Wittgenstein and On Logical Philosophy

This book on logical philosophy has given great inspiration to logical positivists. The author is Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 195 1). The reason why this passage gives him a longer overview than most philosophers is that he has an unusual feature, that is, he inspired two philosophical movements-logical positivism and philosophy later called "daily language philosophy". Both of these movements dominated the development of analytical tradition in the 20th century. Ironically, the latter movement refuted the former in many ways.

Wittgenstein was born into a wealthy and well-educated family in Vienna. He was not interested in material wealth, so he gave up his inheritance completely. 19 1 1 went to Manchester, England to study aviation engineering. His genius in mathematical thinking was quickly recognized, and he was recommended to study with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. During World War I, Wittgenstein returned to Austria to join the army. There is a legend that he packed a stack of manuscript paper in his backpack and took it into the trench. Soon, he was captured by the Italians, and as a prisoner of war, he began to write the Theory of Logical Philosophy. (It is classified as a "great work written in prison" together with Marie Poi's The Comfort of Philosophy and Cervantes' Don Quixote. )

"On Logical Philosophy" is only over 100 pages and consists of a series of seven propositions. Each proposition is followed by a sequentially numbered commentary on the proposition, or commentary on the commentary, or commentary on the commentary. For example, the first page begins like this:

1. The world is what happens.

The world is the sum of facts, not things.

The world is defined by all facts.

1. 12 because facts generally stipulate what happened and all things that didn't happen.

1. 13 The fact in the logical space is the world.

1.2 The world is divided into facts.

Everything may or may not happen, while everything else remains the same.

What happened-a fact-is the existence of various events.

Wittgenstein believes that because we can tell the truth of the world, the structure of language must reflect the structure of the world in some way. This is what he means in the proposition "The world is the sum of facts, not the sum of things". So, what are the facts that make up the world? In Russell's terminology, they are "atomic facts". They are the simplest facts that can be stated, and all other more complicated truths can be analyzed as these simple truths. In On Logical Philosophy, Wittgenstein did not tell exactly what these facts are, but these facts are exactly what positivists seek when trying to construct basic sentences and confirmation sentences.

Positivists also like other aspects of logical philosophy, and especially agree with Wittgenstein's philosophical concept:

Most propositions and questions about philosophical problems are not false, but meaningless. So I can't answer such questions at all, I can only make sure that they are meaningless.

The correct method in philosophy is to say nothing except what can be said, that is, the proposition of natural science, that is, things that have nothing to do with philosophy ... this method will be the only strict and correct method.

These paragraphs seem to fully express the views of hardliners among logical positivists. So it is not surprising that they will regard Wittgenstein as one of their own. However, some puzzling expressions in the theory of logical philosophy make the members of Vienna School deeply anxious. For example, Wittgenstein wrote: "The whole meaning of this book can be summarized as follows: everything that can be said can be clearly stated; You should keep silent about what you can't say. " Therefore, positivists want to interpret Wittgenstein's words as: "metaphysics, shut up!" But Wittgenstein himself seems to have an unusual interest in his so-called "silence" and has made incomprehensible hints about it. In the proposition, he wrote:

My propositions should be clarified in this way: anyone who understands me will eventually realize that they are meaningless when he regards these propositions as a ladder beyond them. It can be said that he must throw away the ladder if he climbs high. He must go beyond these propositions before he can see the world correctly.

Here, Wittgenstein admits that his proposition is meaningless, but it seems to be a special higher level of meaningless. What is this higher meaninglessness? Wittgenstein continued.

What things are like in the world has nothing to do with higher things. God will not appear in this world.

The mystery is not what things are like in the world, but that the world exists.

The answer to the mystery of life in time and space is beyond time and space.

The Vienna school gradually understood the truth in its panic. Wittgenstein is a mystic! He is worse than metaphysics.

For a time, Wittgenstein seemed satisfied with the theory of logical philosophy. This book answers all possible reasonable philosophical questions.

As he wrote: "If the answer is unspeakable, then the question is also unspeakable. There is no mystery. If a question can be asked, then it may be answered. "

Wittgenstein divorced from philosophy. He became a primary school teacher in a small village in the Austrian Alps. But he didn't get happiness from this new job, and his thinking didn't stop. Russell took the lead and invited Wittgenstein back to Cambridge to pass the defense as Wittgenstein's doctoral thesis. Wittgenstein got the professorship vacated by Moore after his retirement. Since then, many exciting things have happened in the field of philosophy because Wittgenstein returned to philosophy.

