Schroeder begins his account of the Picture Theory of Meaning by presenting three puzzles that drove Wittgenstein’s early thought. The first two should feel familiar by this point, and the semantics that he needs to solve those problems stems directly from his logical atomism (although he developed the semantics first and then the ontology that had to go with it). It is the third puzzle that will most interest us, as it is the puzzle that will require the picture theory.
i) Given that language is essentially a matter of signs standing for things (referentialism), how can there be false propositions: i.e., propositions that are meaningful although there is no actual fact represented by them (cf. NB, 30 Sept. 1914)?
[The Puzzle of False Propositions]
ii) How is it possible with a limited number of different signs to describe any of an infinite number of possible states of affairs (cf. NB 98)?
[The Puzzle of Infinite Description]
iii) Words are essentially names, standing for objects (referentialism). A sequence of names (‘Tom Dick Harry’) is not a statement (cf. NB 96, 105). How, then, is it possible for a proposition to be more than just a sequence of names and to make a statement about the world? (Schroeder 52)
[The Puzzle of Propositional Form]
The first puzzle (The Puzzle of False Propositions) stems from the central assumption of referentialism (that language must at some point refer to the world): the puzzle is over how false propositions can make sense to us if they do not point to anything actually in the world. We’ve already seen how Wittgenstein’s logical atomism will help him to address this problem: only names refer to the world (they refer to objects); propositions do not (they picture possible arrangements of objects). Propositions thus do not have meaning, meaning (!) that they do not refer to the actual world as it happens to be right now; instead, propositions pick out a possible fact from all logically possible worlds – and say, as it were, that the fact is true. The proposition pictures a possible fact and so has/makes sense. (And so Wittgenstein says, at TLP 2.221, “What a picture represents is its sense.”) However, one does not need “knowledge of the truth or falsity” of the proposition in order to know its sense. One can know the proposition’s sense – and so understand it – without knowing whether it is true. This fact – that we understand false propositions – is obvious to us, but Wittgenstein is trying to understand this fact philosophically, meaning that he wants to know the ontological, semantic, and logical implications (and underpinnings) of this fact. (He’ll also be interested in the ethical implications of it and the implications it has for our understanding of subjectivity.)
The solution to the first puzzle, then, is that “referentialism must be restricted to [names]” (Schroeder 53), and the idea of sense (Sinn in German) must be introduced. A “fixed one-to-one correlation between language and world” takes place only at the level of names, whereas propositions have a “two-way relationship to [the world]” insofar as they can point toward the world (if true) or away from it (if false – if the world is not in fact as the proposition pictures it but rather the opposite, i.e., when the pictured fact does not obtain) (ibid.; Schroeder spells this out more fully on page 55). One interesting upshot of this solution is that, with respect to language, “what matters is never truth” (to cite Nietzsche from a different context, as Schroeder does at page 54); rather, qua Wittgenstein, what matters is the ability to express truth. Whether something is true is an empirical matter, but that and how we can express potential truths is a philosophical matter.
Puzzle (ii) (The Puzzle of Infinite Description) is, as Schroeder notes, solved using the same conceptual tools (the concepts of object and fact on the side of reality and their linguistic counterparts, names and propositions, which attempt to mirror that reality). I need to understand the reference/meaning of a name in order to understand a name. Wittgenstein assumed that this happened either through direct acquaintance with the object or by having the reference explained to one. However, if every sentence was a sort of “name,” then I’d need to be acquainted with or have explained to me the meaning of every sentence. In other words, someone would have to explain what the sentence is pointing me to (some actual fact) – as if the sentence were not already trying to do that on its own! (And how would you explain the reference of that sentence without explaining the reference of other sentences? An infinite regress looms.) The way around this is to say that only names name objects, and all propositions are built from names. We understand the names and so we can then understand all the different possible arrangements of those names – and this is in fact the case: we understand far more than what we directly experience or have directly explained to us. This is just something that we can do once we grasp a language.
Puzzle (iii) (The Puzzle of Propositional Form) is trickier and it requires that we introduce a new idea (albeit one that we’ve talked about in class): the idea of logical form. The Puzzle is this: Even if I have names for each object, how do I arrange the names in the right way, such that they hang together in the sentence in the same way as the denoted objects are hanging together in the world? The answer, in a simple version, is this: The proposition pictures the fact. Put otherwise: The proposition puts together the names in a way that mirrors the way that the objects are arranged in the fact. A quick insight into what he means is given by the possible arrangement (in Schroeder’s example) of the words ‘Jones,’ ‘Smith,’ and ‘sues.’ Different arrangements yield different senses: “Jones sues Smith” is very different from “Smith sues Jones.” This arrangement is what Wittgenstein calls the “determinate relation” of the parts of a proposition to each other. Of course, this relation is ultimately (insert corny arrhythmic-finger-on-desktop drum roll here) logical!
This then raises the question, What is logical form (as opposed to what we commonly think of when we think of pictorial form), and how does it enable a proposition to picture reality? Of central importance here will be the distinction between a proposition and a propositional sign (which is the sensible manifestation of the proposition) and the idea of thought as projecting the proposition via the propositional sign. These are the central ideas of the 3.1s, which is our primary focus in class tomorrow.
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