Blog Prompt 2: Trying to Picture Logical Atomism

You are likely in a position similar to where you were when you wrote the first blog: confused and overwhelmed. This is still to be expected, especially insofar as we’ve been working our way through what might be the most difficult part of the TLP: the logical atomism. The idea, however, is that if you grasp the basics of logical atomism, then the rest of the text is more interesting and fruitful. And you most likely grasp these basics already – and that you do so will become evident when we start to apply (so to speak) the logical atomism to thought, subjectivity, logic, and ethics.

The main prompt for your second blog post is quite simple: “Describe the logical atomism as fully and as clearly as you can.” As you do this, you will find yourself perhaps having the thoughts of the TLP – the thoughts without which you cannot understand the text (although one must wonder whether thoughts of logical atomism picture any possible facts – and so whether these thoughts are really thoughts or are instead something else). And what I said in the first blog prompt remains true: “Struggling with these thoughts should lead you to question a lot of what you take for granted – even if you continue to believe what you take for granted.” And what you might take for granted at this point is what simple, everyday words such as ‘object,’ ‘name,’ ‘fact,’ ‘sentence,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘world’ (to mention just a few) really mean. Indeed, with this in mind, another statement that I made in the first blog prompt remains quite true: “Many of these terms are everyday words, but they clearly mean something slightly different here.”

It’s the use of everyday words to denote (if that’s the right word) technical philosophical concepts that makes the initial encounter with the logical atomism of the TLP so frustrating but also so uncanny (with ‘uncanniness’ being the kind of thing that lures one into philosophical reflection). Some of you might have felt that you had a basic grasp of those words and so of logical atomism when I first introduced it in Class 3, but now that we have pushed further into the logical atomism and the reasons for it, you might find yourself doubting what you initially thought. You perhaps had a mere pseudo-grasp of logical atomism, and you’re now on your way to replacing it with an actual grasp of this ontology. This is to be expected – and it is part of why we have pushed further in Classes 4 and 5: we have pushed further not so that you can grasp and understand all the various arguments one might make for logical atomism (although I hope that some of you grasp some or even all of them) or the problems that arise with logical atomism. Rather, asking these questions (What arguments support it? What problems can one find with it (on its own terms)?) help to make clear what the basic parts of this ontology are. And that’s all I want – to make sure that you could spell out, in two or three hundred words or less, what the theory of logical atomism states and maybe also a basic sense of why it states that.

This basic grasp of logical atomism – and it need only be very basic – is necessary to make sense (and have fun with) the rest of the TLP and, beyond that, the Philosophical Investigations. Why you need to know those basics – and why the grasp need only be basic – will become clearer later.

However, the process that we’ve undergone in the past couple of classes is one that will be repeated throughout the course: We’ll introduce ourselves to some philosophical set of concepts or perspective, and it will be introduced using ordinary language, but those ordinary words will be used and joined together in such a way that we question what we think they mean (and how we ourselves see things). Grasping that new meaning will require that we question them thoroughly, and this leads to two things. First, it leads to a better understanding of our ordinary language and our ordinary thinking and how they both work (when they work) and trip us up (when they don’t work so well). It also introduces us – and this is ultimately what is of value – to actual thinking. Wittgenstein wrote in such a way that what he thinks cannot just be handed to you like a piece of information that you memorize or a method that you can then quickly apply for yourself. Rather, you must think the thoughts yourself, and in the process you must work on and refine your own capacities for thinking. It calls for many mental qualities: flexibility; precision; inquisitiveness; endurance; the ability to imagine various reasons for a belief (especially beliefs that are not one’s own); the ability to look at things from many perspectives; and the ability to take a complicated thought and see how all its parts hang together and require each other. The logical atomism of the TLP is indeed faulty; however, it has enormous strength – especially in the context of the text as a whole – as a method for helping you to develop your capacity to think critically and philosophically.

