Essay 07

Are we really at Essay 07? We're half-way there, folks! It's hard to believe, and a bit saddening, to be honest. Anyway, this essay is due Thursday, 10/18. The rest of the instructions are as before.

Our discussion of the Philosophical Investigations 1-88 last week revealed the later Wittgenstein abruptly and systematically dismantling the early Wittgenstein. Thus, by way of a summary,

The Picture Theory

Wittgenstein-of-the-Tractatus: The possibility of language being meaningful at all--that is, that it serve to picture presupposes that it and the world be put into a one-to-one relationship which shows, but cannot itself say, the logical structure of both language and the world.

Wittgenstein-of-the-Investigations: Whatever meaning a language may have is exhausted by our use of the language, which by itself may have nothing whatsoever to do with any particular structure of the world or language.

Logical Atomism

Wittgenstein-of-the-Tractatus: The fact that the meaning of a proposition is composed of the meanings of its parts entails that there must be simples in language (meaningful names) and simples in the world (the objects the meaningful names designate).

Wittgenstein-of-the-Investigations: There is no necessary connection between language and the world to bear out compositionality and any presupposition of simples from its presumption--language being entirely contingent on the uses to which we language-users put it inasmuch as it is a tool like any other (and as manifold in use as any tool in our toolbox.)

The Ideal Language

Wittgenstein-of-the-Tractatus: The messy affair that is natural language, whose surface grammar so frequently leads us to philosophical 'puzzles' which are at root merely confusions or bafflements, necessarily presupposes for the very possibility of meaningfulness an underlying logically crystalline language that permits of no such confusions once it has been specified.

Wittgenstein-of-the-Investigations: Languages are (social) games as multitudinous as any games we might play, and since meaning is nothing more than the use to which a given language-game is put, the very notion of a logically ideal language fundamental to them all is as absurd as the idea of a set of rules fundamental to all games.

Analysis

Wittgenstein-of-the-Tractatus: Language can be analyzed (or decomposed, given compositionality, into its constituent meaningful parts) so as to cleanse it of confusion in light of its ideal specification if it is meaningful, and where it cannot be so cleansed, it is meaningless.

Wittgenstein-of-the-Investigations:

60. When I say: "My broom is in the corner",—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed form of the first one.—But why do I call it "further analysed"?—Well, if the broom is there, that surely means that the stick and brush must be there, and in a particular relation to one another; and this was as it were hidden in the sense of the first sentence, and is expressed in the analysed sentence. Then does someone who says that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush, and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?—If we were to ask anyone if he meant this he would probably say that he had not thought specially of the broomstick or specially of the brush at all. And that would be the right answer, for he meant to speak neither of the stick nor of the brush in particular. Suppose that, instead of saying "Bring me the broom", you said "Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it."!—Isn't the answer: "Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?"——Is he going to understand the further analysed sentence better?—This sentence, one might say, achieves the same as the ordinary one, but in a more roundabout way.—Imagine a language-game in which someone is ordered to bring certain objects which are composed of several parts, to move them about, or something else of the kind. And two ways of playing it: in one (a) the composite objects (brooms, chairs, tables, etc.) have names, as in (15); in the other (b) only the parts are given names and the wholes are described by means of them.—In what sense is an order in the second game an analysed form of an order in the first? Does the former lie concealed in the latter, and is it now brought out by analysis?—True, the broom is taken to pieces when one separates broomstick and brush; but does it follow that the order to bring the broom also consists of corresponding parts?

61. "But all the same you will not deny that a particular order in (a) means the same as one in (b); and what would you call the second one, if not an analysed form of the first?"—Certainly I too should say that an order in (a) had the same meaning as one in (b); or, as I expressed it earlier: they achieve the same. And this means that if I were shewn an order in (a) and asked: "Which order in (b) means the same as this?" or again "Which order in (b) does this contradict?" I should give such-and-such an answer. But that is not to say that we have come to a general agreement about the use of the expression "to have the same meaning" or "to achieve the same". For it can be asked in what cases we say: "These are merely two forms of the same game."

62. Suppose for instance that the person who is given the orders in (a) and (b) has to look up a table co-ordinating names and pictures before bringing what is required. Does he do the same when he carries out an order in (a) and the corresponding one in (b)?—Yes and no. You may say: "The point of the two orders is the same". I should say so too.—But it is not everywhere clear what should be called the 'point' of an order. (Similarly one may say of certain objects that they have this or that purpose. The essential thing is that this is a lamp, that it serves to give light;——that it is an ornament to the room, fills an empty space, etc., is not essential. But there is not always a sharp distinction between essential and inessential.)

63. To say, however, that a sentence in (b) is an 'analysed' form of one in (a) readily seduces us into thinking that the former is the more fundamental form; that it alone shews what is meant by the other, and so on. For example, we think: If you have only the unanalysed form you miss the analysis; but if you know the analysed form that gives you everything.—But can I not say that an aspect of the matter is lost on you in the latter case as well as the former?

Well, what is Wittgenstein's argument against analysis in the above passages? Is the argument cogent? That is, do the considerations he raises in the above four paragraphs suffice to refute the project of analysis we learned about in the Tractatus?