PHIL 2060 Wittgenstein
Lecture 8: The Nature of Logic
0. If, at this stage, you'd like an `overview' of Wittgenstein's work, I can recommend a video, `The two philosophies of Wittgenstein', a dialogue between Anthony Quinton and Bryan Magee in the series Men of Ideas. This video is in the Department's audio-visual collection, and can be viewed in the Department. Even better (in my opinion) is the video of a dialogue on Wittgenstein between Magee and John Searle in a series called The Great Philosophers. This is in the university's video collection.
1. We saw that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein developed an influential view about the nature of logic (it was accepted by, among others, Russell, Ramsey and Carnap). This was the view that the propositions of logic are not truths which convey very general information, but are vacuous tautologies. That they are tautologies shows that the senses of the elementary propositions figuring in a tautology somehow cancel each other out, for the tautology itself is senseless (sinnlos). Further, the laws of inference are shown in tautologies. Take the tautology `(p & (p →q))→q’. That this is a tautology shows that `q’ may be inferred from the two propositions `p’ and `p →q’. This is all very mathematically neat, and the theory, in the form of the `truth-table method’ for testing validity (T, 4.31) is now a standard part of logic.
2. In his `transitional’ period, Wittgenstein saw the need to make logic more messy and complicated in order to accommodate inferences such as `a is red, therefore a is not green’, and in Philosophical Remarks (1931) he develops a theory based on the idea that propositions come in families. For examples, propositions about the colours of objects belong in a family, so that, for example, while `a is red’ is logically independent of `a is round’, it is not logically independent of `a is green’. (Russell, who said he liked simplicity, wanted to think that these new views of Wittgenstein’s were not true.)
3. At PI, §89, Wittgenstein raises the question `In what sense is logic something sublime?’ It is not quite clear what he means, but clearly his answer to this question is that the conception of logic as `sublime’ is mistaken. Logical investigation, on that conception, springs `from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical’. By the time of his later writings, however, Wittgenstein challenged the view that there are `essences’ that it is the philosopher’s task to uncover. It was a misconception about the nature of logic which, as Wittgenstein confesses, once led Wittgenstein `to think that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules’ (PI, §81).
4. By the time of the composition of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein came to realize that the idea that there must be simple or `pure’ mathematical rules for inference was an unfounded assumption. We cannot be quite sure what his abandonment of the preconception of `the crystalline purity of logic’ amounted to, nor what logic is supposed to look like after a `return to the rough ground’ of our linguistic practices (PI, §107). But perhaps we can get some clues by a process of elimination. Logic does not concern itself with subjects’ psychological states, for it is a normative discipline which is not concerned with individual psychology but with how we ought to reason. Wittgenstein also rejected the Platonistic conception of logic advocated by Frege because of its commitment to a `superhuman’ realm of fixed meanings. If, as Wittgenstein argued, meaning is use and is not determinate, then logic, insofar as it is concerned with what statements (conclusions) follow from other statements (premises) it is answerable to our linguistic practices and these are not subject to superhuman dictates. So, insofar as logic concerns itself with reasoning – with what is inferable from what – it concerns itself with a shared practice in the use of words.
5. The word `logic’, in Wittgenstein’s later usage, also includes identifying what is illogical and, in his later works, this amounted to exposing conceptual confusions. In the case of a conceptual question – let’s take as an example the concept of grief -- we can avoid the philosophical error of thinking that grief is a kind of pain merely by reflecting that it makes sense to say `For a second he felt violent pain’, whereas to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief’ sounds like a joke. It sounds queer, as Wittgenstein says, but does it sound queer only because feeling deep grief for one second so seldom happens? (PI p.174) Obviously not, and Wittgenstein is being blatantly and playfully ironical in proposing this ridiculous `explanation’. Many of Wittgenstein’s own examples suggest humorous zeugmas. E.g. `He was traveling to Swansea accompanied by his mother-in-law and my good wishes’ (after PI 673); `It’ll stop soon – I mean the pain in your finger and the noise in the next room’ (after PI, §666)(note the exclamation mark that Wittgenstein, uncharacteristically, allows himself at PI 666). [Note: K.T . Fann (in Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy (1969), p.109 says that this passage about grief from PI, p.174, reminds him of a comic strip conversation:
Blondie:
What a day I had! I feel blumpy.
Dagwood: `Blumpy’?
There is no such word in the dictionary.
Blondie: Well, that’s because nobody’s ever felt
blumpy before.
Although this dialogue is not particularly relevant to the section of PI that Fann cites, it is perfect as an illustration of someone’s inventing a private vocabulary, the possibility of which Wittgenstein discusses at PI §243ff. and which we shall soon be discussing in this course.]
6. I just spoke of a joke, and was alluding to PI § 111. Wittgenstein there says `The problems arising through our misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. ----- Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)’ Recall also that he had told Norman Malcolm that `a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious)’. It may seem strange that Wittgenstein of all people, should say such a thing (blessed as he wasn’t with a sharp sense of humour) and when one finds examples of what he has in mind, one is not exactly in the territory of belly-laughs. At one point, he says `It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain’ (PI § 246). It could only be a joke to say that my right hand can give my left hand money (see PI §268) and one assumes that Wittgenstein was being playful when he asks: `Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? (PI §250). Wittgenstein thought that Cantor’s Paradise was a joke. Moore-paradoxical utterances also strike us as funny. One of Wittgenstein’s examples of a Mooronic assertion features an announcer at a railway station saying `Train No….will arrive at ….o’clock. Personally I don’t believe it’ (RPP I § 486)
7. Nonsense is a familiar source of humour and conceptual confusion of the sort in which Wittgenstein was interested, is manifested in utterances, such as those cited above, that are not false but nonsensical. A verbal gaffe that is an expression of a conceptual distortion is often funny, and alerts us to the possibility that there is a deep philosophical issue in the vicinity. It is a remarkable fact that many of the jokes we find funniest are those which turn out, on subsequent analysis, to be philosophically most rewarding. Yet it is hardly plausible to believe that we perform such an analysis in the split second between hearing a joke and laughing at it. The phenomenology of humour interested Wittgenstein. He mentioned an occasion on a bus when he heard two people laughing together, and was able to think himself into the skin of an outsider not accustomed to the phenomenon, witnessing these people breaking out into a sort of bleating like some outlandish animals (CV, p.88). Getting a `conceptual’ joke, seeing the duck where one previously saw the rabbit and experiencing the meaning of a word are all examples of aspect-switching, a subject on which Wittgenstein wrote much in what I call his `late late’ period. Some of the connections are explored in Monk, pp.529-533.