Three last thoughts. First, I’m blogging (here in “The Unsayable Panda”) a review – or in the case of “interlude” posts, a preview – of our classes. I realize that it can be hard to hold onto everything we do in class, and so these posts will help us to keep a record of everything.

Second, in addition to blogging about what logical atomism is and why Wittgenstein believed it was, as an ontology, necessary, you might also begin to closely read and make sense of the 3.1s. They are vexing, but in a very interesting way. If you have a nice clear grasp of logical atomism, you should find that you can both summarize that and then turn to the 3.1s. Of course, you might also wish to present a grasp of logical atomism and then turn to the questions of why one might hold this ontology or how one might defend it or what its main problem is.

Finally, don’t worry about understanding everything. There is a lot in this tiny text, and we just want to grasp the basics, even thought getting that grasp requires that we push beyond the basics. But when it comes time to write about the TLP, you will be able to pick your topic and you will be allowed to write expositions instead of arguments (meaning that you can seek to explain and clarify as opposed to argue for or against). For instance, you might wonder at what the logical atomism is and then, once you grasp it, at how it entails the views on the subject or ethics that Wittgenstein will later introduce. But if you think of each proposition as a battle (a battle to make sense of it), you might then decide not to fight each battle. Instead, fight strategically and aim to win the war (which is the fight to get a basic grasp of the text as a whole).

Interlude 4.1: Schroeder on Logical Atomism

Wittgenstein’s logical atomism stems from his appreciation of the model of analysis developed by the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell. According to Russell, a proposition such as “Scott was the author of Waverly” is actually very complex and can be analyzed into a least three other propositions:

Fact: Scott was the author of Waverly.

Atomic Fact 1: At least one person wrote Waverly.

Atomic Fact 2: At most one person wrote Waverly.

Atomic Fact 3: Whoever wrote Waverly was Scott.

Wittgenstein draws a conclusion from this sort of analysis: “the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one” (TLP 4.0031). (In other words, we confuse ourselves by treating grammar as logic.) A typical proposition of our language is a logically complex one that describes a fact that is itself complex. The proposition can be analyzed (i.e., broken down into) elementary propositions, each of which describes an individual state of affairs (i.e, an atomic fact or Sachverhalt). Taking this to be true, Wittgenstein must then develop an ontology that captures what these individual states of affairs must be like.

Schroeder says that he will look at three propositions (one of which is two combined) in order to develop the logical atomistic ontology associated with the Sachverhalt, although he actually ends up looking at four:

Facts, not things: 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

Simple objects: 2.02 + 2.0271 Objects are simple […] unalterable and subsistent.

Determinacy of sense: 3.23 The demand that simple signs be possible is the demand that sense be determinate.

Independent Sachverhalten: 2.061 States of affairs are independent of each other.

I’ll review each in turn.

Facts, not things: A list of all things would not describe the world; we need to know how the things are arranged.

Simple objects: Russell envisaged a complete analysis of any given thought that would trace it back the atoms of language, each bit of which corresponds to some bit of the world with which we are acquainted (mostly just sense-data). Wittgenstein agreed that the aim of analysis is to “uncover the atoms of language”; however, he “did not adopt Russell’s empiricism about those simples” (Schroeder 40). (Whether his simple objects – that that the atoms of language name – must be empirical is unclear; as Schroeder notes, Wittgenstein was undecided on the point, and scholars still debate it.) Wittgenstein postulated the existence of these atoms of reality not on the basis of any empirical evidence (which he did not have) but rather on the basis of what we call a priori reasons: reasons that argue about the nature of something prior to any empirical investigation. Schroeder offers three possible a priori arguments that Wittgenstein might have made or even had in mind.

Analysis must come to an end: Here the idea is that analysis cannot go on forever; we must eventually get to those most basic parts of language that have meaning not on the basis of referring to other bits of language but rather on the basis of referring to bits of the world. Language must, in other words, at some point point to something outside itself. However, while it might seem plausible to claim that analysis of language must in this sense come to an end at some point – we must at some point go outside language to the world that language describes (and makes more fully available to us) – it is not clear why a simple atom of language (a name) must denote a simple atom of reality (an object) and not something complex. Why cannot “tree” be a name that denotes something complex (a tree), even though tree functions as a simple sign in language?

