Wittgenstein's ladder: The tractatus and nonsense

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 97-151

  Reid, Lynette ^a  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 0344343083     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00063     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. I am grateful to Peter Winch, Nehama Verbin, and (especially) Sean Stidd for many helpful conversations on this topic, and to James Conant, Cora Diamond, Robert M. Martin, Timothy Tessin, and Robert Wengert for comments on earlier drafts. The writing of this paper was supported by a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities; its final revision was supported by a Dalhousie University Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship
2. The second point (about the status of the propositions of the Tractatus as nonsense) is argued by Cora Diamond in her 'Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus', in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 179-204, 'Introduction II: Wittgenstein and Metaphysics', in ibid., pp. 13-38
3. and 'Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus', in Bilder der Philosophie, ed. Richard Heinrich and Helmuth Vetter, Wiener Reihe 5 (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 55-90
4. it is also emphasized by James Conant in his Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder', Yale Review 79 (January 1991), pp. 328-364
5. 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say? in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 242-283
6. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense', in Pursuits of Reason, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992), pp. 195-224
7. The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus', Philosophical Topics 20 (1991), pp. 101-166
8. Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors', in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 248-331
9. and The Method of the Tractatus', forthcoming in Wittgenstein in America, ed. Peter Winch and Timothy McCarthy. Some of these arguments appeared earlier in H. O. Mounce, Wittgenstein's Tractatus: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Chapter 11 ('The Propositions of Philosophy'), pp. 101-109
10. The first point (about the application of logic in language) is the subject of Winch, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy', in Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 1-19
11. and Language, Thought and World in Wittgenstein's Tractatus', in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 3-17
12. and is emphasized in Rush Rhees, The Philosophy of Wittgenstein",' in Discussions of Wittgenstein, pp. 37-54, especially p. 39
13. All citations to the Tractatus in this paper are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922)
14. G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 19
15. Ramsey points this out in his review, and calls it a great advance (Mind 32, 128 (1923) 465-78)
16. The point about the logical parity of thought and language remains highly controversial; some commentators hold that Wittgenstein thinks of thought as being able to accomplish logical feats that language itself is incapable of. Norman Malcolm most prominently argues that thought, the structure of which cannot fail to mirror correctly the structure of the world, plays a necessary role in mediating the relationship between language and the world -without which mediation the signs of language are dead -in Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein's Criticism of his Early Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 63-82. P. M. S. Hacker takes a different view of the logically necessary role of thought in Insight and Illusion, pp. 73-80
17. where according to what he calls Wittgenstein's Doctrine of the Linguistic Soul', the transcendental subject endows names with meaning through mental acts. This is something of an elaboration on the view presented in Anscombe's Introduction; she argues that thinking the sense of the proposition is a matter of correlating the names with objects (pp. 68-69) and is an essential step in making a picture into an assertion. H. O. Mounce, in his Wittgenstein's Tractatus.' An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 30-33
18. Wittgenstein's comment Does a Gedanke consist of words? No! But of psychical constituents that have the same sort of relation to reality as words (my italics) in a letter to Russell seems decisively in favour of this reading, which claims no greater logical powers for representation in thought than for any other representation (Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, edited by G. H. von Wright, translated by B. F. McGuinness [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974], p. 72)
19. See Diamond, 'Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus', p. 64
20. My thanks to Nehama Verbin for her refusing to let me forget that the preface also contains these statements
21. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), §500
22. I give this reading of the Tractatus in my dissertation, The Determinacy of Logic in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois, 1996)
23. 'The irreality of argument' means the irreality of arguments that purport to lead to conclusions that are non-evident (Sextus Empiricus, PH I.27) - which thesis amounts to an argument for the irreality of argument altogether, as the skeptics understood argument, since an argument to what is already evident was not considered an argument (for much the same reasons that Mill complained of the circularity of the syllogism), and that an argument can take you to what is not already clear is what is being denied. (Burnyeat, Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy', Philosophical Review 85, 1 [January 1976], pp. 44-69; Sextus Empiricus PH II.13.)
24. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), M 8.480-81
25. Diamond at one point includes the propositions of logic in what Wittgenstein means us to jettison ('Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus', p. 79), but says that there is an unselfconscious metaphysics about language in the Tractatus ('Throwing Away the Ladder', pp. 181, 182, and in 'Wittgenstein and Metaphysics', pp. 19-20)
26. Robert J. Fogelin, Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987)
27. Raymond Bradley, The Nature of All Being: A Study of Wittgenstein's Modal Atomism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
28. Conant, in an attempt to preserve an intelligible and systematic distinction in the Tractatus between nonsense and senselessness, excludes tautologies from being the sort of nonsense the Tractatus itself is ('The Method of the Tractatus'). In 4.4611, Wittgenstein does say that tautologies and contradictions are senseless but not nonsensical and that they are part of the symbolism. But in 4.466 he describes them as being the limiting cases of the combinations of symbols, namely their dissolution'. That is, as he explains in 4.4661 and 4.462, because the expressions that are internal to the propositions that make up tautologies and contradictions are inessential to the symbol, they no longer stand in representing relations to the world at all. This is a somewhat startling claim - that in either it is raining or it is not raining', 'it is raining' does not stand in any representing relation to reality - but it is Wittgenstein's claim. We might compare it to a similar move he makes in the Investigations, where he insists that the apparent truth of a statement of the form 'p or not-p' does not endow sense on p in all possible contexts (§ 352)
29. Letters to C.K Ogden, with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. by G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 49
30. The Pears and McGuinness translation, despite its claim (p. v) that it has been done with an eye to the Ogden letters, gives Philosophy does not result in "philosophical propositions", but rather in the clarification of propositions', which is not bad; but then for the next sentence gives a translation directly in contradiction with what Wittgenstein writes to Ogden: Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries'. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961].)
