Unearthing the sense
In neither period is the sense something to be discovered or unearthed by philosophy. It is not some timeless, abstract thought that has to be grasped in a ‘non-psychological sense’. Nor to know the sense of a sentence do we have to have to have some ‘logical experience’ in order to grasp the indefinables of logic. Some of the negative arguments leading to the postulation that there is a GFP are targeted at just those assumptions. There are no representatives of the logic of facts (TLP 4.0312) with the only indefinables being the simple signs that stand for objects. These do not need to be discovered in order for us to express a sense because as far as they are the ‘logical co-ordinates’ of a proposition, any proposition we understand already involves them. Knowing how our signs symbolize means logical syntax can ‘go without saying’ (TLP 3.334). Philosophy can only be said to ‘find’ or ‘discover’ these things in terms of a process leading to them, by analysing what is already there.
Here there is no such thing as the sense of the sentence- they are not part of the totality of facts. The ‘sense’ just is what is given as answer to a request for the sense of sentence and philosophy is characterized by the kind of answer it gives. He says in PI 108:
We are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not about some non-spatial, non-temporal chimera [...Only it is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways]
For the Investigations it means looking at language as part of a language-game. However, this is perfectly apt for the Tractatus as well (or at least what it aims at). There is no ‘non-psychological sense’ to be grasped- there is only language in use- but we lay the sense out in a non-psychological way. Whilst we understand a proposition individually, philosophy clarifies the thought from the perspective of the ‘metaphysical subject’ (the non-psychological self) (TLP 5.641). As such, early and late, philosophy is marked by the how and not by the what. What then marks out his view of laying out language-games as better is that it is a better how for revealing the what (the sense of our ordinary propositions).
This is important to note as McGinn[1] talks about a change in the ‘object of investigation’ between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later works. She correctly points out Russell’s mistake in the introduction to the Tractatus when he says “he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language”[2]. However, she then goes on to say that whilst the earlier Wittgenstein was investigating the properties of an idealized language or construct, he was later interested in the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language. He goes from looking at a system of representation simpliciter, to concrete, language-in-use. I find this misleading. If she simply means that he had earlier held an idealized view of language, and that he was mistaken that this view held good of ordinary language, I agree. However, what she actually says is that this was the ‘object’ of investigation. He laid out the rules of an idealized language and only held that ordinary language works this way because it somehow must do. However, I think we misunderstand the arguments against the GFP if we say the Tractatus takes this line. It is because he earlier aimed at elucidating the logic involved in understanding concrete language-in-use, but misinterpreted what this involved, that his earlier view was rejected.
The Tractatus doesn’t look at the logic of an ideal language or any language at all. It looks at what can be said about logic in advance before one looks at the logic of a language. It does tell us that we can analyse any proposition into logically innocent propositions with no logical constants and ‘names’ in immediate combination. However, that is all that can be said a priori (TLP 5.55) and as such we are not given any examples of objects or elementary propositions. An ‘object’, for example, is a ‘formal concept’ and so we don’t know what one is until we are shown what it is used to symbolize (c.f. TLP 4.1272), and thus we don’t have an idea what would be in an ideal language. Finding out information like this would belong to the application of logic (TLP 5.557) and thus observing how signs are used with sense (TLP 3.326). For this, we have to look to ordinary language.
As such, even if the interest was in an idealized language the following is true: “He was working inside the structure of actual language... [in] trying to establish the limits of any possible language.”[3] However, a so-called ideal language is only ideal as an end-point and clarification of how we use our words with sense. Now of course, he doesn’t deal with ordinary language in the Tractatus itself and is just dealing with the logic of any representation whatsoever. However, the point being that logic doesn’t have any content of its own and we need to see the logic inherent in ordinary language.
Misdirection or mistake?
If philosophy is an activity, and is designed to fulfil a particular purpose, then the worst can be said is that it fails to meet that purpose. It cannot be shown to be ‘false’ because it didn’t state a ‘truth’ in the first place. It is at worst, useless. The GFP was meant to be shown in how we our propositions with sense but if we follow Wittgenstein’s advice to look at the varied contexts of their use, it is hard to see how their meaning could be made perspicuous in the way he envisaged. As such, in one sense my criticism will amount to no more than that. On the other hand, something more informative can be said about why he went wrong. We can see why Wittgenstein’s investigation took the turn it did from a misleading account- the Augustinian picture- of how we learn in what sense an expression is being used. By looking at how language is learned without first paying attention to the kind of thing communicated, led him to have a particular pre-theoretical conception of what a particular thought having content consists in. In the end, this conception plays no formal role in a philosophical elucidation of how sentences have sense or in what sense a particular sentence is used. However, i) it is this very way of looking at ‘how things stand’ that the GFP is meant to justify and ii) makes us think that an analysis as proposed in the Tractatus is possible. This is so because it gives us an idea of the ‘what’ (what is understood when we use the sentence with sense) that the ‘how’ of the GFP (the way it can elucidate that sense) is addressed.[1] (McGinn, 2006)
[2] (Russell, 1922/2001) pp. ix-x
[3] (Pears, Wittgenstein, 1971) p.49
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