Autonomy of sense: The answer has to do with the ‘fact’ that language can have meaning – i.e., a proposition can have sense – regardless of what happens to be the case. This leads to his second argument for simple objects. This one stems from proposition 2.02, which introduces the claim that objects are simple. The first comment on this (2.021) explains why: these objects make up the substance of the world. The first comment on that (2.0211) explains why: if there was no substance, then the sense of one proposition would depend on the truth of another proposition. The second comment on 2.021 (namely, 2.0212) then further explains that if 2.0211 were so, then we could not make a picture of the world of any kind (true or false). Why is this?

As Schroeder explains, the worry here stems from making the referentialist assumption, namely, that meaning is a matter of the things out in the world to which language ultimately refers. Thus, the “meaning of a name is the object it denotes” (42). (Note that propositions do not have meaning; they have sense.) If the object that a name denotes does not exist, then the name denotes nothing and has no meaning. The propositions in which it occurs will then not have sense, since they contain (perhaps at a deep level available to us only upon a logically possible analysis) a name that points to nothing; this means that some atomic fact that this proposition points to cannot in fact exist and so it cannot in fact be pictured, and the proposition does not picture anything logically possible.

For instance, if we take the statement, “President Washington asked me to call on him,” and we then regard “President Washington” as a name, and we accept that President Washington no longer exists, then the name has no meaning, since there is no object/thing to which it points. Here, the sense of the proposition “President Washington asked me to call on him” (let’s call this proposition p) depends on the truth of the proposition “There exists a man that is President Washington” (let’s call this proposition q). It is possible for p to have sense only if it is possible for the fact it describes to be true; however, q is false, meaning that the fact that it describes could not be true. Thus, p has no sense (it is not bipolar) and in fact is nonsense – it points to no possible fact and is actually not even really a proposition. However, this is clearly not true, and so it must not be the case that the sense of p depends on the truth of q. (Notice also that q is not the name, but rather a proposition about the name “President Washington.” If proper nouns were treated as Tractarian names, then it would be possible for those names to have no meaning, since the referent might not exist; thus, in order to know if we can use a name, we need a proposition – such as “The referent of this name exist” – to be true, but this would be strange, since names are meant to, as it were, speak for themselves as the basic building blocks of language.)

It might seem clear at this point why Wittgenstein thought description would be impossible if the sense of one proposition depended on the truth of another. However, he goes further and offers two more explicit accounts, one which just spells out what I spelled out above with the “President Washington” example. But he (Schroeder) first looks at Max Black’s account (Black was an early and influential Wittgenstein scholar). Black posits (quite plausibly) that this ‘dependency of sense’ (the idea that the sense of one proposition is not autonomous of the truth of other propositions but in fact depends on them) would involve an infinite regress: in analysis, we would have to determine if q is true in order to know if p is true, and q would itself depend on some proposition – say, r – and r would depend on s, and so forth. Schroeder points out that this is flawed as an argument for the problem of the ‘dependency of sense,’ since it is dealing with verification, not sense: yes, we would never be able to verify whether some proposition is true, but we often make claims that make sense to us without our knowing if all the truth-conditions on which those claims rest are themselves true. The issue for Wittgenstein at this point is not whether we could ever actually verify the truth of the proposition; the issue is whether we can know that our proposition does in fact have sense. Is it logically possible for it to pick out a possible state of affairs in the world?

