Right! The question here is whether you are into dialogue, if you even know what this means, or into monologuing. I can tell ya, polyloguing is the best!

No I am talking about the work to be 'agreeable' to the reader. — A Seagull

Ah to a particular reader you mean? And not to all readers? This would be easier, I guess.

Let me just say here that while one can see the objects of the Tractatus and their forms, either as the fixed platonic forms or ideas in which every object partakes on the one hand, or the "potential" forms of Aristotle that are transformed into "actuality" or at least more "potentiality" on the other, the important difference and discrepancy with these thinkers is that Wittgenstein changes philosophy's focus from those forms, from the "objects", to their combination into situations of objects, the so-called state-of-affairs.

Every object is non-existent, it does not exist outside the states in which it can be found. So it doesn't make sense to talk about the objects themselves, but about all the possible formations and combinations between them. So when a single object is given, along with it are given ALL the other objects with which the first meets. Of course, when all objects are given, then all possible states-of-affairs are given, and then the world is fully described. But in order to know that we have the complete description of the world, we must also know that we have been given all objects. In other words, even if we could somehow get to the full description of the world, we would still not know that we had done so, and continue to look for other objects and states-of-affairs, if we did not know that we had them all.

But a good analogy, I think it is with computer programming, if anyone has dealt with it, like I have, I think programmers will understand it better. In object-oriented programming languages, we are dealing with objects and their properties. If we are given some objects, then we can combine them to make a program. But object-oriented programming language tells us nothing about the programs we can make - what they are. The analogy is as follows: the objects of the Tractatus correspond to the objects of the programming language, and the states of affairs correspond to the programs that can be made.

The old philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is, so to speak, object-oriented, while the new philosophy of Wittgenstein ... is program-oriented. What we need to know about the description of the world is not the objects themselves, but in what situations they can appear. In comparison with computers, "knowing" the objects of the programming language means that we know ALL the programs that can be made with these objects.

This is why it is sometimes said that W. breaks with the deep-rooted philosophical tradition, since he shifts it from objects to states-of-affairs or situations. Philosophy becomes fact-oriented, from object-oriented. Fact-oriented philosophy.

Thanks, I guess! It's nice to see that one's efforts are not completely worthless, and the same should go for everyone here.

I don't think the tractarian 'state of affairs' describes a static state, as you put it. I think it is in fact quite the opposite, well no, badly said, because this implies one or the other, a static and/or a dynamic state. Basically it isn't concerned at all with this distinction, or with change, but with what is pictured, and so you can have a state-of-affairs that pictures a running horse, or another with a still life.

Just because in Tractatus Wittgenstein claims " that is the case" does not mean that it is the case for anyone else. Internal self-consistency is not sufficient reason for others to accept it, it also requires the work to fit in with their own model of the world. — A Seagull

To be agreeable to everyone you mean? This is never the case, as it seems. After all, a friend to all is a friend to none.

I am sorry, Gregory, for leaving your questions posed to me unanswered.

And what is this logic of language that makes metaphysics meaingless? I havent seen any particular examples. — Gregory

Metaphysics, for Wittgenstein, is not meaningless, but senseless, it doesn't make sense.

What's a truth that the philosophy of language can prove? — Gregory

For Wittgenstein, philosophy of language, all philosophy basically, is unable to prove anything, any truth. This is because the medium used to do philosophy, language, is ill-suited for proof-making in the philosophical world. But this doesn't necessarily mean that certain "metaphysical truths" do not exist or that they are meaningless, but just that language is inappropriate to talk about and describe these truths, it is the mystical, as Wittgenstein would put it.

Regarding the connection of Wittgenstein to Hume, I dunno, let's see what the internets are saying. I will just do a search "Wittgenstein on Hume", and see where that leads to.

