[lit-ideas] Re: (Was: Wittgenstein)
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 30 Mar 2004 08:43:14 PST
Phil asks if I could point him some to texts showing that Wittgenstein believed
that propositions could be about themselves.
Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, 1939, ed. by Cora
Diamond from various notes (1975), pp. 206-9, and pp. 222-23. I would quote the
first of these these, but they include sketches which I cannot reproduce in this
medium.
Wittgenstein has been talking about the Liar Paradox, as an example of something
philosophers (?) feel they have to contend with, resolve, or whatever, and this
in the course of trying to show that contradictions (which he sometimes
conflates with paradoxes) aren't something we need to worry about _in general_,
i.e., that one shouldn't worry about the possibility of 'hidden' contradictions
in a system but only about contradictions which actually appear--although he
seems to believe that we worry about even these too much: a contradiction isn't
a sign of anything beyond a useless proposition's having been discovered, or
produced e.g., 'The Liar.'
At 222 (speaking of Russell's notion of classes that are not members of
themselves, and what follows, or not, from the possibility of such classes) he
says:
'There are concepts [sic] which we call "predicates--"man", "chair," and "wolf"
are predicates, but "Jack" and "John" are not. Some predicates apply to
themselves and others don't. For instance "chair" is not a chair, "wolf" is not
a wolf, but "predicate" is a predicate.
'You might say this is bosh. And in a sense it is. No one says " 'Wolf' [the
predicate] isn't a wolf." We don't know what it means. Is "Wolf" a name?--in
that case Wolf _may_ be a wolf. If someone asked, "Is 'wolf' a wolf?", we simply
would not know what to answer.
'But there is one way in which Russell would have used it. Nobody would say, "
'Wolf' is a wolf", but " 'Predicate is a predicate" people would say. We can
distinguish between predicates which apply to themselves and those which don't,
and form the predicate "predicate which does not apply to itself".'
These latter passages are, I grant, about self-predication, not self-reference,
but it isn't clear to me why from self-predication we could not easily get
self-reference (or, come to think of it, how there could be one without the
other).
There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein would have rejected 'This sentence
is short,' or 'This sentence is in English,' as being self-referential, although
I have no texts less than ten feet from where I'm sitting which I could cite to
that effect.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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