WITTGENSTEIN'S 'TRACTATUS'

[Readers will notice some overlap in this essay with my pieces on Russell, Wittgenstein and Linguistic Analysis and The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. I anticipate these three essays will at some point merge.]

Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) fought World War I as an Austrian soldier. At odd moments he scribbled philosophy into notebooks. The result was his Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, a work of less than 100 pages. It was published first in German in 1921.

In 1922 C.K. Ogden translated the work into English. In English we know Wittgenstein's book as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 2001 this is perhaps the best known work of 20th century academic philosophy.

What was the Tractatus about?

The Tractatus was a series of logical propositions (sentences that have to be true or false) about logic and the world.

Now I must confess here that, though I have struggled to understand the Tractatus, a difficult and hermetic work, I am far from an expert. Fortunately, experts familiar with Wittgenstein's thinking have come to the fore. They have expanded on Wittgenstein's gnomic utterances in several commentaries. And the whole has been re-translated in recent years.

No, my take on the Tractatus is, that though it is considered very important in 20th century philosophy, and was very influential on 20th century philosophical thought . . . well, it is really important only for those reasons. Except for one or two interesting ideas, in itself it isn't very important.

I understand that this may seem an arrogant position to take, but please bear with me. (Incidentally, I am not the only person to take this view.)

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought for some years that he had solved all the problems of philosophy that were outstanding in his day. Today, no one agrees. Even Wittgenstein later changed his mind. After 1931 he spent the rest of his life trying to correct serious errors he felt he had made in the Tractatus. The chief result was his posthumous book Philosophical Investigations (1953).

# # #

The Tractatus is screwed up for many reasons.

One of the main ones is the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Like most philosophers of his time Wittgenstein accepted this dichotomy.

What is the analytic-synthetic dichotomy (hereafter known for short as the ASD)?

The first traces of the ASD appear in the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 B.C.E.). Aristotle believed that some truths are, as we would say today, self-evident. That is, these truths are obviously true.

Why? Because the sentences they are in are obviously true. And how do we know? By analyzing what the words in the sentences mean.

(By the way, if a sentence in modern logic must be true or false, it is known as a proposition.)

So Aristotle believed that some sentences or propositions can be known to be true and certain by analyzing their words. And therefore throughout his works Aristotle spends much time analyzing what people of his time meant by certain words.

But Aristotle also used another method of arguing about the truth of things.

# # #

Sometimes Aristotle would tell the reader not what he thought certain words meant, but what he had observed. That is, Aristotle had gone out into the world and observed, for example, animals. Then he related to his readers what he had found out. Thus Aristotle showed a belief in observation to find out truth.

But analyzing words, on the one hand, and studying the facts of reality on the other, are two different methods of finding out truth. Thus Aristotle showed that he was aware to some degree of two methods of finding out truth.

Although Aristotle's writings show that he was aware in some sense that one cannot find out the truth of all things by merely analyzing the words in which their propositions are cast, and that one must sometimes go out and study nature, it was German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1824) who was the first philosopher to state this explicitly.

Kant thus stated the existence of the two kinds of propositions and analyzed their differences. This is the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, that every proposition falls into one of the two kinds. Kant did so well that since his time, nearly all philosophers and logicians have not only accepted the existence of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, but taken it for granted.

In Kant's formulation, the ASD says that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic. Analytic sentences (a sentence in modern logic that must be true or false is known as a proposition; this has nothing to do with dubious offers by young men to young women) are true or false upon analysis: that is, when one looks at the meanings of the words within them, one knows whether they are true or false.

And analytic sentences are not just true or false; they are necessarily true or false (that is, things could not be otherwise). According to the philosophers who believe in the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, logic requires that in all possible worlds, the propositions involved would have the same truth value. Why? Because of the meanings of their individual words.

Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, state facts or untruths about the world which might be different if the facts were different; the truth or falsehood of synthetic propositions cannot be known simply by examining the meanings of the words within them. The only way to tell whether synthetic propositions are true or false is to look at the world -- to examine reality for the evidence which indicates whether the proposition is true or false. An example would be, "Yesterday I bought a red shirt." Only if in fact I bought a red shirt yesterday would that proposition be true. And you can't tell whether it is true unless you examine reality.

Now Wittgenstein, when he wrote the Tractatus, was under the influence of traditional philosophic thinking since Kant. Wittgenstein accepted that some propositions were analytic, some synthetic. He accepted that the truth of some is known a priori (that is, just by looking at the meaning of their terms), the truth of others a posteriori (that is, by looking at the evidence of reality). And he accepted that logic was about tautologies. (Tautologies are true-or-false statements -- that is, propositions -- which, when analyzed as to their meaning, prove themselves trivially true or false. An example would be. "A unicorn is a horse with one horn." The very word "tautology" has a connotation of triviality.)

Because Wittgenstein thought that logic was about trivial tautologies, he accepted that logic told one nothing about the world. The only way, he thought, to find out about the world was to consult reality.

This is the central problem that comes about when one believes in the ASD. If one believes in the ASD one believes that propositions are divided into ones that are true (and certain), but trivial -- i.e., analytic ones; and ones that are uncertain but informative and important -- the synthetic ones.

And this isn't a very desirable state of affairs. For we want certainty about our knowledge, and we want it to be about important states of affairs.

Is there a way to absolutely certain knowledge about important states of affairs?

That is the question that perplexed Immanuel Kant. The Prussian philosopher pondered this matter and finally wrote in his book The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that there was one kind of proposition that was certain and informative about important matters. This kind of proposition Kant called synthetic a priori.

Synthetic a priori propositions were necessarily true and about important matters of metaphysics. They were necessarily true because, if in fact they happened to be true, one could not (Kant thought) conceive of their being false. He could prove that they had to be true.

Synthetic a priori propositions had to be true because (Kant thought) he could prove that they had to be true to explain how we perceive the world. We perceive the world in time and space. Therefore propositions about time and space have to be synthetic a priori.

Kant worked out a whole theory of what he called "categories" (he got the term from Aristotle). The categories structured how human beings perceive reality. They had necessarily to exist (that is, you could discover their existence through reason) because, otherwise, no human being could perceive reality the way in which we do perceive, namely, to take two categories, in time and space. Kant worked out what he thought the categories of our perception were.

(Think of the Kantian categories as filters which structure an onrushing atomic bombardment into sensations, perceptions, and even reflections. Kant seems to have thought of the entire world, both interior and exterior, as atoms in motion. In this he was similar not only to the early Greek atomic philosophers, like Democritus and Leucippus, but to such earlier philosophers as the Englishman Thomas Hobbes.)

Nowadays most philosophers think that Kant was partly right. We do perceive things through various innate filters, structures and "categories," but these are not exactly the ones Kant thought. Nor do they operate quite as Kant imagined. Nor are time and space likely bodily or mental "categories," so much as concepts of organization in which we come to believe and which we eventually use to structure knowledge. (See the work of Piaget.)

A great deal has been discovered since Kant's time about the psychology of perception, especially since the work of Wilhelm Wundt, and this has tended to put Kant's categories in the bin of discarded ideas.

Nevertheless, Kant's idea that there must be some sort of categories to structure our perceptions is exactly right. We do have mechanisms which structure perception and give us a specifically human kind of consciousness.

But I must get back to poor old Wittgenstein and the ideas in his Tractatus.

# # #

I said earlier that Wittgenstein believed that analytic propositions were certain but trivially true (that is, that they gave one no new knowledge). For knowledge, one had to rely on empirical observation. But empirical observation gave one knowledge that might be mistaken; it was not certain.

This, I said, was the ASD.

Okay. Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist philosopher explained the ASD brilliantly in an article called "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail

Last modified: 9:51 AM 27/12/2003