First article reads "The Naturalistic Epistemology of Hume and Wittgenstein":

Wittgenstein never read Hume and nowhere is it evident that Hume had any influence on Wittgenstein’s works. Perhaps the only influence Hume had on Wittgenstein is simply being a philosopher of a certain tradition that Wittgenstein primarily sought to question. Wittgenstein like Hume, however, is committed the view that human knowledge, philosophical or otherwise, is ultimately grounded in natural facts about human beings.

Second one, "Skeptical Arguments in Hume and Wittgenstein":

It’s hard to think of two philosophers more distant than David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein himself is supposed to have said that he ‘couldn’t bear’ to read Hume. It’s easy to see why: in Philosophical Investigations (PI) (Wittgenstein 1968) Wittgenstein ‘trashes’ Hume’s basic tenets. Hume’s thesis that every word expresses an ‘idea’ derived from an ‘impression’ is more noxious to Wittgenstein than Augustine’s idea (quoted at the beginning of PI) that every word is a name. For Hume’s doctrine makes every word a name of a private object, and every language a private language. Also, Wittgenstein has no truck with any absolute notion of a simple idea (a mistaken notion which he traces to Plato’s Theaetetus), yet Hume made ‘simple ideas’ the basis of all knowledge.

And a third, third time's the charm, like the say, "Hume and Wittgenstein":

It is well known that Wittgenstein’s reading of the philosophical classics was patchy. He left unread a large part of the literature which most philosophers would regard as essential to a knowledge of their subject. Wittgenstein gave an interesting reason for his non-reading of Hume. He said that he could not sit down and read Hume, because he knew far too much about the subject of Hume’s writings to find this anything but a torture. In a recent commentary, Peter Hacker has taken this to show that ‘Wittgenstein seems to have despised Hume’. Hume, he adds, ‘made almost every epistemological and metaphysical mistake Wittgenstein could think of’.

And so, it doesn't seem that Wittgenstein is, in essence, "a humean in disguise", but then again, we could be wrong. Nevertheless, it is interesting and somehow odd that W's friend and - most probably - lover, to whom he devoted the Tractatus, David Pinsent, was a descendant of the philosopher David Hume. Did they discuss Hume's philosophy together, is this how Wittgenstein became acquainted with Pinsent's great-great-great grandpa's work? Who knows, it wouldn't make a good bedtime conversation, I don't think!

The point is that Wittgenstein's early view of language is not based on observation of how language actually works, but on how it must work if the presuppositions he has hold. You basically just recapitulated that very thought process to me in your post. — Snakes Alive

And you just recapitulated that Wittgenstein was prejudiced. So? Where does this leave us? But regarding prejudice, you don't say something new, cause, truly, one way or the other, every human is prejudiced, or even if they are not, others may make this claim of them. I would agree with you, if you weren't using it to belittle the Tractatus.

In any case, Wittgenstein goes into great lengths to show what language and logic are, it is a work on logic after all, amongst other things. Chapters 4-6 are mainly devoted to this. And so the claim that Wittgenstein just presupposed what logic and language are, would mean that he made everything in the Tractatus, and especially in the aforementioned chapters, to fit with this presupposition, which of course might be true, but we need to examine it closely in order to be sure, or else it is an empty claim.

Then read more! Consider: the reason you don't know what I mean is the same reason you take the Tractatus to be so original: ignorance of the history of philosophy. If you knew what the empiricists had said for example, you'd never think that the tactic of treating philosophers' statements as meaningless rather than wrong, due to them misunderstanding how language works, was original to Wittgenstein.

In general, we tend to think great figures are more original than they are, because we read them in isolation. Once we read more widely, this illusion disappears. — Snakes Alive

I remember that some years ago, I made the connection between what Wittgenstein was saying in the Tractatus, and previous thinkers before him like Hume, Kant, Plato and others. Hume, with his is-ought problem and the fact/value distinction, Kant with his antinomies, and Plato/Socrates with his problem of definitions, but for sure there are others as well I am not aware of. Everything seemed to me to be the same, or very similar at least. However, I doubt that these thinkers placed the real problem on language and its misunderstanding, well maybe except Plato, and if they did, they did so polemically, as in to show and prove that their 'adversaries' misunderstood language, and that they themselves were able to understand it properly and use it effectively.

