--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote: > > ... if you find anything you want to share from the book, please do! > Since I'm not yet conversant with how to post anew on FreeList and since initiating posts on Yahoo no longer works (that's still the case, right?), I'll use this post of yours, Sean, as an opportunity to add something from the book in question. I'll pick up on page 89 where McGuinness is discussing how Wittgenstein first fell in with Russell. I think the text is interesting both because it shows where the early Wittgenstein was coming from (what influences his thinking reflected) and also because it is a useful case in point to show that (and how) our ideas change over time and that even (maybe especially?) a great thinker like Wittgenstein could have come to realize he had been wrong. This is especially relevant to my ongoing discussions with Cayuse who seems to be convinced that the Tractarian Wittgenstein is definitive in understanding certain of Wittgenstein's ideas even though, in his later work, he explicitly disavows the earlier thinking as reflecting "grave" mistakes. From page 89 (Clarendon Press - Oxford), McGuinness writes: . . . Russell made an anecdote: "Quite at first I was in doubt as to whether he [Wittgenstein] was a man of genius or a crank, but I very soon decided in favor of the former alternative. Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." [From Mind 60(no. 239) 1951] The dispute seems to be connected with a thesis held by Wittgenstein at the time, and mentioned in the next two letters . . . namely that there is nothing in the world except asserted propositions. The exact point at issue can hardly be recovered, but it is clear that Wittgenstein was harking back to earlier views of Russell's and G. E. Moore's. The sense of assertion involved is not the social or psychological sense in which true and false propositions alike can be affirmed or credited, but that described in The Principles of Mathematics (p. 49), where being asserted is said to be the extra quality that true propositions possess to differentiate them from false propositions. A proposition also is nothing psychological, but is a complex of concepts in the sense described by Moore in his article 'The Nature of Judgment' (Mind 1899). Concepts on this view are the objects of thoughts (not modes of it) and, as such, are the only things that exist. The truth of a proposition (its being asserted in the above sense) will consist not in a correspondence or other relation between a complex of concepts and something else, but in a certain property of the complex itself. The view described will best be understood if it is seen as a reaction (rather in the spirit of Frege) against any confusion between what is judged and the judging of it. If we call what is judged a proposition, and if there is nothing mental about it, then the proposition cannot stop short of actual things involved in the judgement, and if it is a true proposition, it will be identical with a fact. (For present purposes logical truths will be disregarded.) Thus (Moore thought) contemporary accounts of truth as consisting in correspondence between a proposition and a fact arose from a failure to distinguish between a mental act and its object. To say that asserted propositions exist will, therefore, be to say that facts exist . . . Some further reason is needed for saying that only asserted propositions exist. A man would have such a reason if he held the second of two views described by Russell in an early discussion of Meinong: "Among objects ['objects' here are the same as what Moore called 'concepts'] there are two kinds, the simple and the complex. The latter are characterized by a certain kind of unity, apparently not capable of definition, and not a constituent of the complexes in which it occurs. On one view, a complex is the same as a proposition, and is always either true or false, but has being equally in either case; on the other view, the only complexes are true propositions, and falsehood is a property of such judgements as have no Objectives." Russell himself held the former view; that was what led him to make the remark criticized in the Tractatus (6.111) that some propositions are true and some false, just as some roses are red and some white. "What is truth, and what falsehood, we must merely apprehend, for both seem incapbable of analysis." [Essays in Analysis, p. 76 . . .] On the other view (taken, so it seems, by Wittgenstein) a general difficulty about negative propositions, mentioned but dismissed by Russell, becomes apparently more acute: "It is hard to regard A's non-existence, when true, as a fact in quite the same sense in which A's existence would be a fact if it were true." (id.ibid) It must be remembered that in the present discussion a fact is a true or asserted proposition, that is to say a complex concept, which on the first view possesses a certain complex property and on the second view (that ascribed [by Russell] to Wittgenstein) simply exists. Now: what complex can reasonably be supposed to exist in virtue of there not being a rhinoceros in the room? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Note 1: the earlier discussion recounted by McGuinness before the place I picked up in this post dealt with the rhinoceros argument, not the one about the hippo though it looks as if they were much the same issue. Certainly that's how McGuinness treats them. Note 2: Not only does this overly complex and abstruse discussion strike one, from the point of view of today's vantage, as somewhat pointless, it clearly points up how deeply Wittgenstein must have been enmeshed and entangled in this sort of thinking. His later work offers an antidote to just these kinds of problems by homing in on linguistic usages and how they operate in various contexts to lead us, in discussions like these, deeper and deeper into thickets of abstraction and complexity far removed from any chance of achieving understanding. Why? Because the usages are always subject to being more and more finely sliced as the inherent ambiguities are discovered and pursued. But, in so doing, we lose track of what was meant by the original linguistic uses as we become lost in a labyrnthine world far removed from the sense language depends on. SWM WEB VIEW: http://tinyurl.com/ku7ga4 TODAY: http://alturl.com/whcf 3 DAYS: http://alturl.com/d9vz 1 WEEK: http://alturl.com/yeza GOOGLE: http://groups.google.com/group/Wittrs YAHOO: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wittrs/ FREELIST: //www.freelists.org/archive/wittrs/09-2009