Our last three classes have, from my perspective, gone well, insofar as we have, in each class, engaged in sustained analysis of key Tractarian concepts, and we have typically concentrated on a single crucial concept for the majority of the seventy-five minutes. Even more impressive, everyone seems to be paying attention, and questions and comments are just as frequent and useful at the end of class as at the beginning. Indeed, it always feels like we’re really ready to get into things around the fiftieth or sixtieth minute, but then, alas, class ends and you all leave. Sigh.
In summary, we focused primarily on the following in our most recent three classes: In Class 5 we focused on the second of the three proposition puzzles. The solution of the first – The Puzzle of False Propositions – was clear as a result of our work on logical atomism: propositions have sense, not meaning, and so can make sense even when false insofar as they have sense in virtue of a possible (not an actual) fact. The second puzzle is The Puzzle of Infinite Description: How can we generate infinite propositions – many of which have a new sense – with a limited set of names? This led to the question of how a name is connected to an object. There are two key aspects to that connection: the name must have the same form as the object, and a referential (denoting) connection must be made. We spent the bulk of the class wrapping our head around the idea of what the form of such a name would be: it would be a matter of combinatorial possibility. In other words, the name must be able to enter into every proposition that would be needed to describe any possible fact into which the object it names might enter. Thus, if an object was at one time part of the complex fact “Alexander the Great” and at another time part of the complex fact “this bunghole plug,” then the name must be able to enter into propositions that say those facts. But how then does a name – which is just a scribble or sound – get hooked up with an object? This is even more mysterious: it happens, Wittgenstein implies in the TLP and states explicitly in his notebooks, via a mental act of meaning the name. Class then ended. Note that we never explicitly addressed the issue of how we can understand a new sense, i.e., a proposition with sense that we have never before heard or thought. We are starting to touch on that issue now as we head into the say/show distinction in our upcoming class, Class 8.
In Class 6, we turned to The Puzzle of Propositional Form. This puzzle is what led to the so-called Picture Theory of Meaning. The puzzle is this: How can a sequence of names say anything about the world? The answer: The names have a logical form that mirrors the logical form of the objects that the proposition is saying something about, and in this fashion – in having names in a determinate logical structure – a proposition is able to picture reality. However, it is not a visual picture but a logical one. Thus, we turned our attention to the notion of logical form. We also noted the distinction between logical form (all the possible combinations of a set of objects or names) and logical structure (one actual combination from that larger set). We also managed, near the end of class, to get at the vexing issue of projection and the distinction between propositional sign, proposition, and thought – but we didn’t get too far (and we still haven’t fully addressed this issue). We ended with the issue of how the elements of thought are connected to objects. Thus, we know that an act of thought is what makes it so that an element of language (a name) connects with an object, and the name is just the perceptible sign of an element of thought. However, what hooks up an element of thought with an object, and what guarantees that their connection remains stable through time?
In Class 7 we took these issues up again, but I believe that they are still open questions for us. However, before tackling them further, we went over Wittgenstein’s logic. His account of logic approaches the connection between language and world from the ground up, so to speak: assuming that names form elementary propositions and that these in turn are combined into more complex propositions, then logic deals with the form of those propositions and the connections between them. Going over the logic as we did should either confirm for you that you have indeed been properly grasping Wittgenstein’s ontology and semantics or it should make help to make clear and weed out lingering errors. For us, the most important things to get are the idea of senseless propositions (which is what the propositions of logic are: they are well-formed but have no sense) and the implication that this view of logic has for propositional attitudes (such as belief), which do not exist. The first idea – senseless propositions – seemed relatively clear, but we ran out of time and so did not get to fully explicate why propositional attitudes do not exist and why their nonexistence means that there is no such thing as the soul or self.
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