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Overview
This is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philosopher of language and historian of analytic philosophy, provides the fullest and most detailed account of the analytic tradition yet published, one that is unmatched in its chronological range, topics covered, and depth of treatment. Focusing on the major milestones and distinguishing them from detours, Soames gives a seminal account of where the analytic tradition has been and where it appears to be heading.
Volume 2 provides an intensive account of the new vision in analytical philosophy initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its assimilation by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, and the subsequent flowering of logical empiricism. With this “linguistic turn,” philosophical analysis became philosophy itself, and the discipline’s stated aim was transformed from advancing philosophical theories to formalizing, systematizing, and unifying science. In addition to exploring the successes and failures of philosophers who pursued this vision, the book describes how the philosophically minded logicians Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing discovered the scope and limits of logic and developed the mathematical theory of computation that ushered in the digital era. The book’s account of this pivotal period closes with a searching examination of the struggle to preserve ethical normativity in a scientific age.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691160030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2017 |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Abbreviated Metaphysics of the Tractatus
1. Aims and Significance
2. Modal Metaphysics: Facts, Objects, and Simples
3. Wittgenstein's Logically Atomistic Explanation of Change and Possibility
4. The Hiddenness of the Metaphysically Simple
5. The Logical Independence of Atomic Sentences and Atomic Facts
1. AIMS AND SIGNIFICANCE
Volume 1 of this work ended with an extensive discussion of the version of logical atomism found in Bertrand Russell's The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, originally presented as eight lectures in 1918. There, we observed Russell's most systematic attempt to use his methods of logical and linguistic analysis, originally deployed in "On Denoting" and Principia Mathematica, to craft solutions to what he, along with G. E. Moore, took to be the central problems of philosophy. Moore's own summary of those problems was presented in the first of a series of lectures given in 1910–11 that ultimately were published as Some Main Problems of Philosophy in Moore (1953). There, Moore says that the most important, though not the only, job of philosophy is to give a general description of the whole Universe, mentioning all the most important things we know to be in it, considering how far it is likely that there are important kinds of things which we do not absolutely know to be in it, and also considering the most important ways in which these various kinds of things are related to one another. I will call this, for short, 'Giving a general description of the whole Universe', and hence will say that the first and most important problem of philosophy is: To give a general description of the whole Universe. [pp. 1–2]
In those lectures, and in the years preceding and following them, Moore showed himself to be highly critical of philosophical descriptions of the universe that contradicted what he took to be his commonsense knowledge of it. Included in that knowledge was his knowledge of space and time, past and present, mind and matter, and of other human beings — their material bodies, their conscious states and experiences, and their commonsense knowledge of the same sorts of things that he took himself to know. Although Moore didn't rule out philosophical additions to commonsense knowledge, his practice was to subject proposed extensions to relentlessly critical scrutiny — including the Absolute Idealists' arguments for the essential unity and relatedness of all things, J.M.E. McTaggart's vision of human immortality, and William James's insistence on manmade, pragmatic truths. Despite Moore's emphasis on what we know, he did find it puzzling how, exactly, we know all the things we do know. To his disappointment, he never found a satisfying explanation.
Russell was more ambitious. Sharing Moore's traditional conception of philosophy, he employed his method of logical and linguistic analysis to produce a general description of a universe capable of being known without philosophical perplexity. In the years preceding the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the form of analysis Russell used for this purpose in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918/19) was the method of logical construction. The idea was to arrive at a description of what reality must be like, if what we take ourselves to know — from both science and ordinary experience– is really capable of being known.
His account of a knowable universe arose from a reductive philosophical analysis of the claims of science and common sense. The aim of the reduction was to show that these claims — which, on their surface, seem to be about entities the existence of which can be known only by philosophically contentious inference — can be interpreted as involving no such questionable entities or inferences. The analysis involved replacing ordinary and scientific claims — the contents of which seem to posit persisting, mind-independent things in "the external world" — with logically complex systems of sentences about epistemically privileged, actual or hypothetical, momentary sensible objects of immediate perception. Just as Russell had earlier attempted to validate our arithmetical knowledge by reducing arithmetical truths to knowably equivalent statements of pure logic — which were (prior to his recognition of the need for the Axiom of Infinity) themselves assumed be transparently knowable — so, in the years immediately preceding the Tractatus, he sought to validate our knowledge of the external world by reducing statements about it to knowably equivalent, and themselves transparently knowable, statements about perceptual appearances.
In this and succeeding chapters I will present a reading of the Tractatus that places Russell's logical-atomist conception of philosophy midway between Moore's traditional conception in Some Main Problems of Philosophy and Wittgenstein's radically new conception. In accord with the traditional, but at variance with the tractarian, conception of philosophy, Russell aimed for an all-encompassing theory of the whole universe. In accord with the tractarian, but at variance with the traditional, conception, Russell's official aim was not to produce new knowledge of the world unavailable outside of philosophy. On the contrary, the relationship between his system of logical atomism and our pre-philosophical knowledge of the world was meant to parallel the relationship between his logicized version of arithmetic and our prephilosophical knowledge of arithmetic. Just as his logicist reduction wasn't aimed at giving us new arithmetical knowledge, but rather at validating that knowledge and exhibiting its connections with other mathematical knowledge, so his logical atomism wasn't presented as adding to our ordinary and scientific knowledge of the world, but rather as validating it and exhibiting the connections holding among its various parts. It is, at least in part, because Russell thought of his enterprise in this way that he says, in Our Knowledge of the External World, that "every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical."
Russell's view of philosophical problems as essentially logical encompasses the idea that although philosophy has a role to play in describing reality, its task is not to formulate testable hypotheses or to subject them to empirical test. Rather its task is to provide conceptual analyses, which he took to be a kind of creative logical analysis. This is what he had in mind in 1914 when he said:
[P]hilosophical propositions ... must be a priori. A philosophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved nor disproved by empirical evidence. ... [P]hilosophy is the science of the possible. ... Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from logic.
The keys here are the conception of philosophy as a priori and the implicit identification of a priori truths with logical truths, and of a priori connections with logical connections, which it is the task of philosophy to articulate. Since Russell thought that a priori and necessary connections were logical connections, he understood the task of revealing and explaining them to be a search for philosophically motivated definitions, as in the reduction of arithmetic to logic, or decompositional analyses, as in his analysis of statements about the external world in terms of statements about perceptible simples. Although the final form of the resulting general description of reality was to come from philosophical analysis, the raw material for that general description was seen as coming not from philosophy, but from everyday observation, commonsense knowledge, and empirical science. It was, if you will, an exercise in analytic metaphysics. Russell's atomist system was intended to be an informative description of the world, but its informativeness was supposed to lie in our surprise at appreciating what was present all along in the knowledge expressed by the statements of science and everyday life.
This seemingly modest view of philosophy was, in certain respects, not too far from Wittgenstein's more thoroughly deflationary conception of philosophy in the Tractatus. However, my statement of Russell's view, which I believe he would have found congenial, is not an entirely accurate statement of his position. As I argued in Volume 1, his "analyses" of ordinary and scientific statements about the world weren't even approximately equivalent to the statements being analyzed. Hence, his resulting atomist system was less an analysis of what our prephilosophical worldview amounts to than it was a proposal to replace it with an ambitious and highly revisionary system of metaphysics, driven by an antecedent conviction of what reality must be like if it is to be knowable. As we look at the Tractatus, we will see that Wittgenstein's thought was not free of its own tension of this general sort — not between what we pretheoretically think the world is like and what it must really be like if it is to be known, but between what we pretheoretically think, both about the world and about our own thoughts, and what both the world and our thoughts must really be like if the latter are to represent the former.
If this sounds like the Tractatus offers a kind of transcendental metaphysics, there is, I am afraid, no denying that it does. But the tractarian metaphysics is relatively spare, in comparison to the Russellian metaphysics of The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, and not intended to be substantively informative in the way that Russell's atomism aspired to be. Although the Tractatus begins with abstruse metaphysics, there is no identification of its basic metaphysical simples and virtually no analyses of the statements of science or commonsense. Consequently, there is no attempt to state an informative worldview in which traditional philosophical problems are solved by recasting our ordinary and scientific knowledge into anything purporting to be their true or ultimate form. Rather, the heart of the Tractatus is its conception of how thought, which finds its expression in language, represents reality.
Its organizing premise is Wittgenstein's rejection of the conception of propositions found in Frege, the early Russell, and the early Moore, and his replacement of that conception with a new analysis of meaningful, representational language. That Wittgenstein himself saw this as the single great problem of philosophy, to be addressed in the Tractatus, is suggested by the following passages from the Notebooks 1914–1916, which he kept when producing that work.
My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. (p. 39)
The problem of negation, of conjunction, of true and false, are only reflections of the one great problem in the variously placed great and small mirrors of philosophy. (p. 40)
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole of the single great problem. (p. 23)
The single great problem, explaining the nature of the proposition, was, as Wittgenstein then saw it, the problem of explaining meaning, which, in turn, was the problem of finding the essence of representational thought and language. This was both the task of the Tractatus and, he believed, the only real task for philosophy.