The Status of Proper Names: Wittgenstein’s answer is that if some name within my proposition has no possible referent, then the proposition cannot have sense and cannot possibly (in a logical, not just empirical sense) depict anything. This is the strongest version of the second argument, and Schroeder introduces it on pages 44-45. To develop this explanation and defense of the early Wittgenstein’s views, he turns to the later Wittgenstein’s views of these earlier views. The idea we get from that later account of this earlier view is this: the problem is that we talk about grammatical proper names all the time, and many of those names refer to things that no longer exist (or never existed), and yet the sentences in which those names occur clearly make sense to us. Upon realizing this, the early Wittgenstein had two options: give up referentialism (the idea that names have meaning via denoting existing objects) or redefine what a name is. Wittgenstein (early on) chose the latter option: he claims that what we commonly regard as a proper name is a grammatical concept but not a logical one. Logically speaking, what we call ‘names’ are actually ‘disguised descriptions’ of the world: they are really a set of propositions that describe a possible state of affairs and are not simple atoms of language that pick out simple objects.

This version of the second argument for logical atomism is the strongest of those that depend on the autonomy of sense. And Schroeder rightly notes and emphasizes that this argument in defense of simple objects contains only one dubious premise: the truth of the doctrine of referentialism. Insofar as this second argument stems from the fact that our propositions do in fact have sense even when they depict non-existing facts (which we are erroneously but habitually inclined to call ‘things’) and whether any other proposition is true, we might call this argument for simple objects the ‘Argument from Propositional Sense.’ One might also call it the ‘Argument from the Autonomy of Sense.’

Determinacy of sense: This defense of the existence of simple objects is closely related to Wittgenstein’s assumption that sense be determinate, i.e., that every meaningful proposition of our language have a sense that depicts some possible fact in a determinate way, by which he means that it is possible to then verify that the proposition is true. In 3.23, he refers to this not as an assumption but as a demand: “The demand that simple signs be possible is the demand that sense be determinate.” For some, this points to the central question that motivates the TLP: How is determinate meaning possible, i.e., how is it (logically) possible that our ordinary language works as well as it does?” If we demand that our theory explain the determinacy of sense, then we are, Wittgenstein is claiming, also demanding that there be simple signs (for reasons we have just seen), and this demand for simple signs implies a demand for simple objects, since a simple sign (a name) has no meaning (qua Wittgenstein) if there is no simple object to which it refers.

It might seem clear at this point why determinate sense requires simple things – both simple signs and simple objects – but Schroeder elaborates what we might call the ‘Argument from the Determinacy of Sense’ in case it is not. (Note that we are here dealing not with the simple fact that my propositions have sense – even when they refer to what seem to be non-existent things – or with whether that sense is autonomous but rather with that fact that that sense is also determinate). What Wittgenstein has in mind by ‘determinacy’ is spelled out on pages 46-47 and allows for the fact that I might – at the level of ordinary language – speak in ways that seem general, vague, and imprecise. However, such general statements are made in particular situations that help to give them a particular sense; further, much of that sense might well be ‘in my head,’ so to speak. Thus, when I say, “The book is on the table,” it is possible for you to know exactly what I mean – which book and which table and whether the former is on the latter. The ‘details’ that make the sense of the proposition determinate are, as he put it in his notebooks on 21 June 1915, “added in thought” (47). In other words, an analysis of my ordinary language utterance would reveal that utterance’s sense by analyzing what appear to be general terms into that that connects those terms with simple objects. “The book” is a complex that can be broken down into simple signs that correspond to those and only those objects that are arranged as the particular book that I have in mind. I do not need to actually be consciousness of this exact composition, but it must be there at some level in my thought in order for me to think determinately about this exact book and no other. Thus, the complex “the book” can be analyzed down into more basic parts, each of which has an internal relation to that complex, since it is not logically possible for the complex to obtain if the parts of which it is made do not obtain.

Thus, to say that a sense is determinate is to say that, with any thought that we have (with any proposition that we think or utter or write), it is always logically possible for us to spell out the more basic propositions out of which that complex proposition is built. But doing this is only possible if we get down to lowest level of analysis beyond which we cannot and need not go. This lowest level would be where we have names joined together in atomic (i.e., elementary) propositions that depict objects joined together in atomic facts (i.e., states of affairs).

