[lit-ideas] Re: "The Austrian Engineer"
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:45:46 +0000 (GMT)
This is a 'holding' reply: I was hoping to reply sooner and have something more
to say, but reading the TLP gives rise to many questions (I've elsewhere
mentioned one - in what way is "a proposition a fact" [rather than something
the content of which asserts something to be the case, or a "fact"]).
--- On Sat, 18/4/09, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>I'm concerned
> now with the notion that somehow a problem persists: whether
> it is the view in the Tractatus that it is
> impossible—logically impossible, not just contingently
> difficult—to give a description of let alone point to an
> example of, one of the simple objects in the Tractatus.
> (This is not, strictly speaking, a problem; it is an
> interpretation.)
My guess is that the TLP simply does not explicitly address the issue. I have
been reading to see whether it implicitly does so - but my current guess is
that it does not. Wittgenstein assumes an isomorphism between language and
reality and takes it that it is this isomorphism that allows language to get
purchase on non-linguistic reality. His faith in this assumption is such that
the question of illustrating it by even a single example (worked out in the
necessary 'atomistic' detail) simply gets by-passed. Among other
considerations, this view is supported by reflecting that if Wittgenstein did
have an example to give he would have given it: if not in the TLP then in
correspondence or conversation. A worked-out example could be seen as a kind of
clincher for his overall view.
> How Wittgenstein's saying in 1949 that in he hadn't
> thought, around thirty years earlier, that it was up to him
> to describe or to give examples of the simple objects
> somehow implies that there is in fact no problem about
> whether this can in fact be done; that is, that _I_ have
> said or implied it, is mysterious to me. I quote
> Wittgenstein on another issue: whether _he_ thought it was
> up to him _qua_ logician to provide examples of simple
> objects. Apparently, he didn't.
I am unsure he didn't think it was his job "_qua_ logician to provide examples"
rather than that, at the level he was writing, he could by-pass such detail,
carried by his conviction in the necessity for a structural isomorphism between
language and reality.
> This does not speak to the question of whether or not one
> could or could not give such examples. If I understand Donal
> at all, he seems to believe that there is something in the
> Tractatus, passages in it, which show that there cannot be
> descriptions of or examples of simple objects, and that this
> is somehow a 'problem'.
I do suspect that it might be, that when the implications of the TLP are fully
laid bare, it becomes apparent that just as language cannot state its own
representational form (but can only show it) so "simples" cannot be said, their
existence can only be shown.
Donal
dashg
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