Class 5: Deeper into Logical Atomism; Deeper into Confusion

I don’t have too much to say by way of review of Class 5. Almost everyone seemed a bit befuddled, and I had at least one person confess after class that s/he feels so lost such that s/he might withdraw. That’s more like it! And by that I don’t mean that I want anyone to withdraw, but rather that I need to know where people are at. The student who was (I’m sticking to the past tense here) contemplating withdrawal was clearly grasping what needed to be grasped and is in a safe position as far the ‘Will I be able to write an A paper?’ question, which is always the perennial question (and not one that s/he actually asked, but I always assume that it’s a concern). However, I think that I’ll need to cold call those of you who are quiet so as to draw out your confusions and your thoughts; those who talk up and question or articulate have the grasp they need, but what I say in response to their concerns might not be addressing other pressing concerns that others of you have. Overall, I’m very happy with how you are doing, with emphasis on the adverb.

As for content, I started by going over Schroeder’s quick introduction to symbolic logic (which is also called formal logic). This might have confused you more than helped you. Luckily (?), Section 2.6 is dedicated to the basics of this logic and walks through it more slowly and carefully and – I hope and feel – clearly. But we’ll see. The basic idea that you need to grasp at this point is just that a logical system developed that enabled us to describe ordinary language sentences in logical terms – and in ways that reveal the logical complexity of those grammatically simple statements. Wittgenstein accepted this logico-analytic truth (that apparent grammatical form is different from actual underlying logical form), and it is a primary impetus for the logical atomism that he developed.

We then got further into logical atomism, and most of what we did covered Section 2.5 of Schroeder’s book, which I’ve already presented in Interlude 4.1; thus, that post provides the best review of the content we covered in class. There were fewer questions than usual, but what was said seemed to reflect a continued growing grasp of the material, and there were more attempts to articulate what Wittgenstein is saying (as opposed to asking me questions about what he said); Steven seemed to be very much thinking Wittgenstein’s thoughts near the end of class.

We then got off to a good start with the 3.1s. Steven got us going, and Emerson made a good first foray into restating what Wittgenstein means by “projecting.” He seems to clearly mean “objectifying” (Emerson’s constructive paraphrase) in the sense of making a proposition/thought objectively available to us in a sensible medium (such as visual (writing) or acoustic (speech)). We had just enough time to read the 3.1s and to gather up two strange potential consequences of Wittgenstein picture theory of meaning: it seems that (a) thoughts have a non-worldly form and (b) there is something that thinks/projects these thoughts – a something that is not itself a fact in the world. Cool.