But Wittgenstein in the Tractatus doesn't say this, he says that language is completely ineffective in addressing certain problems - all those not in the natural sciences. That there is nothing really wrong with language, but that it is not suitable for doing philosophy as people thought it would, like having a hex key for unscrewing a slotted screw, the bloody thing just won't do. Or trying to swim in a sea of cement, there is nothing wrong with cement or with swimming, but you cannot do this as advertised. This, I think, is the "misunderstanding of language" he meant. Philosophers misunderstood language/they didn't understand the logic of language, because they took language to be something that was not. In fact, they didn't understand a lot of things, logic for one, then they misunderstood language, and thus their "logic of language" was completely off. Wittgenstein is not here to teach philosophers or people how to think logically, because this is something that everybody does, there is no such thing as "illogical thinking". He just wants to show the correct way to philosophize, as well as what logic really is, the limits of language, and of course he most famously insists on quietism.

Now, can you tell me what all this has to do with thinkers before him, who of his predecessors and where in their work, said this same thing?

huh, pretty quiet today this thread, considering yesterday's orgy. :yum:

The Wittgensteinian notion of how language works comes from the idea of the world being composed of a Humean mosaic of atomic facts, and the idea that the purpose of language is to say true or false things under certain conditions. — Snakes Alive

I have no idea of what you mean by 'humean mosaic of atomic facts', but in any case, yes, W's purpose of language I believe it is "to say true or false things under certain conditions". Like if I say "I went to the supermarket and bought myself a beer, then went back home and drank it", this would be a perfect example of how language is used, and one could hold me in check on whether I was saying something true or false, by making a picture of what I was saying and comparing this to the actual, for example if there were cameras everywhere, even in my own appartment, to corroborate my story.

It follows from this that for a sentence to have sense is just to carve exactly the set of atomic facts to which it corresponds against those to which it doesn't. — Snakes

The sentence, "I went to the supermarket and bought myself a beer, then went back home and drank it", has perfect sense no matter what, because it points to facts in the world, but it can be either true or false, false if for example I got myself some milk, or if I went to the theater instead, or if I put the beer in the fridge and not drank it (not gonna happen). But maybe you are saying something else.

The rest of the Tractatus, past the mystical and transcendental stuff, just falls out of that. You can see it as not an account of what language is, but what it would have to be if this picture were right. So Witt. has comments about how everything in natural language must be in order in this way, even though we can't tell how it is and empirically it doesn't look that way. The prejudices are guiding the account of language, not vice-versa. — Snakes

The Tractatus, in my eyes, is just saying that language mirrors facts in the world, that it is/was designed to do this, and nothing more. I don't think that W. says what language is supposed to be, he just makes this observation, whether he is right or wrong. And, based on this, he goes on to talk about the abuse of language when people, philosophers mainly, use it wrongfully. But then again, we can discuss.

Russell said at some point that what they were trying to do was to break with the idealism of the time. Most probably he meant what we now call "continental philosophy". Analytic philosophy, as it came to be, is a critique and reaction to that, I think. And the Tractatus heralds this attack on what philosophers up to that time were doing, by heavily criticizing their very bone and tool they were using to convey their ideas, what else, language that is. I mean, analytic philosophers wouldn't meet the continentals in their own battlefield, contesting whether they were right or wrong, e.g. on the matter of free will or ethics or metaphysics, but by showing that their project was futile from the beginning, because they didn't understand the logic of language, they didn't even know what they were saying. And this, I think, is what makes the Tractatus so innovative.

