False statements have meaning. — Amity

To be sure, the suggestion is that if you have the truth conditions of a sentence, you have it's meaning. This is so whether the sentence is true of false.

"Der Hahn legt ein Ei" is true if and only if the rooster laid an egg.

You understand this, even though the rooster did not lay an egg.

Sure, all good pints.

Consider the Slab game in PI. The builder calls "Slab", the assistant brings a slab. The Builder calls "Block", the assistant brings a block, and so it goes. It is difficult to see how this behaviour is "emergent".

There is much more here than the transfer of information between builder and assistant.

And that without consideration of anything "subjective"

Hence, I suppose, 's call to holism.

, , here's a neat synopsis of the Tractatus, focused on the picture theory. Pictures and Nonsense

In this article I am going to describe Wittgenstein’s famous picture theory of language. The aim of this theory is to set out an account of what sentences mean and just as importantly, to give us a way of distinguishing sense from nonsense. The theory is found in Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which ranks as one of the hardest-to-read of all the great works of philosophy. It is an unusual book, written whilst Wittgenstein was serving in the Austrian army during the First World War and finished whilst he was a prisoner of war in Italy. It is remarkably short for a great work of philosophy; this is in part due to Wittgenstein's condensed writing style, which has put off many readers and confused a good number of philosophers. But Wittgenstein’s aim was not to confuse his readers: he simply wanted to express himself as precisely and as logically as possible.

So the picture theory of language is an attempt to discover the essence of language. In its simplest form, the theory says the function of language is to allow us to picture things.

In itself, this doesn’t tell us all that much. Pictures can have many purposes – just think of the differences between hieroglyphics and modern artworks. Therefore it is helpful to consider a very basic type of picture, such as a diagram I might draw to show a friend the way to my house. I do not have to sketch every detail of the route my friend should take, such as what the view will look like along the way. Rather, I need to show my friend where to turn, and perhaps mark some prominent landmarks along the route.

Suppose that my diagram indicates that my friend should take the second right after the lights. Of course, the situation that the diagram presents to my friend need not be true to the facts; my diagram might be part of a practical joke on her, in which I send her to someone else’s house. In constructing a picture such as this, I am not constrained by the actual facts. Although my house is on the second road on the right, I am perfectly able to draw a diagram in which the house is pictured on the second road on the left.

Wittgenstein is keen to emphasize that what a picture means is independent of whether it is a truthful representation or not. But if a diagram can be misleading or downright false, so that it does not picture the facts, what does it picture? Wittgenstein says that what a diagram or picture represents exists in logical space. One way to understand this is to see that the way the world has turned out is not the only way that it could have turned out. Had things turned out differently, my house could have been on the second left, even though it is actually on the second right. So a picture represents something that is the case, or alternatively, could have been the case had the world turned out differently.

What is it that makes the arrangement of lines on my diagram a picture, whereas a scribble produced at random (say, by a crab crawling around in the sand) is not counted as a picture? According to Wittgenstein, it is that the lines in the diagram are related together in a way that mimics the way the things they correspond to are related. For example my diagram has symbols for roads and houses, which if true, are arranged in a way which mimics their arrangement in reality.

Our diagram is a good example of what Wittgenstein had in mind when talking about pictures, for its usefulness relies on the way in which the parts of the picture are arranged, rather than relying on it being a lifelike artistic depiction of the facts. The important point is that the structure of the picture mirrors (represents) the structure of a possible situation. The possible situation is what the picture means. This is why we can know what a picture means without knowing whether it is true or false. The picture is true when the situation it pictures is the actual situation. To find out if it is, we have to look and see how the world actually is.

Wittgenstein’s theory of language holds that sentences work like pictures: their purpose is also to picture possible situations. It must be pointed out that Wittgenstein is not concerned with mental pictures, ie the images we conjure up in our minds. The thesis is not that the meaning of a sentence is what we picture in our minds when we hear or think the sentence. That was the theory of language advocated by John Locke, the 17th century empiricist philosopher. Rather, Wittgenstein is concerned with a more abstract notion of a picture, as something that either agrees or disagrees with any way the world might have been, and which says, this is the way things actually are.

