Long Post: law of thought and law of reality

[wilderness]

@E. R. Olovetto

I’m going to check out Plauche’s paper. I think that Plauche and Long reach some faulty conclusions at times regarding punishment. I just want to note too that when Reinach and others are talking about “state of affairs”, this is Sachverhalt in German. In early Wittgenstein, “state of affairs” is used, but in later works the term “forms of life” is used.

Do you know why Wittgenstein changed the name? What accuracy may he have been striving for in such a change, for Wittgenstein, to necessarily have to take place?

Also is there a difference between Wittgenstein’s early works compared to his later, generally speaking, and any pitfalls of his works that I may want to take heed of before reading his writings?

@E. R. Olovetto

This is his (later) Philosophical Investigations, if anyone is interested in reading it.

I’ll see if I can download it. I noticed different mechanism to download and I don’t know which one works for my computer. I’ll trial and error it.

thanks.

[E_R_Olovetto]

That is just various file hosts and the PDF is in a ZIP file. I agree with whoever left this review on Amazon, that if you have to get one book on the Tractatus (I have this and a bunch of other things in PDF too), this is the one, Donald Peterson’s Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy: Three Sides of the Mirror. I don’t know why it lists only 1 new over $100. I bought it (seeming brand new) from the 3rd listed used seller’s shop for like $15.

I don’t know what to recommend for analysis of his later work though, besides things that are online. Toulmin and Janik’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna is a good historical background that I read first. Reading Long’s paper on Wittgenstein again is toward the top of my list, so maybe I can make sense of the importance of his philosophy related to ours then.

I think that his major shift (sometime while writing what is known as The Brown Book IIRC) is to abandon the Picture Theory of Meaning. I’ll quote a short passage from Peterson on this after one I just noticed on another translation of Sachverhalte:

Facts are, thankfully, referred to as ‘facts’ (Tatsachen), and the totality of these in the ‘world’ (die Welt). In the ontology facts are analyzed into constituent ‘elementary facts’ (Sachverhalte). Facts can be ‘said’.

Wittgenstein later abandoned this view [The Picture Theory], arguing, essentially, that language describes the world through language-games, rather than through the metaphysical matching of the picture theory.And this lends something to the already easy task of finding fault with and dismissing the picture theory. But the picture theory has great value not because it is correct—which it is not—but because Wittgenstein articulated and developed the details and consequences of such theories of meaning. His work, and subsequent criticism, have made it plain what is the appeal and what are the faults of such a theory, and in particular, they have emphasized that a theory of this sort relies on an internal, and presumably structural, relation between elementary sentence and elementary fact. And in examining, for example, the conceptual basis of cognitive science, we find that, in theories of ‘mental representation’ inspired by the computer model of the mind, the picture theory and its internal relation are not dead.

I don’t know if that is going to clear things up at all. Maybe “forms of life” came about because he goes from talking about how things are in our world to imaginary one’s where things don’t happen the same way, like with the “wood-sellers” cited in Long’s paper. This is related to why you will see me harp on people for saying things like “non-enforceable obligations”, because what does it mean “to be obliged/obligated”? These are the types of things Wittgenstein talks about in PI.

[Conza]

Excellent. [Y]