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.
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