Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought
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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought
338
and that can tell a man something about the world. The important restriction is
that no question can arise about whether it exists or not. Ordinary physical
objects and other people seem not to fit this requirement.
In his search for something whose existence cannot be questioned,
Russell hit upon present experience and, in particular, upon sense data: one
can question whether he is really seeing some physical object – whether, for
example, there is a desk before him – but a person cannot question that he has
had visual impressions or sense data; thus, what a man can name in the strict
logical sense and what things he can actually talk about turn out to be the
elements of his present experience. Russell therefore made a distinction
between what can be known by acquaintance and what can be known only by
description; i.e., between those things the existence of which cannot be
doubted and those about which, at least theoretically, doubt can be raised.
What is novel about Russell’s conclusion is that it was arrived at from a fairly
technical analysis of language: to be directly acquainted with something is to
be in a position to give it a name in the strict logical sense, and to know
something only by description is to know only that something uniquely fits the
description.
Russell was not constant in his view about physical objects. At one point
he thought that the observer must infer their existence as the best hypothesis
to explain his experience. Later he argued that they could be taken as logical
constructions out of sense data.
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Logical Atomism: Russell and the Early Wittgenstein
The next important development in Analytic philosophy was initiated
when Russell published a series of articles entitled “Philosophy of Logical
Atomism” (1918-19), in which he acknowledged a debt to Wittgenstein, who
had studied with Russell before the war. Wittgenstein’s own work, the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which can also justly be said to
present a logical atomism, turned out to be not only tremendously influential
on developments in Analytic philosophy but also such a deep and difficult text
that it has generated a growing body of scholarly interpretation.
Russell’s choice of the words logical atomism to describe this viewpoint
was, in fact, particularly apt. By using the word logical Russell meant to
sustain the position, described earlier, that through analysis – particularly with
the aid of the ideal structure provided by symbolic logic – the fundamental
truths about how any language functions can be revealed and that this
disclosure, in turn, would show the fundamental structure of that which the
language is used to describe. And by using the word atomism Russell
highlighted the particulate nature of the results that his analyses and those of
Wittgenstein seemed to yield.
On the linguistic level, the atoms in question are atomic propositions, the
simplest statements that it is possible to make about the world; and on the
level of what language talks about, the atoms are the simplest atomic facts,
those expressible by atomic propositions. More complex propositions, called
molecular propositions, can then be built up out of atomic propositions via
logical connectives – such as “either... or... ,” “both... and... ,” and “not...” –
the truth-value of the molecular proposition being in each case a function of
the truth values of its component atomic propositions.
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Language, then, must break down, upon analysis, into ultimate elements
that cannot be analyzed into any other component propositions; and, insofar as
language mirrors reality, the world must then be composed of facts that are
utterly simple. Atomic propositions are composed, however, of strings of
names understood, as Russell had explained it, in the strict logical sense; and
atomic facts are composed of simple objects, the things that could be thus
named.
The details of the Russell-Wittgenstein view have fascinated
philosophers by the way in which they not only formed a coherent view but
also seemed to follow inexorably from the central assumptions. There are
close connections between this period, which was perhaps the most
metaphysical in contemporary Analytic philosophy, and traditional
Empiricism. The breakdown of language and the world into atomic elements
had been one of the prominent features in the classical Empiricists, John
Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. There was also a view of the
connection between language and the world – adumbrated in Russell but fully
evident in the Tractatus – which has been important and influential, viz., the
picture theory, which holds that the structure of language mirrors that of the
world. Analysis is important because ordinary language does not show
immediately, for example, that it is founded on the atomic-molecular
proposition model. Another theme is that the deductive sciences –
mathematics and logic – are based solely on the way that language operates
and cannot reveal any truths about the world, not even about a world of
entities called numbers. Finally, logical atomism, in Wittgenstein’s thought as
opposed to Russell’s, was at one and the same time metaphysical – in the
sense of conveying via pure reasoning something about how the world is –
and antimetaphysical. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is unique in the history of
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Empiricism in its acceptance of the fact that it is itself a metaphysic and that
part of its metaphysics is that metaphysics is impossible: the Tractatus says of
itself that what it says cannot be coherently said. Only empirical science can
tell a man anything about the world as it is. Yet the Tractatus apparently tells
him, for example, about the relationship between language and the facts of the
world. For Wittgenstein, the solution of this seeming paradox lies in his
distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. There are
certain things that can somehow be seen to be so – in particular, the ways in
which language is connected with the world. The Tractatus could not
straightforwardly tell its readers about these matters – metaphysics cannot be
a body of facts expressible in any language – but the attempt to say these
things, done in the right way, can show them what it cannot coherently
express.