When a person makes what are supposed to be truth statements about the world, then later admits that those statements are really "senseless", then I think we can conclude that the person has come to the realization that those truth statements are really not truthful at all, and therefore wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I believe it is so, but only if there is nothing else but true/false, right/wrong. However if there are other things in-between or elsewhere, then it is a different matter, which I believe is what W. was getting at.

I think that the idea of knowing when to be silent is good – it's just that here it's too obviously tied to present theoretical prejudices. — Snakes Alive

What prejudices? What do you mean?

Not so. If other kinds of claims can be assigned truth values on some other grounds than empiricism, then they can be manipulated through truth-functional logic just the same. The logic doesn’t care what the truth values mean or where they come from. — Pfhorrest

I meant what I said from Wittgenstein's perspective at the time of writing the Tractatus, I am not putting forward any ideas of my own. And I think that W's truth-tables and truth-grounds concern the propositions that make sense only, that point as arrows to somewhere in the world, to the facts, those things that we can have a picture of. For everything else, I don't think he would use truth-functional logic.

So, in all, is there something you praise the Tractatus for?

The Tractatus is a lot like any other work – the technical development that was lying around at the time was taken for a key to the universe. This time, it was the truth-functional propositional calculus.

Seen in retrospect it's a profoundly silly thing, but then I guess most things are. — Snakes Alive

Yes, but this - the truth-functional propositional calculus as you put it, applies only to matters of fact and the natural sciences, not to everything.

It seems to me that much of what W says, or at least the gist of it, is correct when limited specifically to descriptive propositions, words being used to indicate something about how the world is; but, as you rightly point out, words can also be used to do a lot more than that, they can mean things other than “the world is such-and-such way”. Talk about what words mean, like this message or the Tractacus itself, falls outside that limited scope of describing the world, but still clearly has nother kind of meaning. — Pfhorrest

You are correct, I think, the Tractatus conveys a meaning but with it being senseless. "sense", in the Tractatus has to do with the facts, descriptive propositions like you say, on "how" the world is, the propositions of natural science. All the propositions in the Tractatus are senseless, huh, in that sense.

Right, when you get to the end of the book, Wittgenstein admits that it's all wrong, and advises you to throw it all away. He basically says I've given you a demonstration of the wrong approach, now move along and find the right approach. But when you see from the very beginning, that it's all wrong, as Sam26 says, "Wittgenstein holds to the traditional view at this point in his life, that names refer to objects.", it makes a very boring read. — Metaphysician Undercover

He doesn't admit that it's all wrong, he says it is 'senseless', which is a different thing than 'wrong'. Philosophical propositions, as well as "elucidating" propositions referring to the nonsensicality of those, are neither right or wrong, they are just senseless: they don't make sense as language is normally supposed to do. But they do convey meaning. In the Tractatus, there is a difference between meaning and sense, really hard to tell, and besides, it's all lost in translation. Bedeutung und Sinn. Sense and Meaning, or otherwise. I mean, in english, sense and meaning may be taken to be the same, but in the Tractatus, they are most definitely not. See also "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" by Frege. Wittgenstein sort of responds to Frege with the Tractatus, there is a reference to him therein. In order to understand the Tractatus better, we should see it in its historical reference.

When you "demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions", you presumably do so using language. That does not seem to be a use of language for natural science, though. Is it therefore an abuse of language to show someone they are abusing language? — Pfhorrest

For sure. Which is why W. immediately after writes:

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Remember I'm talking mainly about the Tractatus, and it's clear if you read what he said about that book, that he believed he solved all the major problems of philosophy. It's in the Tractatus that Wittgenstein puts forward his theory of truth-functions, which I'll be talking more about as we go along. — Sam26

Yes, he believed he had solved them at the time, but how, is the question. He says so at 6.53:

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method. — w

The truth-functions have to do with the propositions of natural science, not with philosophy or metaphysics. Philosophy/metaphysics shouldn't, cannot have any propositions at all, language is solely used for the natural sciences. Using language to say something philosophical or metaphysical is an abuse of language, you understand?

