The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (56 page)

The project, then, is to make sense of propositional sense. And this involves saying what is required of things for such sense to be made of them. Wittgenstein’s vision is a result of his execution of this project. The details of the vision need not concern us. Its outline is as follows.
²⁴

Propositional sense can be made of things because
there are ways those things are
. There are facts. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs are configurations of objects. Objects constitute the unanalyzable, inalterable, ungenerable, indestructible substance of the world. These would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been configured differently, not because there had been different objects. Propositional sense-making itself consists of facts. Indeed, propositions are facts, determined by configurations of signs. In the most elementary case the signs stand for objects – they are what Wittgenstein calls
names
– and
the fact that they are configured in the way they are expresses that the corresponding objects are configured in that same way, in other words that the corresponding state of affairs exists. If it does, the proposition is true. If it does not, the proposition is false. In a less elementary case the conventions of language determine that the proposition is true provided that some suitable selection of states of affairs from a given range exists, false otherwise. For example, suppose that
s
₁
and
s
₂
are two states of affairs. Then it is possible to construct a proposition that is true if
s
₁
and
s
₂
both exist or if they both fail to exist, and false if just one of them exists. Equivalently, if
p
₁
and
p
₂
are the two corresponding elementary propositions, then it is possible to construct a proposition that is true if and only if
p
₁
and
p
₂
have the same truth value. At the limit it is possible to construct a proposition that is true whatever the circumstances, and a proposition that is false whatever the circumstances. An example of the former would be a proposition that was true if and only if
p
₁
and
p
₂
either had the same truth value or had different truth values. An example of the latter would be a proposition that was true if and only if
p
₁
and
p
₂
were both true and both false. But Wittgenstein dissociates such unconditionally true or unconditionally false propositions from sense-making. He explicitly says that they are senseless. This is not to deny that they are bona fide propositions, that the true ones really are true and the false ones really are false.
²⁵
In the contrast that Wittgenstein draws, though they are senseless, they are not nonsensical. They are meaningful signs configured in such a way as to be true or false – the true ones being what he understands by logical truths, the false ones being what he understands by logical falsehoods. The point, however, is that they do not express
thoughts
. To have a thought about how things are, or to make propositional sense of things, is, for Wittgenstein, to represent things as being one of the ways that they could be but also one of the ways that they could fail to be. A true thought manages to
be
a true thought only because it runs the risk, so to speak, of being a false thought.
²⁶

Let us relate this vision back to the confusions that bad philosophy engenders. On Wittgenstein’s view, such confusions manifest themselves in the production of pseudo-propositions, such as ‘Time passes at one second per second,’ or, to adapt one of his own examples, ‘The good is more identical than the beautiful’ (4.003). And here we are not dealing with senselessness. We are dealing with nonsense, downright nonsense. But still, ‘downright nonsense’ of a distinctive
kind
– what might be called violations of logical syntax – no? No. A cardinal point of the sign/symbol distinction is precisely to ward us off saying that. Imagine a sign whose sole use hitherto has been as a noun. Suppose it is now used as a verb. We must not say that the original symbol has been put to an improper use.
There is now a new symbol
. Whether any meaning attaches to it or not depends on the circumstances. If no meaning attaches to it, then that is
all there is
to the nonsensicality of the pseudo-proposition in which it occurs. Its nonsensicality really is brute, like the nonsensicality of ‘Frumptiliously quirxaceous phlimps keed’. It is due, as nonsensicality always is due, to sheer lack of meaning, not to possession of inappropriate meaning. Here is Wittgenstein:

The reason why ‘Socrates is identical’ means nothing is that there is no property called ‘identical’. The proposition is nonsensical because we have failed to make an arbitrary determination, and not because the symbol, in itself, would be illegitimate….

… [The proposition] says nothing … [because] we have not given
any adjectival
meaning to the word ‘identical’. For when it appears as a sign for identity, it symbolizes in an entirely different way … therefore the symbols also are entirely different in the two cases. (5.473–5.4733, emphasis in original)

The vision outlined above, whereby propositional sense-making consists in facts, and propositions themselves are facts, reinforces these ideas. Imagine someone who is confused, whose attempts at sense-making misfire, and who produces nonsense as a result. Still this is all a matter of the obtaining of facts. Nothing in what this person says or does can consist in the obtaining of some ‘pseudo-fact’, as it may be an object’s satisfying another object rather than satisfying a property. For nothing of that sort ever does obtain or ever could obtain. So the
only
way in which this person can have produced nonsense is by using signs to which, as so used, ‘he has failed to give a meaning’ (6.53). Insofar as he is being illogical, this can at most be a matter of his not attending to the symbols in his signs. Neither he nor his thinking processes can actually violate any logical laws, any more than anything else can. To quote G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘an
impossible
thought is an impossible
thought
’ (Anscombe (
1971
), p. 163, emphasis in original). Or to quote Wittgenstein himself, ‘thought can never be of anything illogical,
since, if it were, we should have to think illogically’ (3.03). Again: ‘In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic’ (5.4731).
²⁷