Schroeder notes that, as with the other arguments for logical atomism, this one also depends on referentialism: in this case, it depends on the corollary that when a name means an object, it means all the essential features of the object even if we are not in (empirical) fact aware of them. “Thus,” Schroeder writes, “the contents of meaning and sense can outstrip what competent speakers know, indeed what they are able to find out” (48). We’ll return to this issue when the later Wittgenstein critiques it, but Schroeder quickly notes that one could have determinacy combined with infinite and endless divisibility if one could assume that that divisions are regular (although this rebuttal seems to me to be rather weak).

Independent Sachverhalten: This idea of the indepenence of the existence of states of affairs follows from the previous one – in particular from the idea that a complex proposition logically entails the simpler propositions out of which it is built. The idea here is that this is the only internal relation one proposition can have to another: a more complex proposition, given its nature as complex, is what it is only through being composed of those simpler propositions. (Wittgenstein will, later in the TLP, say that it is a truth-function of those simpler propositions.) However, those simple propositions contain no such relationship to each other, and so they are logically independent of each other. This must be the case given the nature of the atomic facts that the most simple, elementary propositions depict: whether any objects are arranged in a particular atomic fact is a contingent matter, and so it cannot logically depend on whether other objects are arranged in certain ways. If atomic facts were logically interrelated – such that the existence of one logically entailed the nonexistence of another – then Wittgenstein’s logical atomism falls apart.

Schroeder goes about spelling this out in a slightly different way. He assumes that Tractarian objects are physical (or at least phenomenal in an empirical sense); we need not assume this, but doing so quickly reveals the problem with the idea that atomic facts are independent of each other. The problem, simply put, is this: “There is a speck of blue here.” Assuming that this is an elementary proposition, referring to an atomic fact, then we should not, Wittgenstein claims, be able to infer the existence or non-existence of another atomic fact and so the truth or falsity of another elementary proposition from the truth of “There is a speck of blue here.” However, this is false: If it is true that there is a speck of blue here, then it is false that there is a speck of red (or yellow or green or etc.) here. It was this “color problem” that led Wittgenstein to later – in 1929 – explicitly reject the Tractarian theory.

Class 4: Logical Atomism

We spent the fourth class period introducing ourselves to the early Wittgenstein’s logical atomism. This pretty much took up the whole seventy-five minutes. I loved it, and for me the time raced by. However, it can be hard for me to judge how the class as a whole felt about these seventy-five minutes. Some of you were active in questioning, some of you were active in listening, but in some cases I worried that I’d lost you completely. This is a difficult section of the book, and I’m tempted to say that it’s the most difficult, insofar as it is conceptually demanding but also not terribly exciting. (The ethical and mystical aspects of the TLP will be difficult but are generally found to be exciting.) However, once one grasps the logical atomism, then everything else begins to (kind of) fall into place. I believe that it is for this reason that Wittgenstein starts with the ontology, even though it ultimately plays a subservient role in the Tractarian system and is not primarily what he’s interested in – and it also came later in the development of his thought. (He also believed that most of his ontology simply awaited verification by advances in the sciences and so he seems to have not worried – in his early thinking – about the problems with this ontology.)

(A digression for those who are not familiar with the subfields of philosophy: Ontology is the study of what is – various characterized as the nature of being, existence, and/or reality – and the relationships that (can) obtain among what is. Most systematic philosophies offer an ontology. Further, ontology is itself a branch of one of the primary subfields of the field of philosophy: metaphysics. Metaphysics is that branch (subfield) of philosophy that deals with ontology (the philosophy of being) and cosmology (which often includes the study of the concept of God), and the philosophy of mind/soul is sometimes placed here. Metaphysics is, of course, not the only branch of philosophy but is one of many. There are various ways of grouping the main branches of philosophy. The standard simple division with which I am familiar is Metaphysics – Epistemology – Ethics – Logic. But this can be more broadly constructed as Being – Knowledge – Value – Signs. “Being” deals with what is, whether that the ‘what is’ in question is the cosmos, the mind, or the basic features of reality. “Value” deals with ethics, aesthetics, and politics. “Signs” deals with logic and language. Furthermore, there are now applied fields of philosophy (such as business ethics or medical epistemology) and philosophies for each discipline (such as the philosophy of history or literature or psychology). And now back to logical atomism.)