Logical Analysis

The next element of Wittgenstein’s first theory of language concerns how sentences are built up from simpler sentences (or propositions, as Wittgenstein calls them, meaning a sentence that’s unambiguously either true or false). His idea is that whenever a sentence contains one of the logical connectives ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘if … then’, we can work out the truth-value of that proposition (ie whether it’s true or false) if we know the truth-values of the sentences that make it up. This is seen most easily by giving an example. Suppose I say, “If it isn’t raining, then we will go to the park and have a picnic.” This sentence is made up from the following simpler sentences:

1. It is raining

2. We will go to the park

3. We will have a picnic

We build our complex sentence in three stages. First, we negate sentence 1 by adding ‘not’ to it; then we join sentences 2 and 3 with ‘and’; finally, we join these two new sentences using ‘If … then’. Wittgenstein gives us a method of determining the truth-value of our complex sentence in terms of the truth or falsity of sentences 1 to 3. Negated sentences ‘not …’ are true when the sentence that occupies the ‘…’ place is false. Sentences built by joining two sentences with ‘and’ are true when each of the original sentences are individually true. Finally, conditional ‘if … then’ sentences are false when the first sentencein the complex sentence is true but the second is false, and true otherwise. These conditions correspond to the truth tables any philosophy student learns in their first logic classes. Combine these rules together and you discover the truth conditions for the compound sentence.

Having given this analysis of complex sentences in terms of simpler ones, Wittgenstein then says that there must be sentences that are completely free of logical complexity. He calls these elementary propositions. These are not simply sentences in which ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’ or ‘if … then’ do not appear, for Wittgenstein holds that sentences can contain hidden logical complexity which does not show up in everyday English. An example of this is given by definite descriptions such as “the present King of France is bald.” According to Wittgenstein’s teacher Bertrand Russell, this actually means “there exists exactly one person who is both the present King of France and bald.” According to Russell, the existential ‘there exists’ is hidden in everyday English use, but can be brought out through logical analysis. — Mark Jago

I hope we agree on at least the description in the first two sections. In the Tractatus, the meaning of a sentence is what it pictures. In the investigations, the meaning of a sentence is it's use.

The question in hand here is, what happens with the picture theory as Wittgenstein moves on to the Investigations?

Who can give a simple, direct answer to that?

As you point out, the common factor is a mind. — RussellA

You get so close, then jump sideways to the wrong conclusion.

The "common factor" is what is done with the utterance.

And that is public, open for us to see.

The builder could call "Slab" all day, while nothing changes, the assistant moving slabs and blocks haphazardly. Meaning enters were the two act together. it's in moving slabs to the right place, not in the content of their heads.

2) These two minds are independent of each other — RussellA

Obviously not.

I don't believe it would be a picture theory per se... — Luke

In the PI? I think that's right. It's delicate. Consider:

And it is this inner process that one means by the word “remembering”. The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our face against the picture of an ‘inner process’. What we deny is that the picture of an inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word “remember”. Indeed, we’re saying that this picture, with its ramifications, stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is. — 305

This has ramifications for your discussion with @schopenhauer1, who is seems is in the thrall of a certain picture.

So "picture" is being used diversely. Yes, Hacker's comparison of the use of red and pain – that we can have no paradigm of pain– is enlightening.

Nice.

Ok, cut off the conversation even as it begins.

You might be claiming that belief statements are not bivalent - that "Banno is floating in space in the orbit of Jupiter" is now false, but before being considered, was neither true nor false. An antirealism towards belief.

Or, and this seems to be closer to what you are claiming, you might be saying that the belief did not exist in the time before being considered, and so is not the sort of thing that has a truth value. But the upshot of that might be interesting.

I've tried here to defend a view of belief roughly in line with mainstream analytic thinking, and you've been helpful in challenging that. It might be that I need to adjust my view somewhat. The view I was defending is that not all our beliefs are explicit. I find it puzzling, given our previous interaction, that you choose this with which to disagree.

Good to see something a bit more sophisticated going on here.