4. Logic. Wittgenstein
Contra
Frege and Kant

Logic, for Wittgenstein – as we have just seen – is the province of that which is true (or false) irrespective of which states of affairs exist. This means – again as we have just seen – that a logical truth, such as the truth that it is either raining or not raining, can never, on Wittgenstein’s conception of thinking, be thought.
²⁸
It has no content (cf. 4 and 6.11–6.111). Admittedly, we can prescind from the meanings of our symbols and have genuinely contentful thoughts about logical propositions
qua
combinations of signs, but that is a different matter. We can also, if we so choose, extend the use of the word ‘thought’ to embrace the vacuous relation in which we stand to logical truths, but that is just a question of how we define our terms. The important point, on Wittgenstein’s view, is that logical truths are of a completely different
kind
from non-logical truths. A logically true proposition earns its title of truth by dint of its construction as a proposition, and by dint of that alone, not by dint of any relation in which it stands to reality.

There is a persistent temptation, whose force is felt as keenly by Wittgenstein as by anyone (see §7), to treat logical truth as though it differed only in degree from non-logical truth, as though it were just a matter of utmost generality. Frege can be seen as having succumbed to this
temptation. Although he distinguished carefully between the jurisdiction of the laws of logic, which he took to be truth, and the jurisdiction of the laws of nature, which he took to be what occurs in space and time (see §6 of the previous chapter), still he saw the two jurisdictions as broadly analogous. And when he contrasted the domain of what is thinkable and therefore subject to the former laws with the domain of what is actual and therefore subject to the latter laws – as indeed he did both of these with the domain of what is intuitable and therefore subject to the laws of geometry – he did so by treating them simply as wider or narrower domains and by calling the first ‘the widest domain of all’ (Frege (
1980
), §14). Thus just as physicists study the function that is represented in English by the expression ‘the resultant of’ – a function which, when applied to two forces as input, yields a force as output – so too, on Frege’s view, logicians study the function that is represented in English by the conjunct ‘unless’ – a function which, when applied to two truth values as input, yields a truth value as output.

Wittgenstein recoils from all of this.
²⁹
Here are three pertinent quotations:

[When a] logical proposition acquires all the characteristics of a proposition of natural science … this is a sure sign that it has been construed wrongly. (6.111)

The mark of a logical proposition is
not
general validity.

To be general means no more than to be accidentally valid for all things. (6.1231, emphasis in original)

My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ [such as ‘unless’] are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the
logic
of facts. (4.0312, emphasis in original; cf. 5.4–5.42)
³⁰

One way to grasp Wittgenstein’s conception of these matters is as follows. We can recognize various different kinds of possibility, some strictly subsumed by others. Thus whatever is economically possible is technologically possible, but not vice versa; whatever is technologically possible is physically possible, but not vice versa; and similarly in other cases. These different kinds of possibility can be pictured as a series of concentric circles, in which larger circles include possibilities that smaller circles exclude. It is in these terms, very often, that we indicate what a given kind of possibility excludes, or at least some of what it excludes: we say that certain things are not possibilities of that kind, by first identifying them as possibilities
of some more inclusive kind. Thus a politician may say, adverting to what is technologically possible, ‘There are
some
ways of improving the safety of our railways that are unaffordable.’ A botanist may say, adverting to what is physically possible, ‘There are
some
temperatures below which plant life is unsustainable.’ (The politician is not vindicated by the technological impossibility of a completely fail-safe automated signalling system, nor the botanist by the impossibility of any temperature below absolute zero.) Now logical possibility subsumes all the rest.
³¹
But this means that it differs from the others in a way that is very radical indeed. It is not just another circle in the space we are considering. We cannot say, except as a kind of joke, that logical possibility excludes possibilities of such and such another kind, such as the ‘illogical’ possibility that it is neither raining nor not raining. To repeat, logical possibility is not just another circle in the space we are considering. It
is
the space we are considering.
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This is not to deny that, even in the case of logical possibility, there are relevant divisions that we can recognize. For instance, and most notably, we can step up a level, talk about language, and distinguish between those combinations of signs that do represent logical possibilities and those combinations of signs that do not (cf. p. 3). But that of course is still not to say that logical possibility excludes any other possibilities.
³³

It follows from all of this that there is a good sense in which logical possibility is the
only
possibility (see the 6.3s, esp. 6.37 and 6.375). It is the only absolute possibility. The others are relative. They are parasitic on it. Thus what is physically possible is what is logically compatible with the laws of physics, where these are just highly general truths about how the world happens, logically, to be.

Does it also follow from all of this that logic sets no limits to reality? That depends on how ‘limits’ are understood. Logic precisely does set limits to reality in the sense that it displays reality’s
essential features
: it displays
how reality must be. It does not set limits to reality in the sense of imposing
limitations
on reality.
³⁴
Logical possibility excludes nothing. For it excludes nothing that can be thought, nothing of which propositional sense can be made. And we cannot regard what can be
thought
as excluding anything, for reasons encapsulated in the Limit Argument. Wittgenstein gives a version of this argument in the Preface to his book. He writes: