Getting Behind the Picture?
Reflections on Wittgenstein #2
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein presents a picture of the world. This is to say that the world is a picture; a picture in turn being a thing composed of facts. He goes on to say that such a picture is the most basic access that one has to the world. Anything that would be more basic, say objects themselves, are beyond one’s reach.
This is because anything more basic than a picture of the world would not have truth conditions associated with it, which means that there is nothing that can be said of it, and thus there is nothing for one to know as we can only have knowledge of true things. Wittgenstein’s argument is logical rather than epistemological or phenomenological.
Similar to Kant, Wittgenstein does seem to speak about objects as something which we posit as a result of us knowing something else. In other words, something that must be there in order for us to see the world in the way that we do. While Kant speaks of objects as being the things that must exist for there to be phenomena, Wittgenstein posits objects as the logical components that construct the facts contained in a picture of the world.
This puts Wittgenstein in a slightly better position than Kant with regard to there being some kind of “objective” world as he arrives at it as a necessary component of logic itself rather than merely phenomenological. However, I still feel that Wittgenstein faces the same metacritique that was leveled at Kant by the likes of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Georg Hamann.
Essentially, the metacritique is this: do the insights gained by analyzing statements about the world really reveal anything about the world? Hamann argues that instead what one gains insight into is not the world but language. The reason that objects ‘act’ a certain way or possess a certain kind of ‘modality’ is due to the word itself and the grammar of the language in which the word is used.
For example, the word ‘red’ is not something that, in the English language, can be predicated of happiness (in such a way to make a truth claim). All that one is able to claim as a result of this statement is that the words ‘happiness’ and ‘red’ are not words that can be put into relationship with one another. It does not reveal anything about the nature of redness or happiness themselves.
To say that a pig cannot fly is not to make a claim about the nature of pigs but rather the nature of our talking about pigs. This is to say more than simply we lack an experience such that one would be able to confirm the truth of the claim. Rather it is to say that the logic of symbols is not the logic of the objects that they stand for.
I believe that the metacritique intuition is true. There is nothing in a symbol that necessitates it having the logical properties as the object that it stands for (this is not to say that they cannot, only that it is possible that they do not). The issue is that a picture, no matter how accurate, is always one removed from any ‘objective’ world and thus is unable to taken at face value.
Wittgenstein claims that truth claims are about the relationship between facts (from a picture) and the actual world. However, if the metacritique can be leveled against Wittgenstein, it is not clear that truth claims can be made as one does not have anything to compare the picture to.
Until next time.