[U.S.] Jaakko Hintikka: “Wittgenstein”
Xingding posted on 2007-02-11 23:25:47
[U.S.]Jaakko Hintikka: “Wittgenstein,” translated by Fang Xudong, Zhonghua Book Company, May 2002
I read this on the plane and at the airport on my way back to Shanghai. Since the book is very thin, I originally thought I could finish it during the waiting period, but in the end it took much longer than expected to read it (these past few days I had been reading only light stuff, and this one at last has some connection with philosophy). As a result, I nearly missed boarding… Since I still have not begun an in-depth reading of Wittgenstein’s original works, for the time being I’ll just excerpt a few things from this appetizer and not comment on them.
Page1 In 1951 G.E. Moore was awarded a first-class decoration by George VI. Afterward, he told his wife with some surprise: “Can you imagine? The King had never even heard of Wittgenstein!” By the end of the twentieth century, the degree of surprise would even have been greater. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was perhaps the most widely known philosopher of the twentieth century, …
Page2 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father, Karl Wittgenstein, accumulated a fortune that ranked among the greatest in Europe. ………… Gradually, he came to embrace Tolstoy’s ideal of a simple life and poverty. Accordingly, he gave away all of his share of the fortune, but not to the poor. Poverty is a blessing; the poor would be corrupted by such money. As before, he gave everything to those who were already very rich, namely his brothers and sisters. Earlier on, Ludwig Wittgenstein had also given large sums of his own money to many writers and artists, …
Page11 … just as he himself said, “My terrible spelling in my youth … is connected with all my other character traits.” ………… The way Wittgenstein’s philosophy is expressed was not a deliberate choice of literary genre or style, but was compelled by his reading and writing disability. This condition clearly made it very difficult for him to state clearly, in oral form, longer language or other symbol systems (such as proofs and other forms of argument). The best it could do was to sum up another person’s systematic argument with an individual, memorable comparison or metaphor.
Page18 From this point of view, we can already appreciate several aspects of the most important feature of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. There is a phenomenological world in Wittgenstein’s world. His objects are like Russell’s topics of acquaintance. They are the topics of my experience. As one of his best early interpreters once pointed out: Wittgenstein says that to believe experience gives nothing is meaningless nonsense… because what is mine, what is given in experience, is the formal (explicit) property of being a genuine entity.[Quoted from Ramsey’s archives of Pittsburgh,004—21—02号]
Page18~19 In any case, Wittgenstein clearly indicated that the objects presupposed in the Tractatus include phenomenological entities such as the color-drops in my visual space. However, this does not mean that these objects are pure phenomena, just as Russell’s sense-data are not all pure appearances. Perhaps the best way to describe Wittgenstein’s objects is this: insofar as they are the objects of all direct experience, they are in fact components of physical entities.
Page19 This point is confirmed by the rest of section 6.43 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These parts show that for Wittgenstein, the world of the happy person and that of the unhappy person have different limits, that is, different objects. If there is one difference between Wittgenstein and Moore, it is that for Wittgenstein, value is revealed by the experience of the will rather than by the experience of different kinds of pleasure:
Page20 For Wittgenstein, properties and relations are also objects, not merely particulars.
Page21 But, as we have seen, with simple objects we cannot say that they exist or define them (for that would mean that what is defined exists). Therefore, they can only be pointed to and exemplified by means of “this” or “that.” We do not say what it is; we indicate it. This can explain the most puzzling feature of the Tractatus. That is Wittgenstein’s contrast between what can be said and what can only be shown. Closely connected with this contrast, and capable of being taken as its consequence, is Wittgenstein’s deeply rooted conviction that all meaningful relations have an ineffability, since they involve the recognition of simple, irreducible objects. Our view is that with these simple objects, we cannot say anything. We can only point to them and then say “this” or “that.” We can only indicate them. Thus Wittgenstein’s saying-showing terminology can be taken almost entirely literally.
Page23 Wittgenstein’s answer is: a proposition is combined not by means of any added “bond” or “glue,” but by means of its compositional form; in a proposition, objects are linked to one another not as tiles are stuck together, but as in a jigsaw puzzle, where they are fitted into place by their form.
Page26 “Phenomenology is grammar,” he wrote again and again.
Page26 Everyday language “is part of the human organism, and no less complex than it is” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, section 4.002)
Page32 The philosophy of the Tractatus did not satisfy Wittgenstein for long. Its weakest point lies in the assumptions beneath such apparently different but equally meaningful forms as: the problem of the logical independence of simple propositions, the tautological character of logical truths, and the completeness of the truth-functional theory as the logic of our language. The contradiction of color properties suited Wittgenstein as a paradigmatic problem, though the issue that really aroused discussion was more general.
Page33 The real problem is not whether propositions can in some sense be thought of as pictures. The problem is how they are connected with entities. In the Tractatus, the language-world bond is fixed by the name-object relation. And now, according to Wittgenstein’s new view, those relations are precisely constituted and sustained by certain rule-governed human activities, activities that might be called “custom” or “intuition.”
Page33 However, this new interest in the non-descriptive uses of language does not represent the dominant new point of view in Wittgenstein. It is merely a pleasant dividend of his new view. On the contrary, the true novelty of his view lies in this: even the descriptive meaning of our propositions must be constituted by rule-governed activities.
Page34 Wittgenstein was in fact making a conceptual U-turn. The next thing he tried to do was, for the first time, to assert the priority of an ordinary physicalist language over a phenomenological language.
Page35 Therefore, why Wittgenstein did not try to construct a clear logical language after October 22, 1929 was not, first of all, because the world was so unclear that we could not grasp it through a definite language and clear rules—though he may very well have thought that; the real reason was not this. The objects we are happy to describe are phenomenological objects, whereas the way our language works is that it can only directly refer to a physical entity. This has to do with Wittgenstein’s following conviction: Page36 Language itself belongs to the second (that is, physical) system. If I describe a language, I am in essence describing something that belongs to physics. But how can a physical language describe phenomena? (Philosophical Remarks, Part 7, section 68)
Page36 The world in which we live is the world of sense-data (more generally speaking, the world of phenomenological objects—the present author’s note), whereas the world we talk about is the world of physical objects. (Wittgenstein, Lectures 1930-1932 in Cambridge, p. 82)
Page41 But what does it mean to be guided by a rule? For Wittgenstein, this activity became one of the most important problems in his later philosophy, perhaps the most important of all. In another place, in a major section of Philosophical Investigations—namely, Part I, sections 143 to 242—he discusses this issue, and this part has come to be known as Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following.
Page42 I believe that Wittgenstein’s question about rule-following is not so much the worry of a skeptic about whether he is correctly following the rule, as the bewilderment of a person with reading and writing difficulties as to what rule he is following in acting.
Page54 According to Wittgenstein, the relation between an inner experience and its public expression is not epistemological (for example, demonstrative), but semantic.
Page63~64 Wittgenstein’s way of studying mathematics is unique and entirely out of step with other investigators of the time, because he had a deeply rooted conviction that one cannot speak about the semantics of a language in any language, that is, speak about the relation of this language to reality. In contemporary logicians’ jargon, this made any idea of model theory an obnoxious thing to him, …
Page66 It will not work to take logic as the foundation of mathematics, and it fully shows this: the persuasiveness of a logical proof rises and falls with its geometrical persuasiveness. (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Part 3, section 43)
Page73 Wittgenstein regarded the formulation of theories as a huge mistake.
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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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