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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
suggested that philosophical problems would be solved if the language people
used was more precise, and limited to statements for which there could be
evidence.
In the opening statement of
Tractatus (1921), he identifies the world
with the sum of true propositions: ‘The world is all that is the case.’, but
he has to acknowledge that there are therefore certain things of which one
cannot speak. One of these is the subject self (‘The
subject does not belong to the world; rather it is a limit of the world.’)
another is the mystical sense of the world as a whole.
Whatever cannot be shown to correspond
to some observable reality, cannot be
meaningfully spoken about. Wittgenstein’s early approach to language
presented it as a precise but narrowly defined tool for describing the
phenomenal world.
His ideas were taken up by the 'Vienna
Circle', a group of philosophers who met in that city during the 1920s and
30s. The approach they took is generally known as Logical Positivism.
Broadly, it claims that:
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Metaphysics and theology
are literally 'meaningless' - since they are neither matters of logic
(and therefore true by definition - a priori) nor provable by
empirical evidence.
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Analytic propositions
tell us nothing about the world. They are true by definition, and
therefore tautologies. They include the statements of logic and
mathematics.
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Synthetic propositions
are dependent upon evidence. Therefore there can be no necessary
synthetic propositions.
Maurice
Schlick, argued
that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. This
became known as the ‘verification principle’.
Logical Positivism was promoted by the
British philosopher A J Ayer (1910-1989). In Language, Truth and Logic
(1936), he asks ‘What can philosophy do?’ His answer is that it certainly
cannot tell us the nature of reality as such; for that, we have to rely upon
the evidence of our senses. Philosophy cannot actually give new information
about anything, but its task is analysis and clarification.
Ayer set out two forms of what can be
called the verification principle. They are:
1.
(a strong form) ‘a
proposition is said to be verifiable in the strong sense if the term, if and
only if its truth could be conclusively established in experience.’
2.
(a weaker form) ‘if
it is possible for experience to render it probable’ or ‘some possible sense
experience would be relevant to the determination of its truth or
falsehood.’
Other statements can have meaning, but
Ayer is concerned with statements which have ‘factual meaning’ - in
other words, if experience is not relevant to the truth or falsity of a
statement, then that statement does not have factual meaning.
By the 1930’s Wittgenstein (who, in the
earlier phase of his work had espoused this radically
reductionist approach to language) broadened his view, and accepted
that language could take on different functions, of which straight
description of phenomena was only one.
In his later work, Wittgenstein
recognised that expressing values and emotions,
giving orders and making requests, were all valid uses of language.
His key idea for the later period: that
the meaning of language is found in its use.
Just as there are many different
activities that are all called ‘games’, although they have little physically
in common with one another, so there were all different 'language games'. In
other words, language was no longer just ‘picturing’ reality, but found its
meaning in its many different uses to which it was put.
To know the meaning of a statement, you
have to see it is its context and understand what it is intended to achieve.
The Logical Positivists had hoped to
find a way of making language simple, transparent and ‘scientific’. They
could only do that my restricting its valid use.
But language cannot be simple or
transparent, because:
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