Ludwig Wittgenstein
( 1889 – 1951 )
Austrian philosopher who contributed immensely to logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy mind and philosophy of language. He was a student of Bertrand Russel and is considered to be one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.
His works inspired two major philosophical movements of the analytic tradition:
– logical positivism (esp. the Vienna school, influenced by his early philosophy, particularly the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921)
– ordinary language philosophy (influenced by his later view and the posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations, 1953)
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is set up as a series of propositions, followed by a number of observations about the proposition. It deals with the relationship between language and the world and aims to define the limits of science. In it, Wittgenstein seeks to map out a particular kind of logical structure, which underlies both reality and language.
Wittgenstein argues that the logical structure of language provides the limits of meaning – ie. the limits of language are the limits of philosophy.
According to him, the things that can be spoken about can be said clearly, but anything beyond that – metaphysics, religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc. – cannot be discussed. Propositions related to these areas are not false, just nonsensical.
An important idea set up in the Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s picture language theory
According to Wittgenstein, propositions are logical pictures of the world, because they share the logical form with the reality. Propositions “picture” the world as being a certain way and they either accurately represent it or not.
For example, if I say “There is a pine tree in the garden”, the proposition accurately describes the world only if there is a pine tree in the yard. The example also demonstrates how we can easily picture a pine tree in the yard, without actually knowing if it is there.
Wittgenstein’s conception of representation as picturing also allows him to derive a striking claim, namely that no proposition can be known a priori. We cannot see from the proposition alone if it is true or false (an a priori proposition is known independently from experience), but we must compare it to reality in order to know if it’s true. Hence, there are no a priori truths.
His Philosophical Investigations represent his later view, where he refutes many the ideas presented in the Tractatus. The work deals with the difficulties of language and meaning. It no longer aims to present the hidden logic behind language, rather, it reveals the hidden logic of ordinary language (hence the name of the movement it inspired – ordinary language philosophy). Wittgenstein aimed to show that the tools of language are essentially simple and that philosophy has obscured the simplicity by misusing language.
He presents the idea that language is a game and that speaking language is an activity. Language is used in context and it cannot be understood outside of its context.
He claims that the meaning of a word is its use in language. Words are not defined by which objects they refer to, or by our mental representations, but by how they are used.
Words, phrases, and expressions are rule-governed, and their meaning is derived from the use to which they may be put according to the rules of the language game.
When some of the rules of a given language game are broken in subtle ways, “language goes on holiday” as he put it, the result of which are either strange strains of philosophy (such as metaphysics) or madness
According to Wittgenstein, improper understanding of how meaning works in language had generated an error in the metaphysical view of the Western world.
For example, Plato thought that words had to be names of things that existed unchanging and eternally, and because there was no such thing in the observable world, he developed his theory of the other-worldly Forms. However, according to Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, it doesn’t mean that there is something called “Good” that exists independently of any good deed.
Wittgenstein stresses the social aspects of language and cognition. He argued that definitions emerge from forms of life – the culture and society in which they are used – and to see how language works, we have to see how it functions in specific social situations.