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Richard Myers · Member

Wittgenstein: How To Read Wittgenstein by Ray Monk

Ian Lang · Veteran Member

When W writes about "saying" something I think he means saying in the formal sense of a proposition that can be shown to be true or false (not ordinary "saying"). This is the Tractatus after all.

So when he says "A chair is a thing" is nonsense he is simply denying that the sentence is a proposition that can be shown to be true or false. I think his problem is with the concept "thing". He has a similar problem with the phrase "world as a whole" which he doesn't think can be used in a proposition i.e. to say something.

He would have a similar problem with many concepts such as redness, existence, mind, morality etc which he doesn't think have any place in propositions so in that sense are meaningless nonsense. Nevertheless he accepts that they can be shown or pointed to or demonstrated and in that sense exist (whatever exists means!).

I think the point is well made in the extraordinary dispute between Russell and Bradley (bottom pg 37/38) about whether "relations" are a kind of object. They are talking nonsense and W was clearly exasperated by it.

Incidentally Frege got there first when he said truth and falsity cannot be applied to mental conditions such as beliefs or experiences.

Simon pointed out an excellent talk a couple of days ago on In Our Time on this the subject of ordinary language.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ggc19

simon · Member

It's really not easy going, is it?

I think I agree with Ian that W is placing a very high bar on what he regards as sense! Words are not meaningful by themselves; only thoughts corresponding to facts have sense. "A chair is a thing" is not a fact about the world - it merely restates that the word "chair" refers to something. So "something is shewn by the symbol "M"" indicates that the symbol "M" has a reference (although of course that statement "something is shewn" is itself nonsense - or at least not sense!)

I have more trouble with the issue of "three things in the world". I'm not sure if the problem is "things" or "the world". Would W have been happy with "there are at least three things on this piece of paper" .."in this room" ... "in the observable universe". Or how about "there are at least three blobs in the world"? Perhaps he wouldn't have thought any of these made sense; there is too much abstraction and indeterminacy about "thing" - there are three thirds of a blob in every blob after all - is a third of a blob a thing? And "the world is everything that is the case" ie it is not a physical volume of space so perhaps we can't discuss things existing in it?

But I can't pretend to properly understand it either!! And even W came to realise it was

a - nonsense and (later)

b - wrong!

Andrew · Newbie

I don't think my 'exposition' of Chaps 3-5 is going to contribute very much at all to the situation, except to allow further opportunity for debate!

Structure is as follows:

1. Resume of history of 'Tractacus' and problems of interpretation

2. The easier bits (!)

a. The universe

b. Philosophy

c. Propositions and terminology

3. The bits I don't get:

a. Table is a thing, etc - p38

b. Propositional sign being a fact (p44, 5, 8)

c. The pictorial form of a picture, and logic, being shown rather than said (p50)

At present, I feel I understand less now than I thought I did at the end of the last session. Let's hope that our next discussion is as useful as the last in remedying the situation.

Richard Myers · Member

Ian, Simon: Suppose I think the statement 'A chair is a thing' is a proposition and as such can be true or false. Suppose I think this because my understanding of the word 'thing' - my layman's ordinary-language understanding of the word - makes me think a 'thing' is different from, say, an 'emotion'. 'A chair is an emotion' would be false. 'A chair is a thing' is true. It really means 'A chair fits the kind of rough definition I and others give to the word 'thing'.' Accepting W's definition of expressing sense as picturing a state of affairs, aren't the definitions we give to abstractions a state of affairs? I think I said 'A chair is a thing' was not a state of affairs in my first post: revising that, it is a state of affairs relating to language. More abstract, but still real, still a portion of reality.

This might suggest that W was trying to confine sense to what can be dealt with by natural science, which is what indeed he says in 4.11 [p.52]. But this seems so amazingly narrow that I find it hard to believe anyone took him seriously for five minutes. Perhaps at the time it represented a refreshing simplicity for minds tormented by too many warring abstractions. It is a distraction that he later thought he was wrong, as one is not sure yet what exactly he believed in the Tractatus and what exactly he thought was wrong about it later.

Simon: 'the world contains at least three things': I suspect Ray Monk does not explain this very well, but, as you know, the only rationale he seems to give is that W 'would not admit that anything at all could be said about the world as a whole.' [p.39, quoting from Russell - so nothing about the definition of 'things' or blobs] There is no clear explanation of why not. Perhaps we can't truly conceive of the world as a whole, it is a state of affairs too complex for us to grasp, hence an abstraction even more poorly defined than most?

Over to you, Andrew!

Ian Lang · Veteran Member

An emotion is something (else we couldn't talk about it)

Anything is a thing (by definition)

Therefore an emotion is a thing, like a chair is a thing.

Using the same logic "M is a thing" is always true where M denotes anything.

So "M is a thing" is a tautaulogy.

So "M is thing" says nothing about the world.

So "M is a thing" is not a proposition (in W's terms)

So "M is a thing" is nonsense (in W's terms)

So " A chair is a thing" is nonsense (in W's terms).

Richard Myers · Member

Ian: I can follow your argument, but I am not sure it is W's.
I am by no means sure of my own argument, and perhaps my 2nd post was a bit too confident in tone.
Going back to your argument, some random comments.
1. According to Monk, W did not think a tautology was nonsense - see p.50 - tautologies are 'senseless', 'not nonsense', 'always true'.
2.Going back to the original quotation on p.38: although that M is a thing can't be said,something is shewn by the symbol M. Perhaps wrongly, but I understand this to mean that the 'shewing' somehow is showing that M is a thing - and showing is not nonsense.
3. You say anything is a thing, but that is just one defintion of thing, and it is not clear to me that W used it in that way. E.g. prop 2.01 says things are objects; and e.g prop 2.0251 says 'space, time and colour [being coloured] are forms of objects'. That does not sound like the 'form' of just anything; I can't see emotion having the 'form'of space, of time or of colour. But perhaps you disagree.