It's important to remember that our communication, which seems so natural and effortless to us, and so simplistic, emerges from an absolutely mind boggling amount of communication at lower levels, e.g. the complex interactions between neurones, glial cells, sensory systems, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting that you talk of "levels" here. It seems there is a vast difference between the communication between neurones and that between people. So while I'd like to avoid the ghost in the machine, my inclination is to reject the reduction of meaning to mere communication. Isn't there a difference of kind here?

Yep. We seem to be in agreement.

Yes — Gnomon

So in order to defend your scientistic realism, you deny the existence of certain things posited by science. That seems odd.

I'm thinking you are looking at one particular sense of real - the one given in your note 2 - which is fine, provided you do not think that you are thereby giving an account of the whole of reality...

And again, your style is almost unreadable. Most of your comment seems to be in a footnote, so that I'm not at all sure what you would have me address.

So your idea is that the proposition does not exist at all until voiced?

That is, you are not supposing the antirealist view that "Banno is floating in space in the orbit of Jupiter" was not false before being written in that post, nor was it true, and nor was it some other, third truth option, but that it didn't exist at all, and therefore was ineligible for any truth value?

Is this the position of Antirealism? — RussellA

Depends on your flavour of antirealism. But the label is not important, so much as the content.

(3) the world is such that we can treat part of it as a slab, allowing us to talk about them and move them around.

We don't "create" the slab – that's the idealist error. Nor are there no slabs until we start to talk about them – the nominalist error.

Searle might say that this sort of thing counts as a slab; that sort of thing counts as a block. The assistant gets to recognise the difference not by any internal, private process, but by getting a clip around the ear when they bring the wrong one. Of course, that does not mean that there are no internal processes. Just that "slab" is public.

Russell, I like the way you return and attempt to summarise your thinking.

Therefore language within a community can only exist within the individuals who make up the community. — RussellA

Look at this with care. I do not see how it follows from your argument. Why must language exist within the individuals - why not between them? Then, if they disappear, so does language.

Consider an electric current as an analogy. It only exists between the atoms of a wire, not within them. Remove all the atoms and the current stops. But there can be no current if there is only one atom. The current does not exist within one individual.

As fos "S", consider

214. (The temptation to say “I see it like this”, pointing to the same thing for “it” and “this”.) Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you don’t notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you.

One can play chess by oneself, but the game is set up to be played communally.

In the Tractatus the proposition is a picture of a state of affairs, not something between a state of affairs and the proposition. — Fooloso4

Hmm. That does not count against the point, so far as I see.

2.1 We picture facts to ourselves. 
2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs. 
2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
2.13 In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them. 
2.131 In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects. 
2.14 What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way. 
2.141 A picture is a fact.

and

4.06 A proposition can be true or false only in virtue of being a picture of reality.

Here he is taking on a representational theory of meaning - the picture theory.The Indian mathematician shows that a picture can be seen - used - in different ways.

‘I read somewhere that Indian mathematicians are (sometimes) content to use a geometrical figure accompanied by the words “Look at this!” as a proof of a theorem. This looking too effects an altera- tion in one’s way of seeing

The picture can be seen in different ways, and so does not, as it where, give the meaning of what is pictured. That is found in what is done with the picture.

But perhaps saying the picture theory is being rejected is too strong. He is still making use of pictures, and it seems to me that hereabouts he is attempting to see how his previous representational approach fits in with meaning as use.

Certainly not all propositions are pictures, but at the least, propositions of the form aRb (4.012).

4.462 Tautologies and contradictions are not pictures of reality. They do not represent any possible situations. For the former admit all possible situations, and latter none . In a tautology the conditions of agreement with the world—the representational relations—cancel one another, so that it does not stand in any representational relation to reality.

Reiterating, Tracatatus Wittgenstein had presented a theory of meaning as referential, using the picture theory of meaning. In the latter PI he is hinting that the way a picture is to be understood is in terms of what one does with it, rather than what it represents.

The alternative seems to be that he still harbours a referential picture theory, somehow sitting under his theory of meaning as use.

Are you claiming that meaning is just information...?

You use "representation" a lot.

Is meaning just representation?

That seems to me to prefigure the answer from Austin.

424. The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But what is its application? Think of the picture of blindness as a darkness in the mind or in the head of a blind person.