Logical Positivism: Carnap and Schlick
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was both a landmark in the history of
contemporary Analytic philosophy and perhaps its most aberrant example. It
not only contained the most highly sophisticated metaphysics but also was an
important influence on the most antimetaphysical of the positions taken by
Analytic philosophers, viz., that of Logical Positivism, which was mainly
developed by a group of philosophers, scientists, and logicians who were
centred in Vienna and came to be known as the Vienna Circle. Among these,
Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick have perhaps had the most influence on
Anglo-American philosophy, although it was an English philosopher, A.J.
Ayer – whose Language, Truth and Logic (1936) is still the most widely read
work of the movement in America and England – who introduced the ideas of
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Logical Positivism to English philosophy. Its main tenets have struck
sympathetic chords in the Analytic philosophers and are still important today,
even if in repudiation.
Above all else, Logical Positivism was antimetaphysical; nothing can be
learned about the world, it held, except through the methods of the empirical
sciences. The Positivists sought a method for showing both (1) when a theory
that seemed to be about the world was really metaphysical and (2) that such a
theory was, in fact, meaningless, and this they found in the principle of
verification. In its positive form, the principle said that the meaning of any
statement that is really about the world is given by the methods employed for
verifying its truth or falsity – the only allowable methods being, ultimately,
those of observation and experiment. In its negative form, the principle said
that no statement could both be a statement about the world and have no
method of verification attached to it. Its negative form was the weapon used
against metaphysics and for the vindication of science as the only possible
source of knowledge about the world. The principle would, thus, class as
meaningless many philosophical and religious theories that purport to say
something about the world but provide no way of testing the truth of the
statements; for example, in religion it would render suspect the statement that
God exists, which, being metaphysical, would be, strictly speaking,
meaningless.
The principle of verification ran almost immediately into difficulties,
most of which were first raised by the Positivists themselves. The attempt to
work out these difficulties belongs to a more detailed study of the movement.
It is sufficient to note here that these problems were sufficient to make most
subsequent Analytic philosophers wary of appealing directly to the principle.
It has, however, influenced philosophical work in more subtle ways.
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With the principle of verification in hand, the Positivists thought that
they could show a great many theories to be nonsense. There were several
areas of discourse, however, which failed the test of the principle but which
were simply impossible to rule out as concealed nonsense. Foremost among
these disciplines were mathematics and ethics. Mathematics (and logic) could
hardly be written off as nonsense. Yet their theorems are not verifiable by
observation and experiment; they are known, in fact, by pure a priori
reasoning alone. The answer seemed to be provided in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus, which held that the propositions of mathematics and logic are, in
Kantian terms, analytic; i.e., true – like the statement “All bachelors are
unmarried” – in virtue of the conventions that lie behind the use of the
symbols involved.
About ethics or, more precisely, about any statements involving value
judgments, the Positivist view was different, yet still of lasting importance. In
this view, value judgments are not, like mathematical truths, necessary
adjuncts to science. But they cannot be put off as nonsense; nor, obviously,
are they true by definition or linguistic convention. The usual view of the
Positivists, called emotivism, is that what look like statements of fact (e.g.,
that one should not tell lies) are really expressions of one’s feelings toward a
certain action; thus, value judgments are not really true or false. The
Positivist’s position was that neither mathematical nor ethical statements
could be dismissed, as were metaphysical propositions. Both had then to be
exempted from the principle of verification; and this was done by arguing that
their statements are not really about the world: mathematical truths are
conventions, and ethical statements are merely expressions of feelings. The
divorce of ethics from science, once again, reflects an old Empiricist theme, to
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be seen, for example, in David Hume’s dictum that from matters of fact one
cannot derive a conclusion about what ought to be nor vice versa.
Later History of the Movement
Philosophical Investigations: the Later Wittgenstein
A crucial turn that initiated developments that were destined to have a
lasting and profound effect on much of contemporary Analytic philosophy
occurred in 1929, when Wittgenstein, after some years in Austria during
which he was not philosophically very active, returned to England and
established his residence at Cambridge. There, the direction of his thought
soon shifted radically away from his Tractatus, and his views became in many
ways diametrically opposed to those of logical atomism. Because he published
none of the materials of this period, his influence on other English
philosophers – and ultimately on those in all of the countries associated with
Analytic philosophy – spread by way of his students and those who heard him
in the small groups to whom he spoke at Cambridge. His style, too, changed
from the semi-rigorous and formally organized propositions of the Tractatus
to sets of loosely connected paragraphs and remarks in which the ideas are
often conveyed more by suggestion and example than discursively. The result
has been that one of the major splits within the ranks of Analytic philosophy is
that between those who derive their methods from the later Wittgenstein and
those who have followed the Tractatus.
