PR of Reading Philosophical Investigations by JWSchmidt

This is a peer review critique 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.

Summary

I have previosly read read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, parts of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, parts of On Certainty, some secondary sources that discuss Wittgenstein's philosophy, and none of Wittgenstein's other books. I found the article Before reading the Philosophical Investigations: a Necessary Context by Robert Parr to be a useful introduction to Philosophical Investigations. I feel that the article should be accepted for formal publication by the Language Journal. The author should adequately reply to the list of suggestions for modifications to the article (below) prior to formal publication.

Critique

The following suggestions are intended to improve the article. Each section name below links back to the original section of the critiqued article.

Abstract

1) The abstract is rather short. It mentions the transition of Wittgenstein's philosophical thought (early vs later philosophy) but does not provide any information about the nature of the transition. The author should breifly describe what he views as the major change between Wittgenstein's early tractarian philiosophy and his later philosophy (PI).

Ideas for what tho add to the Abstract:

i) A rephrasing of: "The great feat of Wittgenstein, in my mind, was to doggedly follow the logic of the assumptions that Russell and he of the "atomic facts" theory of language to its logical, consistent and absurd conclusion."

ii) "The conclusion of the Tractatus was that having achieved his goal, little was accomplished."
or
"As for Symbolic Logic he came to see it as too limited to be much use for a philosopher."
("the second thing in which the of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.")

iii) Maybe something could be said about Wittgenstein trying to look at the full richness of language rather than cram it into an over-simplified formal theory. Maybe a rephrasing of: "Wittgenstein now argued that a word only had meaning in the context of a propositional system, and that meaning of a word is the totality of rules governing its use in the system."

Mathematical Logic

2) "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."

There are several important ideas that are introduced in these two sentences. One of these ideas is important for point #1, above, and the distinction between the early and later philosophy of Wittgenstein.

As the article is written, it seems to imply that because "specificity of content does not matter in symbolic logic", content was not essential in the Tractatus. I think this is a dangerous implication to leave open to the reader.

Part of the problem is use of the word "essential". I think the issue of content and meaning was essential in the Tractatus. It is true that the treatment given to content in the Tractatus produces (or is subject to) the illusion that there is a relatively simple solution to the problem of meaning in human language. Why not say that Wittgenstein realized that the treatment of content in the Tractatus was inadequate and this led to a major new assault on the richness of the problem in Philosophical Investigations?

The sentence, "Much of what he came to call 'grammar' was the logic inherent in the content of words, phrases, and propositions," seems like a terse and unproductive way to introduce the term "grammar". Why not point to what is to come by rephrasing this sentence to explicitly say, "As we shall see, in Wittgenstein's new analysis of the content of words, phrases, and propositions, the logic inherent in that content formed much of what he came to call 'grammar'."

Analytic Philosophy

3) "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.

Suggested alternative phrasing: Humanistic explanations of how language conveys meaning adopted the assumption that the world is naturally arranged so as to be intelligible and describable by us.

An alternative to saying that "humanism" adopted the culturally established view that the world "just happens to be intelligible":
Is it possible that it was natural for humanists to start their analysis of language 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 thoughts in minds could naturally come to conform to the reality of the external world were not available. The hypothesis that, "that the world is naturally arranged so as to be intelligible," might have been a logical hypothesis for humanists to start with no matter what. If there really was only one simple and logical hypothesis that can be the starting place for a naturalistic account of language, then maybe we do not have to suggest that selecting that hypothesis was a culturally pre-determined adoption of a pre-existing religious belief?

4) "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

13.) "The saying/showing distinction" is mentioned, but never clearly explained. Is the preceding 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?

14.) "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

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

16.) In, "It would be a mistake to see this word, 'mystical', as being its logical, consistent and absurd conclusion,"
What is "its"? in what sense is the conclusion absurd?

The Beginning of the New as the Old Disappears

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

18.) The article about Wittgenstein at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Ian Proops cites several published sources and unpublished quotations from Wittgenstein (some from Moore's notes from lectures Wittgenstein gave in 1932) concerning his abandonment of the picture theory. The first source is Wittgenstein's 1929 article Some remarks on Logical Form (This the article that was to have been presented to the Joint Session of the Aristotelian and Mind Society. Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, page 272.) where he comments on the need to have "numbers enter into the structure of atomic propositions." Once Wittgenstein allowed in numbers, he could not find logical reasons for excluding certain possible realities. Logic alone is not powerful enough to define the quantitative nature of reality. Physical reality is more complex than logic. Proops says, "This .... contradicts the Tractatus's idea that all necessity is logical necessity (6.37)".

The issues raise by Some remarks on Logical Form do seem catastrophic for the ability of logic to generate all of "the world", but I am left wondering why anyone could have had enough faith in the power of logic to think otherwise in the first place.

Proops also sites what seems to be an unpublished letter: "There is a most important mistake in [the] Tract[atus]…I pretended that [a] proposition was a logical product; but it isn't, because “…” don't give you a logical product. It is [the] fallacy of thinking 1 + 1 + 1 is a sum. It is muddling up a sum with the limit of a sum." (November 25, 1932 [CL?])

And, "There was a deeper mistake — confusing logical analysis with chemical analysis. I thought '(∃x).fx' is a definite logical sum, only I can't at the moment tell you which." (same "C" source)

This "deeper mistake" is certainly tied up with infinity, but I do not understand how it has application to the theory of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Bridge

19.) Is it Satzsystem or Satzsysteme?

20.) Is there a citation to Wittgenstein's first use of "Satzsystem". Philosophical Remarks?

21.) "The Satzsystem also meant that a major theme of the Tractatus, that, contra Frege, names have meaning and not sense." This is not a correct sentence.

The author of this peer review article is following the Reviewer Guidelines. Leave comments on the the discussion page (talk page) or contact the author by email.

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