He took this to be crucial for philosophy because (i) he believed that finding the scope and limits of intelligibility was part and parcel of finding the essence of thought, and (ii) he assumed that in order for a thought (the function of which is to represent the world) to tell us anything intelligible about the world, it must tell us something about which state — among all the possible states the world could conceivably be in — the world really is in. He took it to follow from this that all genuinely intelligible thoughts must be contingent and a posteriori. Since, like Russell, he believed that philosophical propositions are never either contingent or a posteriori, he concluded that there are no genuine philosophical propositions. Since, also like Russell, he believed that all necessary and a priori connections were logical connections, he could, even then, have attempted to offer substantively illuminating logico-linguistic analyses of both scientific and everyday statements, had he shared Russell's belief that the fundamental metaphysical simples that ground all analysis could be informatively identified. But he didn't. On the contrary, he was convinced that it is impossible to informatively identify such objects. Given all this, he had to view his task not as solving the traditional problems of philosophy, but as disposing of them.
Why then do the first few pages of the Tractatus consist of metaphysical pronouncements, which, by the end of the work, are seen as problematic? The mundane, but correct, answer is that Wittgenstein simply saw no way of enunciating, and in his mind establishing, the limits of intelligibility that are the heart of the work without violating those limits in the process. This predicament was not limited to his explicitly metaphysical pronouncements. The Tractatus is full of tractarian transgressions. The meager metaphysical sketch with which the work begins was the reflex of his views about how propositions, thought of as (uses of) meaningful sentences of a certain sort, represent the world. His intention was not really to do metaphysics, but to end it by revealing how it violates what is essential to all intelligible, representational thought and language.
2. MODAL METAPHYSICS: FACTS, OBJECTS, AND SIMPLES
1. The world is everything that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.12 The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
What is the case is what is, or rather what determines what is, true; while what is not the case is what is, or rather what determines what is, false. Thus the earliest passages in the Tractatus purport to identify the basic elements of reality needed for thought and language to represent it, elements that somehow determine the truth or falsity of all propositions. These elements are identified with atomic facts.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Any one can either be the case or not the case, and everything else remain the same.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
Here we learn that the facts, the totality of which is the world, are independent of one another, which guarantees that they do not include conjunctive, disjunctive, or negative facts. Rather they must be combinations of objects that somehow suffice to determine which conjunctions, disjunctions, negations, and other complex propositions are true. This, Wittgenstein thinks, is the conceptually minimal way in which we must think of reality, if it is to be represented in our thought and language.
What can be said about the objects that combine to make up atomic facts?
2.02 The object is simple.
2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be analyzed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.
2.021 Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.
2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.
2.0212 It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).
Section 2.02 tells us that there are metaphysically simple objects. These, Wittgenstein will treat as referents of logically proper names. Thus, in a very short space, we are given the ontological counterparts of the two key categories of representational language — proper names and atomic sentences. Section 2.0201 is a compressed statement of his commitment to the fundamental parallel between language and the world. As Wittgenstein will later tell us, an atomic (simple) sentence is a combination of logically proper names that represent the metaphysically simple objects they designate as standing in one or another relation to each other. Thus, sentences are, in effect, structured linguistic entities that are projections of the structured elements of reality they are used to represent. Since all complex sentences are ultimately to be analyzed in terms of the atomic sentences they logically depend on, complex statements are themselves, ultimately, reports about classes of possible atomic facts and the simple objects that make them up. Section 2.021 reminds us that this process of analysis, of moving from the more complex to the less complex, must come to an end — in metaphysically simple objects, on the side of the world, and in logically proper names and atomic sentences composed of them, on the side of language.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
I The Tractatus: Language, Mind, And World
1 The Abbreviated Metaphysics of the Tractatus 3
2 The Single Great Problem of the Tractatus: Propositions 24
3 The Logic of the Tractatus 55
4 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 88
II A New Conception Of Philosophy: Language, Logic, And Science
5 The Roots of Logical Empiricism 107
6 Carnap’s Aufbau 129
7 The Heyday of Logical Empiricism 160
8 Advances in Logic: Gödel, Tarski, Church, and Turing 199
9 Tarski’s Definition of Truth and Carnap’s Embrace of “Semantics” 236
10 Analyticity, Necessity, and A Priori Knowledge 288
11 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 311
III Is Ethics Possible?
12 Ethics as Science 337
13 Replacing Ethics with Metaethics: Emotivism and Its Critics 353
14 Normative Ethics and Cognitivist Metaethics in the Age
of Emotivism: H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross 375
References 409
Index 419
What People are Saying About This
"A terrifically good book—and an important contribution to analytic philosophy and its history."—Gil Harman, Princeton University"With its ambitious scope, deep coverage, and sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers a great wealth of valuable insights and advances our understanding of one of the most fertile periods in the history of philosophy."—John Barker, University of Illinois, Springfield