholastic debates exploring the various properties and abilities of angels?) When extended to the question of the existence of reality, the question itself doesn’t make sense. Simply because a question has legitimate syntactical form does not require that it actually have meaning and be capable of receiving a response. In other words, the logical form of the thoughts inspiring the question may not be isomorphic with any actual "state of affairs" in the world.

"Meaning just is use" — that is, words are not defined by reference to the objects or things which they designate in the external world nor by the thoughts, ideas, or mental representations that one might associate with them, but instead by how they are used in effective, ordinary communication. Language arises in social contexts and is oriented to achieving different social goals, depending on the situation. Language is meaningful if it accomplishes the goals of those involved in using it. To require precision and exact definitions in language is to become involved in a whole nest of philosophical problems whose origin is in the neurotic quest for certainty. So, when one asks “does reality exist”, both “reality” and “exist” have the common meanings that the asker and the asked ascribe to them. We don’t require concrete definitions of them as long as all parties to the communication understand each other. For example, when I describe the color "blue" to you, we both understand it to be the color of the sky, though we each have our own personal interpretations of that sense experience. It doesn't matter if they are or are not identical to each other, as long as we both agree on what is meant. In fact a private "definition" of blue would be utterly useless - we could not share it or talk about it. And a non-private, shared, definition of blue would have the same problems as the color, blue, itself - we could agree on the definition (e.g., a wavelength of radiation), but would have no way of confirming if it is seen the same way by everyone.

Philosophers had obscured this simplicity by misusing language and by asking meaningless questions. For example, one might ask “what is the meaning of life?” as if that were a question with an answer. One might instead ask the much simpler question, “what is the meaning of this stone?” What type of answer would satisfy such a seemingly straightforward question? What are the boundaries that would circumscribe a meaningful answer? There are none - a stone, and very likely "life", simply "is". Both can be put to various uses, or not at all. The strings of words comprising the two questions have the structure and lexical form of real questions, but both are nonsensical. Merely asking a question does not imply that a useful answer is forthcoming. If we can't describe the "meaning" of a stone, how much further are we from describing the "meaning" of life? If one were to ask this question, "what is 17 times 237", the boundaries around a possible answer would be, "it is a 5 digit number, odd, ending in 9, and certainly non-prime", even before doing the arithmetic. However, if one were to ask the question, "what is 17 times blue?", there are no properties of a possible answer - the question makes no sense. I propose that "what is the meaning of life" is this type of question.

Regarding reality, Wittgenstein might respond, “not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is at all.” As with all mystery, there is nothing meaningful that philosophy or even language can say about it other than to simply point to it in awe. He fully accepted reality, but concluded that all we can experience of it is the "framework" erected by the language and the mental models we use to understand it. We "see the picture through the frame".