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.

The author (Parr) made an adjustment to the text on August 14 to clarify this point.

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.

Also, there are two "levels" at which logical propositions can be utilized. If the variables are left "free and unsubstituted" then the "statements of symbolic logic are so general that they can neither be true nor false." However, if specific "things" from the World are substituted for the variables, then there is a connection between the World and our thoughts that language is able to express with statements of fact, specifically, the language of logical propositions--- propositions that must be either true or false. Care must be taken in discussing these two "modes" in which logical propositions are discussed. Without such care, the reader will be baffled by alternating statements about logical propositions as

i) being neither true nor false

or

ii) that must be either true or false.

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?

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

It is not clear exactly how this (above) says what the world must be like.

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? If "concerned with" means "about" (represents) then Wittgenstein's statement 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.

Alternatively, what makes a "statement" a "statement" is that we are asserting the truth or falsity of something. Does it make sense to try to assert the truth or falsity of "the logic of the world"? No. "The logic of the world" is independent of anything we may try to assert. All we can do is accept "the logic of the world," not try to discuss if it is true or false, the case or not the case.

Are we supposed to be ruling out some other alternative to "The logic of the world is prior to all that is truth and falsehood"? Could the "the logic of the world" be a creation of people trying to understand the world? How does Wittgenstein's position on the logic of the world "explain language"?

11.) "we required the ideal to be a reality" What ideal? Atomic facts?

The key issue would seem to be the relation between thought and the assumed logical field of atomic facts. Is this "logical field" to be concieved as something that auomatically constrains thought, like a mentalistic force that infuses thought with logic in the same way that a gravitational field constrains the movement of objects?

12.) "these two assumptions that atomic facts must be the explanation of how language works" Exactly what are the "two" assumptions?

Solipsism

"The saying/showing distinction" is mentioned, but never clearly explained. Is the preceeding discussion of “A statement cannot be concerned with the logic of the world" to be taken as showing "the logic of the world" to be an example of something that can be shown but not said?

"what solipsism means is quite correct" But what did Wittgenstein take "solipsism" to mean? That we have a special epistemological relationship to our "self"? That only our "self" exists?

I assume it is the epistemological claim, not the ontological claim that was of concern to Wittgenstein. We cannot think beyond our own self and the powers of thought generated by the self. We cannot speak of anything that is not contained in our thoughts, but we are aware of this limitation.

"our ability to see the logic in the world expressed as self-evident in the atomic facts and simples" Does this mean that Wittgenstein's theory demanded that we have a physiological/mental ability to to percieve "atomic facts and simples as self-evident" and so generate understanding of the world, even if we are unable to say what the "simples" are?

Logicism and Scientism

"The development of Symbolic language"
There should be some transition from "symbolic logic" to "Symbolic language".

In, "It would be a mistake to see this word, 'mystical', as being its logical, consistent and absurd conclusion,"
What is "its"?

The Beginning of the New as the Old Disappears

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the 1928 lecture in Vienna ‘Mathematik, Wissenschaft und Sprache’ is ‘Mathematics, Science and Language’.

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