However, it was soon rumored that what Wittgenstein is saying about philosophy is not what people expected him to say before. But it is difficult for people to know exactly what happened, because the eccentric Wittgenstein kept his new ideas secret and insisted that his students do the same. However, some mimeographed copies of students' notes began to circulate during his lectures. His works in this period were not published in the name of philosophical research until his death. But long before the publication of this book, it is well known that Wittgenstein's thought has undergone a major change. Whether this is good or bad, positivism and mysticism in On Logical Philosophy are gone forever. However, there are still similarities between the two books, and philosophy is still regarded as essentially related to meaning and still belongs to the linguistic turn. In On Logical Philosophy, Wittgenstein once wrote: "The boundary of my language means the boundary of my world." In philosophical research, he still insists on this view, but compared with the theory of logical philosophy, the finiteness of language itself seems to be much weaker.

Let's look at the question of meaning first, and then enter the discussion of philosophical research. In the history of philosophy from Plato to On Logical Philosophy, the main modes of meaning are reference mode and naming mode. Philosophers such as Frege, Russell and the author of The Theory of Logical Philosophy, even where they distinguish between reference and meaning, reference still takes precedence. Wittgenstein believes that naming has been given priority as the main aspect of meaning in history, which has produced a metaphysical picture all over western thought, but this is wrong. Plato believes that words must be the names of things that exist forever, but there is no such thing in the visible world, so he put forward the theory of super-secular rationality. Aristotle believes that words are the names of unchangeable things in this world, that is, the names of entities. In the Middle Ages, nominalists also thought words were names, but they didn't name things. So their conclusion is very similar to the last sentence in Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, that is, "We only have names". Empiricists insist that words are the names of sensory materials, and any words that don't do so are untrustworthy. Pragmatists believe that language is the name of behavior. However, positivists, Russell and early Wittgenstein believe that words are the names of atomic facts.

In the later period, Wittgenstein completely broke away from this tradition and declared that "the meaning of a word is its usage in language". He wrote:

Think about the tools in the toolbox: hammer, pliers, saw, screwdriver, ruler, rubber pot, glue, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as those of these things.

(and there are similarities between the two. ) ..... It's like looking into the cab of a motorcycle, as if all the handles are the same. (naturally, all the handles are used for operation. But one of them is a hand crank, which can move continuously (to adjust the opening and closing of the valve); The other is the change-over handle, which has only two effective positions, either on or off; The third is the brake handle. The harder you push, the tighter the brakes will be. The fourth is the air pump handle, which is only effective when reciprocating.

Just like tools or machinery in a locomotive, language can also play a role, and its significance lies in its role. Imagine that two people are heading for a destination quickly. Because their headlights are broken, they are desperate to get there before sunset. The driver said, "Oh, what bad luck! The sun has just set. " At this time, if the passenger said with a sense of superiority, "Now we know that the sun will not set, and this illusion is caused by the rotation of the earth", does what he said make sense? Of course not, because in this context, his words will not work. (If in another context, the same statement may be useful. In fact, applying this scientific fact to the above context can only be said to be crazy. The next scene is equally crazy: if the passenger finds a hammer in the car storage box, he picks it up and hits the driver, and explains his behavior: "The hammer is for hitting." Yes, but you can't beat anything at any time and any place. So is language.

However, a tool can have multiple functions. In some cases, the hammer can be used as both a weapon and a paperweight. What about the language? Does it only have two usages proposed by logical positivists (one is the function of representation and the other is the function of representation)? Wittgenstein asked:

So, how many sentences are there in a * * *? Like declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences? There are countless kinds: what we call "symbols", "words" and "sentences" have countless different uses. Moreover, this diversity is not fixed, once given, it will remain unchanged; We can say that new language types and new language games will be produced, while others will be gradually eliminated and forgotten.

