But I’m optimistic – the mood I’d like to record here in
advance – because of the possibility of there being an account of the early Wittgenstein
which reconciles two things. First, the attraction of taking the later
Wittgenstein’s simple mindedness about nonsense to be operating in the TLP and hence ruling out the idea of sly
pointing towards metaphysical insights into or even explanations of the hook up
between language and the world. But second, the sheer eccentricity of its
author offering such a detailed account of language and world if virtually all
of it, bar some framing sentences, is merely a kind of reductio. Is there nothing to be said for thinking, for example,
that what we might mean by a ‘world’ is a totality of facts, of things (where
it is impolite to ask which things) which are the case? And what of the account
of logic developed?
McGinn promises to steer a middle course which accepts
the first point but which offers a view of the TLP as offering some sort of insight into language and logic and
the articulation of a world which goes hand in hand with that. A quick skim of
the first half suggests two concrete ideas from the first ten pages help with
this.
First, there is the idea held dear by the resolute
reading that ‘the early and the later philosophy are united in their rejection
of the very possibility of taking what John McDowell calls ‘a sideways on’
perspective on language’ [ibid: 5-6]. With this idea in play, the baldy
metaphysical tone of the first few sentences of TLP is thought of not as
grounding a view of language as from outside it, nor as the result of a kind of
inference to the best explanation of what the world in itself must really be
like if language is possible, but rather a pithy expression of the most general
way the world is articulated as seen, obviously, from within language. (I want to add: which is to say, from within the limits of sense, which is no qualification at all.)
Second there’s an idea to defuse the traditional view
that simple names stand in relates to enduring metaphysical atoms which is
stated like this at the start:
The concept of a simple object that is correlated with a
name emerges, I want to argue, in the context of this conception of the meaning
of a word as something that we grasp and which explains our ability to
understand the sense of propositions in which the word occurs, without having
their sense explained to us. As both Ishiguro and McGuinness remark, the idea
of the object that is the meaning of a name that emerges in this context does
not correspond in any way to our ordinary notion of particular, concrete
objects that constitute parts of empirical reality. [ibid: 7]
and then rather later thus:
Objects are not necessary existents that endure
through all change, but the meanings of primitive signs in a system for
representing the world in propositions. [ibid: 144]
Thus, Wittgenstein wants us to recognize that our
investigation into how a proposition expresses its sense is directed, not
towards what symbols mean (the object they signify), but towards how they symbolize:
how they are used with a sense. The conception of meaning that dominates
Wittgenstein’s argument for simples now slips into the background and his
logical investigation focuses exclusively on the use of expressions in
propositions with sense. [ibid: 163]
The second move is the sort of thing that might
make the first possible. But whether it is enough to head off what had seemed
an account of how representation is possible, an account itself self-undermined
with desperate acts of pointing, and replace it with mere description, I’m not
sure. Nor whether what results is a kind of philosophical insight.
I have always liked the sketch of a sense of method
in resolute readings – not that one discovers that particular possibilities are
ruled out, since in the preference for talk of limits of sense over
limitations, nothing is exogenously ruled out – but that each reader is invited
to reflect on whether she or he has put in the work to invest meaning in
particular combinations of symbols. I worry that this seems a solipsistic
activity. I also worry that we can no longer say what it was that was achieved:
not for example showing that a private language was impossible since that now
becomes showing that *** *** is impossible. But at least there seems to be a
premiss discharging philosophical method.
McGinn,M. (2007) Elucidating the Tractatus:
Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Logic and Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press
