I remember reading about Wittgenstein's efforts to understand Godel and his incompleteness theorem, Wittgenstein used, as usual, a dialectical approach, like a child, and wrote his thoughts in his notebook. After seeing this, Godel exclaimed: "Has Wittgenstein lost his mind?!" :D But I don't think that we should see Wittgenstein's remarks neither as an affirmation nor as a rejection of the theorem.
If l can recall Wittgensteins remarks
I imagine someone asking my advice; he says: “I have constructed a proposition (I will use ‘P’ to designate it) in Russell’s symbolism, and by means of certain definitions and transformations it can be so interpreted that it says ‘P is not provable in Russell’s system’. Must I not say that this proposition on the one hand is true, and on the other hand is unprovable? For suppose it were false; then it is true that it is provable. And that surely cannot be! And if it is proved, then it is proved that is not provable. Thus it can only be true, but unprovable.”
My humble take on this is, what is wittgenstein saying by using the word true, is he equating provable with true.He tried in the following quotations to dismantle the incompleteness theorem.
Just as we can ask, “ ‘Provable’ in what system?,” so we must also ask, “ ‘True’ in what system?” “True in Russell’s system” means, as was said, proved in Russell’s system, and “false” in Russell’s system means the opposite has been proved in Russell’s system.—Now, what does your “suppose it is false” mean? In the Russell sense it means, “suppose the opposite is been proved in Russell’s system”; if that is your assumption you will now presumably give up the interpretation that it is unprovable. And by “this interpretation” I understand the translation into this English sentence.—If you assume that the proposition is provable in Russell’s system, that means it is true in the Russell sense, and the interpretation “P is not provable” again has to be given up. If you assume that the proposition is true in the Russell sense, the same thing follows. Further: if the proposition is supposed to be false in some other than the Russell sense, then it does not contradict this for it to be proved in Russell’s system.
He clearly states the proposition "P is not provable has to be given up ".
Current situation in mathematics is that to prove stuff, a mathematician must make clear what system and what axioms are going to be employed. A theorem that is proved in one system, might be disproved or be not provable in another, and I think that most mathematicians have stopped trying to conform maths to reality, seeing their science as a game.
I don't think mathematicians have to conform to anything besides their own system of axioms and wittgenstein was strictly.I see this as a great merit and clearly ethics or metaphysics do not have such groundwork to support/prove their proposition.There is certainty in a system, it would be absurd to compare two "games" with different rules.Bertrand Russell wrote somewhere that all the worlds must conform and be according to mathematical truths, but the project failed as mathematics wasn't what they thought it was.
( even Kant made this mistake when he did not consider non euclidean geometry ).
So I see that Wittgenstein took tractarian objects as an auxilliary hypothesis, like those used in philosophy of science, dark matter, for example: "we don't know what/how they are, but we are certain that they exist, we hope that future examination will give us more insight into these". But of course Wittgenstein was forced later to drop all talk about elementary propositions, and objects too, I suppose. (a picture held us captive)
Auxiliary hypothesis can mean two things, either he was not clear in what they meant or rather it didn't matter what they referred to.Either way, it creates problems as we go further on reading tractatus.They are central to tractatus and the picture theory.
I think that the logical positivists paid no attention to the last few pages of the Tractatus, treating them as mere nonsense, as if they outright discarded it. Which is why I said "uninterpreted", but yes of course, you can say "misinterpreted" as well. So either "complete (and flawed)" or "incomplete", logically it makes no difference anyway, the difference is only a psychological one, it is what it is, like they say.
They did but could not make anything out of it, those propositions were central to wittgenstein refuting his earlier philosophy.I think wittgenstein was trying to show the inexpressible but he was forced to express it in the end, which led to confusion.He even referred to it as a ladder which must be discarded.
Whereas in physics, we are at a standstill, with all these tens or hundres of interpretations of quantum mechanics flying around, each giving its own view of how things stand, the physical reality I mean. So pretty uncertain there, not to mention the uncertainty principle.
Well let's not exaggerate the number of interpretations to a hundred, the standard one is clearly copanhagen one, but l believe physicists are clearly not impressed with philosophy these days sadly and they would rather not discuss what wave function refers to in the real world but simply its function,uses,applications in the mathematical framework of quantum physics.Uncertainity principle can be applied to real life examples such as electrons but they are deeply rooted in mathematics.I am against scientism and do not believe it can describe the world completely.
Infact wittgenstein was really critical of it and he suggested that natural laws and the physical phenomenon are not synonymous and we can imagine a different set of system, which have different set of natural laws and each describe the world with the same accuracy.
When I quoted science and mathematics, I wanted to demonstrate that, these fields have sorted themselves out as correction was possible but ethics and metaphysics cannot be sorted out, their problems are merely nonsense and they do not need an answer as the problems vanish once we understand the confusion.