This comment embodies another aspect of Wittgenstein's theory of meaning, which is related to his proposition that meaning is usage. He wrote: "The question of' what is a word' is similar to' what is a piece in chess' ... We say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game." Wittgenstein summarized his proposition as: any language is a "language game". Let's think about this carefully. All games must obey the rules. The significance of chess pieces (or chips, cards, baseball gloves) in the game comes from the role it plays according to the rules. What is a pawn? A chess piece that can only advance one square except the first step. When it goes to both sides, it can eat each other's pieces and become a queen when it reaches the other side's bottom line. Words, phrases and expressions are all similar to this-they all obey the rules, and the meaning given comes from the rules of language games. There are many rules that determine language usage: grammatical rules, semantic rules, syntactic rules and rules commonly called contextual rules. Some rules are strict, some are flexible, and some are negotiable. In different games, these differences do exist (the rules of chess are stricter than "losing handkerchief"), even in the same game (the rules of how to move the pieces are stricter, but the rules of the size of the pieces are flexible). But no matter how flexible the rules are, there will be corresponding results if they are violated. When the rules of a given language game are broken in a subtle way, as Wittgenstein said, "Language is on vacation", one result is a certain philosophy (such as metaphysics), and the other result is a certain madness (such as Alice in Wonderland). Alice in Wonderland is mentioned here for a reason. Books such as Alice in Wonderland are Wittgenstein's favorite books, which is undoubtedly because they are language joke manuals, and they show the madness caused by misunderstanding of some aspects of language. Please consider the following scenario. When White King asked Alice to look down at the road and ask her if she saw anyone, Alice said, "I don't see anyone on the road." The king replied, "I wish I had such eyes. I can't see anyone from so far away!" " "What's wrong here? This joke is based on what some "everyday language philosophers" call "category error", which stems from improper classification of some language facts and absurd conclusions drawn from it. (According to Gilbert ryle, the inventor of the word "category error", Descartes made this classification error, which led to the problem of dualism of mind and body. Descartes classified the "mind" into a category similar to the body, making the mind a "thinking thing"-a ghostly spiritual existence. This spiritual existence makes the mind the same as the material existence in some way, but no one can understand what this way is. )

Or consider the example of White Queen, who promised to pay her maid "two pence a week and a bucket of jam every other day", but later refused to give jam because today will never be any other day. To be sure, in this case, the language is on vacation.

What about the positivists who explore the simplest elements in reality in order to build a science building on this basis? Wittgenstein asked:

But what are the simple ingredients that make up reality? What are the simple components of a chair? -Is it a small piece of wood to make a chair? Or molecules or atoms? -"Simple" means not combining. The key here is: in what sense is "combination"? There is no point in talking about "the simple part of the chair".

The above is the exploration of atomic facts.

In Philosophy of Logic, Wittgenstein wrote: "Most propositions and questions of philosophers are caused by our ignorance of the logic of our own language." He still adhered to the same view more or less in his philosophical research, but at that time his understanding of "the logic of our language" had changed fundamentally. The work of philosophers is no longer to reveal the logic behind language, but to reveal the logic contained in everyday language (hence the term "philosophy of everyday language"). Philosophers want to show that failure to master this implicit logic will lead to "confusion between our rationality and language", and that if we don't rationally interfere with our daily way of thinking and talking about the world, it will lead to "language holiday", and it is this kind of "language holiday" that produces a lot of jokes and constitutes most of our philosophical history. Wittgenstein said, "(My philosophy aims at) pointing out the way out for the flies in the fly trap". Of course, in Wittgenstein's hometown of Vienna, we can easily make an ordinary fly trap bottle, just put some honey in the vinegar bottle.

In a pleasant flight, flies will deviate from the course and fly into the bottle because of the smell of honey. It either drowned in this sticky sweet thing or hummed to death. In Wittgenstein's view, most philosophies are like flies buzzing to death. Guiding the way for flies in the fly trap is not to solve philosophical problems, but to resolve philosophical problems, pointing out that these problems are caused by deviation from daily language. This metaphor illustrates the conservative side of Wittgenstein's thought. He believes: "Philosophy should not interfere with the actual use of language in any way; It can only describe the actual use of language in the end. Because it can't provide any basis for the practical use of language. It makes everything the way it was. "

The obvious complacency here is reminiscent of Moore. But this comparison between them is good in some aspects, but bad in some aspects. Wittgenstein's heart is in constant turmoil and confusion. There are some brooding anxieties in him and his thoughts, which cover up the above-mentioned Vermeer-style self-satisfaction of ordinary citizens.