[Wittrs] Anscombe on W's "most fundamental thought"

From: "walto" <calhorn@xxxxxxx>
To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:26:28 -0000
From Introduction, pp. 163-5.

'My  most fundamental thought is this: logical constants are not proxies
for  anything.  The logic of the facts cannot have anything going proxy
for  it. (4.0342)

Here he is  contrasting logical constants with names, which 'go proxy'
for their  objects: 'The possibility of sentences,'  he has just said,
'rests upon  the principle of signs as going proxy for objects'--and
what this  principle in turn amounts to is the possibility of logical
picturing  through one fact's having the same logical form as
another--for only in  the context of the proposition will a sign go
proxy for an object.

Sentences  thus cannot represent, and nothing in them can stand for,
'the logic of  the facts'; they can only reproduce it.  An attempt to
say what it is  that they so o repreoduce leads to stammering....

[I]f we try to  explain the essence of a relational expression to
ourselves, we  reproduce the relational form in our explanation.  For as
we have seen,  we must make the distinction between 'aRb' and 'bRa' and
if we do this  by e.g. saying that in one the relation goes from a to b,
and in the  other from b to a, we produce a sentence which employs the
essential  relational form; for it reproduces the distinction produced
by  exchanging the places of the terms.

All the logical devices--the  detailed twiddles and manipulations of our
language--combine, W tells us  at 5.511, into an infinitely fine
network, forming 'the great  mirror'--that is to say, the mirror of
language, whose logical character  makes it reflect the world and makes
its individual sentences say that  such-and-such is the case. The
simplest and most characteristic mark of  this is that we do not have to
learn the meanings of all the sentences  of our language; given the
understanding of the words, we understand  and construct sentences, and
know what they mean without having it  explained to us....

It was at one time natural to think that the field of logic was the
field of what was a priori true,  i.e. true independently of all
existence.  On this W says at 5.552:  'The "experience" that we need to
understand logic is not that something  is thus or thus, but that
something is: but that is not an experience.  Logic precedes any
experience--that something is thus.  It comes before the How, not before
the What.'  According to the Tractatusthe  'what' is conveyed by the
simple names, which cannot be taken to pieces  by definitions 93.261)
and which name the 'substance of the world'  (2.0211).  Thus even when a
simple name is replace by a definite  description, the description is
merely 'about' the object, it could not  'express' it (3.221).

Walto
[Wittrs] Anscombe on W's "most fundamental thought"

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