Page 559 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most original and influential philosopher of the twentieth century, took up philosophy as a vocation in 1911, having first stud- ied engineering. His choice was prompted by interest in the philosophy of mathematics, a subject on which he lectured and wrote extensively until the end of his life. He also wrote extensively, over long periods, on philosophy of mind, epistemology, and other areas. This article concentrates on his philosophy of language. No area in Wittgenstein's philosophy can be called the foundation, or core, of all the rest. There are many mutual dependencies. His philosophy of language, for example, cannot get started without the proper epistemology—one that can only be under- stood completely in the light of the resultant view of language. But in Wittgenstein's treatment of language there are keys to much of the rest.
1. The Influence of Frege and Russell on Wittgenstein's Early Work
In his first years in philosophy, Wittgenstein was greatly influenced by ideas of Gottlob Frege and Ber- trand Russell, changing earlier Schopenhauer- inspired views. (On choosing philosophy, he visited Frege, who directed him to Cambridge to study with Russell.) Two leading ideas of Frege and Russell were fundamental to Wittgenstein's early views, as epitomized in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (com- pleted in 1918), although they also remained impor- tant in his later work: the idea of 'logical form' and the idea of an Ideal' language.
1.1 Logical Form
The idea of'logical form,' and relatedly 'logical analy- sis,' is roughly this: for each meaningful proposition (one that actually says something in particular to be so), or thought (one that is actually of things being in some definite way), or any proper component of these, there is a unique true logical form which it really has— a way that is constructed out of some unique stock of constituents, where the rules by which it is thus constructed show the contribution each constituent makes to what the whole says, and to what it requires for truth. Logical form may be discovered by thoroughgoing logical analysis which involves, for each bit of an expression, examining the systematic effect of its presence or absence on the conditions of which the whole would be true. Wittgenstein extended these ideas by arguing that a fully analyzed, simple proposition, if it is meaningful, will picture a possible state of affairs with which it shares a form, and also
that all complex meaningful propositions are truth- functions of simple 'atomic' propositions. The para- digm for a successful search for logical form was taken to be Russell's analysis of sentences containing defi- nite descriptions (in Russell 1905), which became a sort of oblique manifesto for those who thought discovering such form to be the main business of philosophy.
1.2 An Ideal Language
The other leading idea, strongly promoted by Frege* was that of an ideal language 'suitable for scientific purposes.' Such a language would, first, be totally without ambiguity. So it would never call for dis- ambiguation. What this seems to mean is: the question whether some bit of it is to be understood in this way or that could never arise as a question to be resolved by some fact outside of the language itself. Any such question would be decided uniquely and effectively by the properties already conferred on the language's bits in setting it up, or in specifying which language it is; all this while for any bit, since it has a semantics, there is such a thing as 'the way in which it is to be understood.' (One might see in this Frege's fondness for tertium non datur elevated to a creed.)
So an ideal language is a sort of self-propelled linguistic perpetual motion machine: everything it does, it does quite independently of outside help, or of any surroundings in which it might occur. If P is one of its predicates, and V an arbitrary item, then P is true of V or it is not, with no thanks to us, or to anyone; and quite apart from anyone's reactions to P. That is the sort of meaning conferred on P by its place in the ideal language; and it is what having a proper meaning would look like.
One might regard such an ideal language as a 'language of thought(s),' provided one understands that in an appropriately Fregean, nonpsychologistic way. The point is not that the language is realized in the brain, though in fact Frege sometimes seems committed to that too (see Frege 1918: 26). The point is this: consider the maximally expressive ideal lan- guage that it is humanly possible to construct, or to grasp. Then each thought that we can think, each thing that we can state, will be said by exactly one item in that language, which, conversely, will say nothing but that. (Thoughts here are logical, not psychological, objects; individuated by the situations of which they would be true.) Since an ideal language is completely perspicuous, the item will reveal what the structure and essence of that thought really is.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig C. Travis
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
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