This and the text thereabouts lead me to suppose that the picture theory of meaning is itself being rejected here. More generally, we might ask "what is the relation between a proposition and a state of affairs?" In the Tractatus, the picture stood between the state of affairs and the proposition. Kenny has it that "In the Investigations the relation between the proposition and the state of affairs is made by the language game". I'm suggesting that the state of affairs is itself made, or perhaps, presupposed, by the language game; that it is fundamental that things are considered to be so-and-so in order that the game occur. Hence

432. Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use its breath?

In Science, what is Real & Physical & Actual is what is not Ideal or Imaginary or merely Potential. — Gnomon

So potential energy is not real? Ideal gasses should never be used to find approximations for pressure and temperature, nor imaginary numbers in calculating quantum states?

But of course, you did not mean that. It would be crass for someone to suggest that we ought dismantle the apparatus of physics because it does not meet your exhortation. Isn't it dreadful how some folk misunderstand what is being said? They ought take much more care to understand the context...

This T.L Austin sounds a dreadful fellow.

Yep.

Interesting that he took the swastika as his example. Yes, I think it's about how seeing someone as a zombie is unnatural - I am taken by §419...

419. In what circumstances shall I say that a tribe has a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely he mustn’t be without consciousness!

This strikes me as a precursor to the notion of "hinge" propositions; here, being a chief hinges on being conscious...

And again in §421, '...does it worry you if I say: “These three struts give the building stability?”'; but then continuing on towards §426, the picture becomes problematic, preventing our seeing what is actually happening.

T.L. Austin — Gnomon

Hmm.

fair call it all seems a bit useless. I’d join you if I had much choice.

but I'm not going to sit around for hours typing. — Sam26

Yeah, you will. :wink:

Oh, I remember now. You take the picture theory seriously. That is, you carry it over into the PI, and presumably into On Certainty.

As a question of exegesis, I remain unconvinced that this is right; But apart from exegesis, the picture theory is too close to what we might call 'conceptual schema' for my liking - after Davidson.

So I don't see the distinction you seem to think sits between the fact that the moon is a satellite of Earth and that the moon is a satellite of Earth. It's as if you would say that "The moon is a satellite of Earth", apart from our language games about the moon and the Earth, or that "The moon is a satellite of Earth" requires no interpretation. On that view, truth is relative to this or that scheme. Better, I think, to give away the duality of scheme (picture) and world, and so "reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false".

Could do, but there is much of interest in part one, after the private language argument - and yet in this thread we can't even get that far without interjection.

@Sam26?

So do we start a seperate thread for the latter half of the PI? I suppose if we make the OP specific enough we might engage mod support in not simply transferring this dog's breakfast over to it.

Well, if you know what needs to be so for a sentence to be true, what more do you need?

What more is there to it's meaning?

It might be helpful to visit Davidson here.

What does the sentence S mean? Well, as a first approximation, we want some other sentence p such that we can write:

"S" means that p

So we write

"il pleut" means that it is raining.

What we are lookign for, in asking about meaning, is what the bit in the middle is; the

.....means that.....

Now Davidson points out that we can replace this structure, without loss, with

....is true if and only if...

There's a bit more to his argument than I give here... But the upshot is that we might produce a theory of meaning in which for every sentence S we produce some sentence P such that

"S" is true if and only if P

Notice that the "S" is in quotes, the P is being used.

We have here a theory of meaning in which each sentence is replaced by one for which we know the circumstances in which it is true. And if we know the conditions under which a given sentence is true, then what more is there to it's meaning?

Anyway, that's an overly brief rendering of Davidsonian semantics: the meaning of a sentence is it's truth conditions.

What's sad is, this thread has spent so much time on the first hundred remarks, but there is so much of great interest in the last hundred that remains unaddressed.

I have been traveling for the last few weeks, and while I read your comments, other things stole my attention. IS there something in particular we might re-visit?

Thanks for that. That's what I thought, in that the Investigations takes neither side in the realism/anti realism debate. — RussellA

Well, that debate occurred long after it was written, so that's to be expected. Trying to understand him in those terms is putting the cart before the horse.

Rather, he dissolves the divergence between idealism and realism. See §402.

