In response to my saying that Wittgenstein neither sets forth nor endorses a 'logically perfect language,' Donal replies: (the numbers in square brackets are mine):
Hold on. This strikes me as disingenuous even if largely true - tendentious, if you will. Wittgenstein may not have thought [1] a 'logically perfect language' would ever, or should ever, replace logically imperfect 'ordinary language' - but this would not show that he did not believe [2] analysis of meaning would involve analysis according to the highest standards - [3] and these standards would involve having a conception of a logically 'ideal language' which exposes the 'tacit conventions' that are cloaked when we use ordinary language.
Right. A rejection of [1] would not entail a rejection of [2]. But an analysis of meaning 'according to the highest standards,' thus roughly described, has been a project of philosophers from Plato and Aristotle down through the Middle Ages to the present. In any case, it what isn't clear to me that what Wittgenstein was doing was 'analyzing meaning.'
When I was taught English grammar by Miss Craw, of happy memory, I was held to what were presented as the highest standards: 'between you and I' is a mistake; 'between you and me' is correct. Leibniz, Wittgenstein, and Chomsky might all suggest that this is a naive view of 'the highest standards' of analysis: yet none could argue that there is no such thing as grammatical correctness. 'Analysis' begins with the statements of ordinary language. Even the reformist Logical Positivists began there.
Yet Donal, I believe, misunderstands the difference between Wittgenstein's project and theirs. Wittgenstein does not think [3] that the tacit conventions needed to understand ordinary language disguise anything; he simply remarks that we employ 'enormously complicated' conventions in understanding ordinary language (but we should not mistake this for a defect that has to be remedied). This cautionary remark is not the preface to '...and so, we should examine what language REALLY is.' Wittgenstein believed that he could show the logical structure of language, the structure that it had to have in order to mirror the world. This isn't though a reformist project: it is descriptive, througha and through.
That is the essential difference between Wittgenstein and the Positivists. Wittgenstein thought that he was revealing the relations between thought: language: logic: and the world (and ultimately) the logical structure of world itself, which is mirrored in and is mirrored by logic. (Well, this is all very sketchy.) The Positivists on the other hand, believed that there was something fundamentally misleading about ordinary language (outside the natural sciences) and began a prescriptive project aimed at showing not what language—au fond—rests on but what it should be. That generations of commentators have slurred over this fundamental difference between Wittgenstein's and the Positivists' enterprises has led to much unnecesary suffering.
Robert Paul The Reed Institutea [3] is
Consider: in TLP the putative isomorphism between language and reality is not said to be 'rough' but is assumed to be exact (even if unsayable because we cannot 'say' any of the fundamental 'atoms' of language or of reality): and being _this_ exact it is logically perfect in its exactitude.In the Tractatus, he separates what can be said (propositions like those in the natural sciences) from what can't be. His purpose isn't to exalt the former but to show how little has been accomplished when the separation has been made: for the really important stuff, the things that matter can't be talked about. At first, the Logical Positivists (beginning with the members of the Vienna Circle) saw Wittgenstein as an ally in their attempt to show that the only meaningful statements were empirical ones, and that metaphysical statements, ethical statements, statements about art, etc., were either nonsensical or meaningless: 'pseudo propositions,' as Ayer called them.Again this is tendentious and somewhat disingenuous (no offence). It is true that Wittgenstein's attitude to what he terms 'nonsense' is rather different to that of the standard-issue logical positivist: they may be utterly dismissive of 'ethics', say, as mere balderdash and piffle - whereas for Wittgenstein 'ethics', though its propositions are 'nonsense' strictly speaking, is much more important a field than the field of 'natural science' which is all that does strictly make sense. Yet despite this difference in attitude to the relative importance of what falls on either side of the sense/nonsense divide, Wittgenstein and the LPs draw the line between sense and nonsense in much the same way. [Of course, it was Popper in L.Sc.D. who exposed that it is the wrong way and embodies a mistaken philosophy of science].And for a long time, this was the received view: that Wittgenstein had shown, or had tried to show, that only empirical propositions were useful and important. Only in the past few decades have people realized that Wittgenstein's message was that we cannot talk about the really important things.This is rich. Who are these "people"? For a long time a lot of academicphilosophers may have perpetuated this "received" view - and clearly they would be mistaken: in TLP Wittgenstein asserts that "only empirical propositions" make synthetic sense but he does not therefore say that these sensible propositions are the only "useful and important" propositions, nevermind say that they are always therefore more "useful and important" thancertain nonsensical propositions.Popper was never among this shallow shoal of academic philosophers that Wittgenstein inspired and the anti-Wittgensteinian bent of his philosophy does not overlook the fact that "Wittgenstein's message was that we cannottalk about the really important things." Far from it.I don't think my remarks any more misundestand Wittgenstein than Popper does, bearing in mind that, if Robert Paul is right, "[o]nly in the past few decades" has Popper's longstanding view of the TLP been vindicated even among the slow-moving herd of Wittgenstein scholars [this is a pattern in Popper's thought: some uncelebrated papers of his on evolutionary epistemology in the 1970s, uncelebrated because they went against certain academic 'orthodoxies' of the time, are now seen as far-sighted and cutting-edge; but then Popper isan original and profound thinker and not someone else's stooge].Upshot: Whatever the difference in attitude to non-science/metaphysics, Wittgenstein and the LPs share a mistaken positivistic and instrumentalist view of science.Donal___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Answers - Got a question? Someone out there knows the answer. Try it now.http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