Because you said that he solved all philosophical problems by analyzing propositions via their truth-functions. Philosophical propositions, pertaining to philosophical problems, and according to him, do not have a truth-function, they are neither true or false, right or wrong, but nonsensical, and so the best one can do with them, is to get rid of them. For example, the critique of pure reason by Kant, is a fine example of a nonsensical book.

The logic in the Tractatus contains an exactness that is disposed of in the PI (at least for the most part). It’s this exactness, I believe, that leads Wittgenstein to believe that he has solved all the philosophical problems (in the T.) in one fell swoop. How has he solved all the philosophical problems? Well, if as Wittgenstein supposes one can analyze all propositions via their truth-functions (more on this later), and these line up with facts in the world, then we can determine what’s true and what’s false based on Wittgenstein’s a priori analysis. This is probably why Russell thought that Wittgenstein was creating a logically perfect language. — Sam26

I think that the way he solved all the philosophical problems was by showing, or at least hoping to show at a later time, that these problems were not in fact problems, but pseudo-problems, arising from bad and mis-understanding of language. Just like he says somewhere regarding the problem of the left-right hand posed by Kant, that this is not a philosophical problem, but a purely geometrical/mathematical one: it can be "solved" by transforming the coordinates in 4-d space. And so his method is not one of "solution", but of "dissolution", just like Alexander the Great did with the gordian knot. The knot was entangled in an unorthodox way, the only way to untie it or "solve" it, was to employ an equally unorthodox method, pertinent to its nature, cut it through.

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Violent delights have violent endings, or so they say.

But I think that the book "Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom" by Hanson and Heath, gives some insight into the matter. I found a sort of a summary here:

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/who-killed-homer

IMV the story of philosophy demonstrates discontinuity. Compare Dewey and Plotinus. Philosophy looks roughly like big-picture thinking. Just as humans vary considerably in their fundamental visions of the world, so do the specialists who carefully articulate and argue for such views. — jjAmEs

True, one could find discontinuities and dissimilarities as easily as one would find continuities and similarities, depending on the POV and the semantics of same and different. So I think it's pretty useless this method of investigation, as it would lead to any possible conclusion. So I think it's better to go to the beginning, where it all started, and try to notice any divergence there.

I can't remember how much Durant goes into it, but he does end the book with American pragmatism. — jjAmEs

I hadn't heard of Durant, well at least not Will, cause I had heard of Kevin! Reading a summary of his work 'The story of Philosophy', I think that he sees a continuation, or better a continuity, in philosophy, and therefore, irrespective of whether he is right or wrong, he will not do in this topic, since we are trying to spot and find discontinuities: we do not want people to tell us how similar philosophy is throughout all of (its) history, but how dissimilar.

To me it seems that the professionalization of philosophy is the key issue. Personally I think scholars like Lee Braver are great. — jjAmEs

Key issue, for what? But anyway, yeah, early philosophers were not scholars, pro's or academics, they were just people doing philosophy for ... for, dunno, maybe just for the fun of it? I am not sure, but I think that their reasons were very different than contemporary ones. Just like early footballers and basketballers had different reasons for playing football and basketball than the nowdays millionary professionals. I mean the game is still much the same, chase a ball and score, but it is different to watch poor folk chasing a ball, than watching millionaires do the same.

Haven't heard of Lee Braver either, Paul Graham neither, William James rings a bell, oh right he was that bloke that founded psychology, we in europe have Freud for that.

And so snakes' view paints philosophy as a power-mongering activity or enterprise, wishing to devour everything in its path, just like the game 'snake', in order to grow.



or even a snake eating its own tail.

