PR of Reading Philosophical Investigations by JWSchmidt

This is a peer review critque of an article that has been submitted to the Language Journal.

Title of the reviewed target article

Before reading the Philosophical Investigations: a Necessary Context

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Title section for this Peer Review Article

Title: PR of Reading Philosophical Investigations by JWSchmidt
Author: JWSchmidt^[1]
Leave me alone list: -empty-
Notes:

1. ^  JWSchmidt is the wikicities username of John Schmidt. --JWSchmidt 02:39, 8 Aug 2005 (UTC)
   
2. See also User JWSchmidt for some discussion of issues during the production of this peer review article (the content of User JWSchmidt was moved to the "talk" page for this page, the history of User JWSchmidt may still be useful).

Scope: Complete. I have read Philosophical Investigations but not Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I think this will make me a reasonable reviewer of the article; able to judge if the article provides useful background information to someone who wishes to read Philosophical Investigations without first reading earlier works by Wittgenstein.
Date started: August 7, 2005.
Estimated completion date: August 21, 2005.

Critique

Preface

1.) "In 1962, only four books were available in an English translation: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue and the Brown Books, Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Notebooks 1914-1916 had a copyright of 1961, too close to the deadline, and so is excluded. Hardly any attention was given at that time to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the foundations of mathematics, so that is excluded. That leaves, it seems to me, three possible sources: the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. This assumes that no German texts were referred to."

It is not clear what the point of the above is. Do we care where the quotes in The Viking Book of Aphorisms came from? It seems usefult to discuss how Wittgenstein's work was published. It seems worth making the point that many people have been exposed to Wittgenstein through secondary sources that mention bits of his work.

2.) "But not knowing that the central work of his early period, the Tractatus, is in many important ways different and had an impact on his later work, it sounded like an insightful poetic quote."

Does this sentence (above) mean that the Tractatus suggests another interpretation of “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” ?

3.) "One is that this natural life is the only life we have; the other is that there are only potential infinities in this finite universe."

Is there a concise way to (in this section of the`article) relate these "two assumptions" to what Wittgenstein wrote or will this happen in a later article (for example: 'We only know the infinite by description.')? If the later, maybe say so.

Mathematical Logic

4.) "Principia Mathematica was really much more about language than about mathematics. It was an attempt to find a second order or derived language in symbolism that would do away with the ambiguities and vagaries of natural languages -language that seemed to hide and confuse the expressions of philosophy and logic."

This (above) can be contrasted with what is said at wikipedia:

"It is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic."

and at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Written as a defense of logicism (i.e., the view that mathematics is in some significant sense reducible to logic) the book was instrumental in developing and popularizing modern mathematical logic. It also served as a major impetus for research in the foundations of mathematics throughout the twentieth century. Next to Aristotle's Organon, it remains the most influential book on logic ever written."

Would it be fair to say that Principia Mathematica showed that much of mathematics can be formalized and raised the question: "how much of human thought, reasoning and philosophy can be formalized?" Did Wittgenstein feel that his Tractatus answered this question?

5.) "They are either valid forms or invalid for Truth and falsity can be in either valid or invalid propositions."

I find this sentence to be confusing. Maybe it could be replace by one sentence that explains "valid forms" and a second sentence that illustrates how a valid form can express a falsity.

6.) "Content in natural language would be essential in his later philosophy. Much of what he came to call 'grammar' was the logic inherent in the content of words, phrases, and propositions."

Since you say, "It is useful here to point out that it is supposed not to matter what content---meaning---is plugged into the variables of propositions," I assumed that "content" in the context of natural language is used as slang for "semantic content" or "meaning". I agree that this assumption is problematical because Wittgenstein did use "grammar" in an unconventional way. I think you are correct to say that Wittgenstein thought of some of the "content" of words as being grammatical content, or, "content that governs the grammatical use of words." In natural language, there is not one collection of "logical atoms of semantic content" that are acted upon by an second distinct collection of syntactic or gramatical rules. Much of the "grammar" does exist in the "content" of words, phrases, and propositions.

7.) "It was only when Humanism looked for purely human explanations that it took over the assumptions that formed the assumption." My best guess is that the reader is to hold his breath until the next paragraph and that "the assumption" is "the belief that the world has been expressly made to be intelligible and describable by us." The "assumptions that formed the assumption" remain undisclosed.

The phrase "our language and its explanation of language" seems to say that "our language" has a built-in "explanation of language." Maybe Western Philosophy adopted a cultural "explanation of language" and expressed that explanation in language, but isn't that different than attributing an explanation to language itself?

An alternative to saying that "humanism" adopted the view that the world "just happens to be intelligible" is the possibility that it was natural to start by making use of Occam's Razor and other rules of thumb to help define a simple hypothesis about the nature of the world and why the world is intelligible. When this "simple hypothesis" was being formed, evolutionary accounts of how minds could naturally come to conform to reality were not available. If there really is only one logical hypothesis that can be the starting place for a naturalistic account of language, is it sensible to suggest that selecting that hypothesis was a culturally pre-determined adoption of a pre-existing religious belief?

8.) "change was explained in dualisms such as mind and matter, body and soul" This paragraph has several telegraphic nuggets like this (what were "Russell's otherworldly platonic assumptions"?). Maybe an example of such "change" could be placed in the Appendix.

9.) "atomic facts are like 'snarks'; impossible to find. Neither he nor Russell could cite a single example"

Is this contradicted by what comes next:

Picture Theory

"If you take the proposition, 'This is red' as a 'simple', the simples such as, 'This is blue' or, 'This is green', rely on the truth or falsity of the simple, 'This is red'."

Atomic facts are impossible to find but 'This is red' is an atomic proposition?

8.) “A statement cannot be concerned with the logic of the world"

According to Aimin Shen, Wittgenstein was trying to say that, "propositional language cannot represent what makes it possible." Are we to take this as meaning that the logic of the world exists prior to "statements" we may wish to make about it and we cannot expect to make statements about it? This seems both like a statement about the logic of the world (a statement saying such statements are impossible?) and a statement born of the frustration of Wittgenstein's failure to find a workable formal system of logical atomism.

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• as far as I know, this is the first peer review for this target article.