The two key reasons that the logical atomism is difficult are (a) the fact that the concepts and their relationships can be hard to grasp, especially insofar as they go against how most of us think, and (b) the fact that it’s not clear why Wittgenstein felt that things had to be this way, i.e., the questions and concerns that pushed him toward this ontological theory are not clear. We spent our time dealing with (a) and put (b) off until next class, although we did touch on (b) a little bit at the end: when we were talking about the consequences of a destructible object (an object that could cease to exist), we were starting to grapple with why Wittgenstein felt that indestructible objects are logically necessary features of existence.

I felt that we did a good job introducing ourselves to logical atomism, but I make this claim only on the basis of (a) our having covered all the key terms and (b) you as a group asking good questions – ones that came from either a grasp of those key terms or the honest attempt to grasp them. You also hopefully began to see the way in which (a) the TLP forces you to think and speak precisely, (b) question everything, and (c) hold off on some questions until you’ve read more of it (and so to stay focused on the logical atomism until you’ve grasped it before you try to struggle directly with the other parts of the TLP). But some of the questions that arose or were implied are quite important: How do you know if something is verifiable (and so a thought)? A related question is, How do you know when you’ve gotten to the basic level of analysis? Thoughts are facts, which suggests that we should be able to have thoughts of thoughts, but is this so, and if so, how could we verify whether the pictured thought-fact indeed obtains? And how do we gather up knowledge about the outside world such that we can verify the veracity of our thoughts? Is a perception of the outside word also a picture of some kind? To what extent does my thinking/picturing depend on what I perceive? And who or what within me gathers up the names in my head and puts them together as pictures that are then projected onto the world as truth-claims? And is this something within me itself within the world and so picture-able, or must it be beyond the world and so unsayable? Finally, how does an embrace of what is logically possible alter or expand my thinking regarding what is empirically possible? These are questions that we’ll need to keep in mind as we move forward.

At this point, my hope is simply that the basics of this ontology are clear as we move forward. According to this ontology, the world is composed of objects, which may be infinite in number. Each object is indestructible, such that even if the universe as we know it were destroyed, these objects would still exist. Furthermore, each object must always be in a relationship (a state of affairs, i.e., atomic fact) with other objects, although there is no particular object with which it must be related. However, the ‘form’ of the object is such that it can enter into relationships only with certain kinds of objects. The formal features of the object that determine the logically possible relationships into which the object can enter are its ‘internal properties,’ and the features that an object has as a result of the particular, actual relationship it is now in are its ‘external properties.’

To understand internal and external properties, one might make a rough analogy with Lego pieces. Each Lego piece has a form – what one might call its essence or nature, that which makes it what it is – and the form determines in advance all the logically possible relationships into which the piece can enter. Then we put this Lego piece together with another Lego piece; it is now a fact that this Lego piece is in this relationship, i.e., state of affairs. However, this feature of the Lego piece – that it is actually in this state of affairs – is a contingent feature/property of the Lego piece and so what we’re calling an ‘external’ property: it is not essential to the Lego piece that it be in this atomic fact, but it is essential to it that being in such a fact is logically possible.