31. Throughout this paragraph I have said that we 'rule out talk' about the numbers of grains of sand: this way of speaking is in accordance with the tone of the Tractatus, but it is not entirely satisfactory. The Investigations approach would be to point out that such questions simply do not arise
32. At the level of the elementary proposition, the Tractatus can hardly be said to have a 'truth-conditional theory of meaning', as is often claimed
33. Conant tries to save Wittgenstein from contradiction here by saying that the use of a correct logical notation in presenting a thought does nothing but ward off philosophical confusion and does this by ensuring that the true logical structure of the thought is presented perspicuously in the notation ('The Method of the Tractatus'). But the philosophical mistake Wittgenstein is making in the Tractatus, surely, is to think of logic as something to be gathered from the notation at all. If the logic of our language is perfectly in order as it is, it is not something that needs to be laid bare by a notation (which marks the object/concept distinction, for example); logic just is the pattern of human life with language, and warding off philosophical confusion means removing the philosophical blinders that prevent us from seeing patterns of human life and that lead us to look instead at 'logic' or the 'world'. Even if Wittgenstein understands his use of symbolic notation in the Tractatus to be merely elucidatory, the idea that clarity is achieved through the notation laying out the logical form, rather than through moving our attention away from the bare notation and toward the patterns of human life in which languages have their home, panders to this confusion and does not cure it. Insofar as Wittgenstein is committed already in the Tractatus to the idea that ordinary language does not need to answer to any logical scruples - that looking at logic just means looking at patterns of human life with language -this commitment is at odds with the Tractatus idea that we might achieve philosophical clarification through notational reform
34. Diamond discusses this view of nonsense in greatest detail in her papers on Frege ('Frege and Nonsense', and 'What Nonsense Might Be'). It is not entirely clear to me the extent to which she intends to ascribe these views to Wittgenstein. Conant ascribes these views to Wittgenstein in 'The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus', while leaving open the extent to which he ascribes them to Frege
35. See Diamond, 'What Nonsense Might Be', pp. 95-96
36. See Diamond, Frege and Nonsense', p. 91
37. This connection to the context principle is developed in detail in 'What Nonsense Might Be', pp. 96-114
38. See Conant, 'The Method of the Tractatus'
39. Diamond also discusses the idea of a general possibility in language of transforming words from one logical use to another for example, by the device of treating proper names as concept expressions, as in 'Another Anastasia lives in Charlottesville' ('Frege and Nonsense', pp. 81-83). How, on the Tractarian view, there can be that general possibility in language, the possibility of creating new possibilities, new logical forms, is not at all clear. In any case, that possibility can't be what is suggested in the 5.473s. How can we avoid reading the 5.473s together with 3.322, with the implication that the newly defined 'is identical' might just as well - and should, in the interests of clarity -employ a sign other than is 'identical'?
40. And here by 'inclined to say' I do not mean what Diamond suggests this phrase means ('Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus', p. 72). I do not mean that I feel some psychological attraction to speaking this way, but that I recognize it as nonsensical; I mean this really is how I would be inclined to speak
41. I argue this point in Chapter 6 of my dissertation, 'The Determinacy of Logic in Wittgenstein's Tractatus'
42. This is an adaptation of what she says about the examples 'Another Anastasia Lives in Charlottesville' and 'Another The King of France Lives in Charlottesville' in 'Frege and Nonsense', pp. 83-4
43. See, for example, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, edited by B.F. McGuinness from the notes of Friedrich Waismann (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1984), pp. 38-41
44. See Winch, 'Persuasion', in The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 17 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 123-137, on the description of language games as a form of overcoming the problem of the Tractatus' conception of nonsense
45. 6.54. The italics are mine - or, rather, Mounce's (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, p. 101), Diamond's ('Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus'. p. 57
46. Introduction II: Wittgenstein and Metaphysics', p. 19)
47. and Conant's ('Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder', p. 344, 'The Search for Logically Alien Thought,' p. 145
48. and 'Putting Two and Two Together', pp. 270, 285-6)
49. Conant, 'Putting Two and Two Together', pp. 267, 273-75, 282
50. and the parable of 'The Search for Logically Alien Thought', pp. 146-47
51. Conant recognizes that making the distinction between understanding a person and understanding what he says is necessary to understanding the Tractatus in the course of his review of McGuinness's biography: he does not, however, actually say what that distinction might amount to, since he uses this only to point out that McGuinness does not come near dealing with this issue. ('Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder', p. 347.)
52. See Conant, 'Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder', pp. 334-6
53. Zettel, Second Edition, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
54. Culture and value, ed. G. H. von Wright; trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 74e. Winch often said in conversation that he would now translate 'Betrachtung' not as 'view of things' but as 'considerations', or 'argument', in order to bring out the importance of this remark for Wittgenstein's philosophy
55. Conant, 'Putting Two and Two Together', p. 267
56. See Hertzberg, 'The Indeterminacy of the Mental', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 57 (1983), pp. 91-109
57. See 'Thoughts', in Collected Papers, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 351-2
58. This is in disagreement with how Diamond reads this phrase in light of things Wittgenstein is reported to have said in 1935. 'What Nonsense Might Be', pp. 106-107