Although Wittgenstein’s thoughts ranged over almost the entire field of
philosophy, from the philosophy of mathematics to ethics and aesthetics, their
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impact has been felt most, perhaps, where it has concerned the nature of
language and the relationship between the mental and the physical.
Language and Following Rules
In logical atomism, as shown above, language was conceived as having
a certain necessary and fairly simple underlying structure that it was the job of
philosophy to expose. Wittgenstein began to tear away at this assumption.
Language, he now thought, is like an instrument that can be used for an
indefinite number of purposes. Hence, any effort to codify how it must operate
by giving some small set of rules would be like supposing that there is some
rigid necessity that a screwdriver (for instance) can be used only to drive
screws and forgetting that screwdrivers are also, quite successfully, used to
open jars and to jimmy windows. Language is a human institution that is not
bound by an outside set of rules – only by what men consider to be correct and
incorrect. And that, in turn, is not really a matter for a priori theories to
consider.
The notion of a rule and what it means to follow a rule was especially
prominent in his writings. Several concerns made this point of particular
interest to Wittgenstein. In mathematics and logic, emphasis was being placed
on the rules for manipulating the symbolism. As has been seen, symbolic logic
has also been a model for the underlying structure of language. If this fact is
coupled with the fact that Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus saw
language as reflecting these rules and with the general Empiricist tradition that
explains how language operates by each person following internal rules and
standards for the use of his words, the picture of the system that Wittgenstein
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thought mistaken then emerges, and it becomes clear why he placed the notion
of a rule so centrally.
Natural languages, however, are significantly different in that one does
not first learn the rules and then use the language; indeed, prior to learning the
language, one would not know what to do with rules. Mathematics and logic
are, in this sense, bad models for language because they aim at setting out
before hand the rules and principles that are subsequently to be used. They
encourage the belief that language must have a rigid structure and that,
without rules, no language would be possible. The “rules” that one might
plausibly discern in the language that one speaks are not, as rules, already
there, in a ghostly way, guiding what one says; they are either generalizations
from the finite data of what is counted as correct or incorrect, or they are rules
that, as Wittgenstein metaphorically expressed it, one puts away in the
archives – one adopts the rule but only after the fact.
Following a rule, however, was a concept that Wittgenstein saw as
wrongly analyzed in many classical views about language. Thus, he cast
irrevocable doubt on the prevalent theory – typified best, perhaps, in John
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) – that to use an
expression meaningfully is to have in one’s mind a standard or a rule for
applying it correctly. Against this theme, Wittgenstein’s point was that a rule
by itself is dead – it is like a ruler in the hands of someone who has never
learned to use it, a mere stick of wood. Rules cannot compel nor even guide a
person unless he knows how to use them; and the same is true about mental
images, which have often been thought to provide the standard for using
linguistic expressions. But if rules themselves do not give life to words but
require a similar explanation for what gives them life, then there is a useless
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regress and no (philosophical) explanatory value in the whole apparatus of
internal rules and standards.
Relation Between Mental and Physical Events
In some respects, Wittgenstein made some significant breaks with the
Empiricist tradition – in his views about language and the explanation of the
rigour of the deductive sciences. His treatment of the relationship between
mental events and physical events also represents an important departure.
Empiricists generally have started from the important assumption that what a
person is immediately acquainted with is his own sensations, ideas, and
volitions, and that these are mental and not physical; and, most importantly,
that the things he knows immediately are essentially private and inaccessible
to others. For both Moore and Russell there then arose the problem of how, in
view of the privacy stressed by the sense-datum theory, the world of physical
objects could be known. Wittgenstein’s attack on this viewpoint, which has
come to be known as “the private language” argument, has become well
known, partly because it was in this area that Wittgenstein presented what
could most easily be picked out as a more or less formal argument – one that
could then be analyzed and criticized in an analytic manner. Even in this case,
however, his style of writing was such that his precise formulation of the
argument has become a main source of controversy. Wittgenstein argued that
the notion of an utterly private experience would imply: (1) that what goes on
in the mental life of a person could be talked about only in a language that that
person alone whose mental life it was could understand; (2) that such a private
language would be no language at all (this has been the main source of
controversy); and (3) that the widely held doctrine that there are absolutely