This notion of the internal properties (essence) of an object gives us one of three ways in which Wittgenstein’s atomism is in fact logical: the atoms have essential features that determine in advance what relationships are logically possible for them. A second way in which his atomism is logical will become more apparent when we look at his semantics (the picture theory of meaning) next week, although we’ve already looked at this a good bit: all facts, whether thoughts in my head or the way things stand in the external world and whether atomic or complex, have a logical form. In other words, objects have a logical form that determines what objects they can hook up with, and when two or more objects come together, their collective form is itself logical. They can then be grouped with other atomic facts to form the world as it is (and as we think it). Our thoughts are able to picture the world precisely because they group things together so that the names and elementary propositions in our head have the exact same form as the “case” that they are intending to picture. Thus, we have a name for each object (that is known to us), and we combine them into elementary propositions, which picture possible atomic facts, and we group those together into the ordinary language thoughts of which we are conscious and which we utter to others or write down on the screen. We are typically not aware of these basic names or even the elementary propositions, and for language to work, we (most of the time) don’t need to be aware of them. More on this next week.

The third way in which Wittgenstein’s atomism is logical is open to debate: some say that the objects themselves are logical objects and not physical ones. But we do not need to settle this matter and may or may not take it up as we proceed.

So this, then, is the logical atomism. Indestructible objects combine to form atomic facts, which combine to form more complex facts, and we experience those and try to think them, using names to form elementary propositions and combining those in turn to form more complex thoughts. Our thoughts picture possible facts by mirroring the logical form of those facts. We are often unaware of the form and basic constituents of our own thoughts. We project our thoughts, saying, in essence, that this is the way that the world is, and it is possible that it is so (or else these wouldn’t be thoughts). We might then seek to verify the truth of what we claim.

Class 3: Stepping into the TLP

Yesterday we had our first class on the TLP. You’d been reading it already, but up to this point in class we’d just introduced ourselves to the syllabus/course (Class 1) and to Wittgenstein’s early biography and some pertinent ideas that can be pulled from it (Class 2), but we began in earnest yesterday in Class 3. And overall, I felt that things went well and that we’re off to a good start.

We did three things. The first two things sought to help us to begin to get a sense of the text as a whole: it can, not surprisingly, be difficult to read any systematic philosophical text without knowing the system first. The idea here is that you can really only understand proposition 1 if you know all the other propositions with which it connects, but you can only know those if you have already read the other propositions, which, when you read proposition 1 for the first time, you have not done (excepting Joe Panda, who skipped the first proposition the first time he read the text and who read it only after reading all the others, such that he was the first to read proposition 1 with some understanding the first time that he read it; of course, Joe Panda doesn’t exist). Thus, it is helpful, as we begin to discuss the initial propositions in class, to get some bearing with respect to the textual context for these (and all other) propositions.

By “textual context” I mean that context provided by the text itself and by those documents that played a role in the text’s construction, and by those documents I mean the letters and notes and journals that he wrote as he worked through the ideas that have their final form in the text. It is typically necessary to understand both the general gist of the text as a whole and even some of the background of its development in order to understand any part of the text. Schroeder will provide us with the background material that we need, although other excellent sources are Ray Monk’s exemplary biography of Wittgenstein, Duty of Genius, and Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914-1916.

Schroeder provided us with two crucial sets of ideas for understanding the text as a whole. The first has to do with the nature of the TLP as whole. The second set is four fundamental ideas – in the areas of the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language – that shaped Wittgenstein’s early thought.

With respect to the nature of the TLP as whole – an issue that is the source of much heated debate in Wittgenstein scholarship – the problem is twofold. The first is that Wittgenstein claimed that the point of the book is ethical. Given that it is primarily focused on logic and semantics, it is not clear how this is so. Further, he says that ethics is unsayable, which suggests that if this is an ethical text, it is not saying anything. And this leads to the second fold of the problem: given the logic and semantics that Wittgenstein develops in the TLP, some sentences that we write in our language have sense (meaning that they depict possible facts; these logically legitimate sentences are called “propositions” in order to distinguish them from sentences that look legitimate but are not) and some have no sense (meaning that they do not depict a possible state of affairs). The TLP clearly seems to contain only sentences of the latter sort. Thus, it is nonsense and it says nothing. Finally – and this might be a third fold – this means that there are no thoughts in the TLP, and yet in the Preface Wittgenstein clearly claims that the TLP contains thoughts (and that their truth is unassailable).