I disagree, if I understand you, that facts are truths. — Sam26

I don't know what to make fo that. Are you claiming there are untrue facts? Or truths that are not facts?

There is a recent tendency to take "fact" to mean "empirical evidence" or similar. I do not use "fact" in this way.

Truths are about propositions, — Sam26

Nor this; it is propositions that are true, or not. A truth is a proposition.

DO we differ in that you would suppose there to be truths that cannot be put into propositional form, whereas I would not call such things truths, but perhaps intuitions or sentiments?

:wink:

Do you want my opinion or Wittgenstein's?

In those simple terms, I think the better approach is direct realism, after Austin - Many of the words we use refer directly to things in the world. It's a very misunderstood topic. I don't think your characterisation here at all accurate. As for "you're refusing to give your opinion" - I've provided pages and pages of explanation, over many, many years.

But Wittgenstein - the better interpretation is that he shows the realist/idealist division is flawed. That's why anscombe's paper is so careful. But you can find people that put him in either camp.

Idealism is pretty well irrelevant. Wittgenstein to a large extent set up the discussion of realism/antirealism in the nineties and noughties.

Austin is on the cover of Philosophy Now...

In conflict with Kit Fine. What fun.

yep. The Euthyphro originally considered justice, and is often also applied to The Good(?), but why not apply it, if truth is mooted as here? Is it that god decides what is true and what is false, or is it that god is obliged to only implement truths? There will be odd ramifications, not dissimilar to the question of whether god can contradict himself, and if not, is that a limit on his omnipotence? Enough to keep theologians entertained for an eternity.

For others, it's yet another example of god's incoherence.

Where your not understanding is that your taking a univocal position on a analogical way to speak about God. — Isaiasb

I'm saying that there is a clear enough use of "true" that applies to propositions; and that if you want to invent a different way of using the word, then admit that it is different and set out how it is to be used. I'm happy for you to use "truth" in an alternative way, just so long as you do not confuse or compound it with our usual use.

Further, if you are saying that your use is an analogy, then you are agreeing with me that your use differes from how we usually use "truth". Analogies are used to show how things are, but it remains unclear what it is you are attempting to show by "god is truth".

God isn’t Truth because he’s the most truth. — Isaiasb

Make up your mind. Is he truth or not? And how does truth admit of degrees? Is the pope almost truth, the bishop mostly truth and the priest a little bit truth? See how you misuse words here?

He is the measure of Truth, he is the measuring stick not the highest point on the stick. — Isaiasb

Hmm. So back to the Euthyphro. Is something true because god says, or does god say it is true because it is?

It isn’t nonsense outside of a close minded materialistic viewpoint. — Isaiasb

Wait on - are you now claiming that the notion that it is propositions that are true of false is part of materialism? Twaddle.

I explained previously many times that I see Absolute Truth as Truth that is unchanging and "absolute". — Isaiasb

Laughable. Absolute truth is "absolute". How profound. Yet you want to be taken seriously. Your religion appears, from what you say, parochial and bigoted. You are not offering anything that hasn't been said and rejected a thousand times on this forum alone.

Yawn.

Your rant on intrinsic and extrinsic meanings is incoherent. In particular,

But is this world in the Investigations a world that exists inside language or a world that exists outside of language? — RussellA

Folk have been at pains to try to get you to understand that language games involve both the world and words. It's not one or the other, but both.

meaning is contingent — Corvus

Well, more that meaning is irrelevant. It's use that is of interest, and asking for a slab in an Australian pub is for some an effective way of improving one's weekend.

Such a sensible fellow. — Ciceronianus

Indeed he was. But many of our fellows here are content to continue in confusion. The most deserving of pity are those who think exactly what they perceive is real, and those who think something is real if they think it so.

For example, if you walk into a pub, and say to the barmaid "Bring me a slab.", then of course she knows what you mean by  "slab", "bring" and  "me", all the words you just uttered to her.  But she will think you are talking nonsense, pulling her leg or just plain barmy. — Corvus

Hmm. Again, "Slab" is an Australian term for a carton of two dozen tins of beer.

indeed, it seems that
Kripkes proof shows rules are not objectively true.