I think that what snakes is saying is something like this:

Philosophy, since its infancy, attempts to meddle in everything and in everyone's affairs. It does this by a method of appropriation/assimilation: on one hand, it appropriates and assimilates everything that it likes, that it finds worthy, and on the other, it outrightly rejects and discards as aphilosophical/unworthy everything that it doesn't like. An example of this, is so-called "natural philosophy" and the sciences, which philosophy made it appear to be its child. And so in this way, everything of value is philosophical, and vice-versa, everything philosophical is of value, a win-win situation for philosophy in any case. Any attempts to criticize or chastise philosophy for its wrong-doings, if any, sooner or later are appropriated and assimilated into philosophical thinking. This is what happened to analytic anti-philosophy, some time after the tractarian Wittgenstein posited to have solved all philosophical problems by saying that they were mere nonsense, a product of bad understanding and usage of language: it became part of the philosophical tradition, changing to analytic philosophy instead.

Regardless, what we are talking about here is "significant phase changes in philosophy". Having read Durant's book, what would you say these changes are? Does Durant notice of any changes?

Anyway, just waiting on drake's response, but I think there is a passage from Plato's dialogue, "Protagoras", that relates to what we nowadays call metaphilosophy, as it clearly shows a significant phase change in philosophy. It all starts with Socrates trying to analyze Simonides's poem.

Come up with another response! — Snakes Alive

Who me?

Do you object then? Alright then, objection sustained!

Tell you what snakes, I'm with you, with you all the way, I also believe that there is something wrong with philosophy, I said so myself, so maybe we can forge an alliance, albeit a temporary, an unholy one!

But, for argument's sake, and so that I can promote my own, I would like to play the devil's advocate, like they say. Should you have any objections, please take them to the judge and jury.

I mean, I don't want to show contempt of court, but you've been #2ing and traditionally folking around all over the place! We cats you know, we like our place clean!

Another way to say this: It's possible that most of what's going on in this thread is well within the folk tradition. It increasingly seems that way to me. — csalisbury

Yeah, I think that what we're doing here is unambiguously metaphilosophy (I mean, it's in the title! ;)), which on my account at least is the philosophy of philosophy, a subfield of philosophy, and not something outside of it. (I'm aware that there is historical disagreement about whether metaphilosophy is within or outside philosophy, or even if there is such a thing). — Pfhorrest

haha, this is what I wanted to write, well actually something similar like, "where are we? in the philosophy forum, so we are doing philosophy!".

But I think that snakes is doing what he's accusing others of doing, these #2's I mean, for some reason thinking that his thinking is somehow exempt from the philosophical tradition, where in fact he never left it.

Why would anyone that doesn't believe in 'conversation', that it won't lead to a definite conclusion, indulge in such a practice, defending their own conclusions?? :lol:

I think this is a rather naive, or better simplistic and superficial, view that you have of philosophy, that doesn't take into account of all the facts. In all, I am sorry snakes, but I'm not convinced, not at all indeed! :yum:

And syllogisms are of Aristotle, there are no syllogisms in Plato. This is most likely where the brink happened, where the age of logic supplanted the age of enchantment. Speaking of (meta)philosophical phases. But there was before as well, the presocratic age, I mean, when argumentation was a no-issue, those guys spoke in aphorisms, they saw no need for argumentation.

I also suspect that the very idea of a syllogism, or any kind of deductive argument set out in premises that implies a conclusion, has its roots in courtroom procedure. People noticed in getting people to make statements, that multiple statements, due to their natural semantics, had commitment relations to each other, and noticed that if you said one thing, you then had to say another, on pain of contradiction. This then became a model of reasoning. — Snakes Alive

Ah yes, forgot about this one. Socrates (in)famously never reaches a conclusion, but all his argumentation results in the so-called "aporia", which in greek means "not-knowing", for which he was strongly critisized by later philosophers, they said that he was mocking them, that he somehow knew but wouldn't tell them, or that his method was fallible. But courtrooms always reach to a conclusion, as later philosophers do, which I think shows the aforementioned assimilation of philosophy into so-called lawyering.