With respect to the four fundamental ideas – referentialism, logical analysis, determinacy of sense, and bipolarity – we said a bit, or at least enough so that we were then able to have a very fruitful first discussion of the TLP. What is still missing for us is a sense of why those ideas are important and of the questions/problems that those ideas answered/solved. We’ll get more into that tomorrow or next week.

We then ended with a very good discussion of three propositions. The first two I chose and placed together in order to illustrate some important things about how to read the TLP. The third was offered up by Emerson and strongly seconded by Heather. All three are connected in important ways.

The two propositions that I put together were 1 and 2.06a. (2.06a means ‘the first sentence of 2.06’). Proposition 1 claims, “The world is all that is the case.” Right off the bat, one should have questions. The implicit question that the first comment on 1 answers is, ‘What is meant by ‘the case’?’ The answer given there in 1.1 is ‘the totality of facts,’ with the added specification that facts are not things. (At the very end of class, and so at the tail end of our discussion of Joe the crack-smoking Panda, I noted that this distinction between facts and things is important insofar as if sentences mean in virtue of pointing to things, then we have serious ontological problems when it comes to thoughts of non-existent things. However, we have no such problem, Wittgenstein is claiming, if we argue that the meaning of a sentence – its sense – is a matter of facts (with ‘facts’ understood in a bipolar sense as something that could obtain or not obtain; the thought itself does not require that the fact that is thought actually obtains)).

But one could easily ask another question: Is “all that is the case” all that there is? In other words, is reality exhausted by “the case” – and so by this conception of “world.” I picked out the first statement where reality is mentioned: 2.06. (Note that I did this by simply looking in the very useful index; also, this was not planned – it’s tough to plan a Wittgenstein class too carefully since so much depends on how you all are reacting to it.) In the first sentence of 2.06 (i.e., at 2.06a), we read, “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality.” Noel helped us to work through this quickly: If “all that is the case” is the existence of states of affairs, and if this is the world, then reality is more than the world, since reality also includes all non-existing – but logically possible and so thinkable and ergo sayable – state of affairs (called ‘atomic facts’ in Odgen’s translation; the German is Sachverhalt, meaning ‘the way that things (Sache) stand or hang together or are related (verhalten as a verb means ‘to behave’ and as noun means ‘behavior,’ and so it’s a matter of how things are behaving)).

Why this distinction between world and reality is important became clearer when connected by Emerson to a troubling concept introduced in comments 3.01-03. There, we get the idea what is thinkable is possible and that there is no illogical thought. The entirety of possible thoughts would give us a picture of the whole of reality; the entirety of true thoughts would give us a picture of the world. But thoughts of things that are entirely empirically unlikely, like a crack-smoking panda, are still logically possible. The thought brings, as it were, a picture to mind – a picture of how things might stand if the thought were true. A thought can depict possible states of affairs in this manner because it has logical form: the thought is, at the deep level for which logical analysis aims, organized in the same way as the world would be if the fact existed. What exactly logical form is remains a question for us, but whatever it is, it is what enables thoughts to picture facts (whether they exist or are merely possible (even if monstrously implausible)). But the key point is that what is thinkable goes far beyond what is empirically plausible or even what we tend to imagine or to have ever actually thought. And this world/reality distinction will – like the fact/thing distinction – be important for Wittgenstein’s logic, semantics, and ethics.

A final note: What we saw at the end of class was what I was after when I had you jump into the TLP without any lectures to help set things up for you. You need to flounder and react, since you can engage the TLP only from where you stand right now. Right now you have various assumptions and certainties and faulty ways of thinking, and the TLP will elicit those for you as you struggle with it, such that your struggle with the TLP becomes a struggle with the limits of your own thinking. This is perhaps one of the primary reasons that the TLP has so far had lasting (and ethical) value.