WHAT OBJECT DOES A FAIRY TALE CREATION SUCH AS A GOLDEN MOUNTAIN SIGNIFY?

21 May WHAT OBJECT DOES A FAIRY TALE CREATION SUCH AS A GOLDEN MOUNTAIN SIGNIFY?

Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein’s teacher and mentor, came up with a famous paradox.

As a mathematician and a philosopher, a logician, he tried to investigate the solving of

problems using statements that were either true or false. Something can’t be both true

and false, can it? Can God exist and not exist? That is called the “rule of the excluded

middle.” Using the “set” logic of a mathematician he constructed this logic puzzle “Who

Shaves Harry the Barber.”

If Harry the barber shaves only those who do not shave themselves, who shaves Harry

the barber?

or

Can the set of all sets that are not members of themselves be a member of itself?

Go to the link on Russell’s Paradox http://www.jimloy.com/logic/russell.htm

Until Bertrand Russell, and from the time of Descartes, the central branch of philosophy

had been epistemology—the study of what we can know. Descartes had searched inside

himself for secure knowledge.

But after Russell, epistemology was displaced by the philosophy of language and the

premise that our words are the lenses through which we access thoughts and the

external world. We cannot “see” the world without them.

And the real significance for philosophy came when Russell transferred the techniques he

had employed in this work to the study of language and then to the perennial problems of

metaphysics: the nature of existence, knowledge, truth, etc. The most famous of his

theories concerns the baldness of the French monarch.

In this sense the relationship is language versus the world. How is it that a series of

letters, say “p-i-p-e,” when placed in appropriate order acquire meaning?

The creed in the early 20th century that was part of a branch of philosophy known as

logical atomism was that all words stand for objects—words mean their objects.

But this view of the link between language and the world raises a number of perplexing

issues. What object does a fairy tale creation such as a golden mountain signify?

Back to Russell’s bald monarch: If we utter, “The King of France is bald.” It is a

perfectly coherent statement. One who didn’t know might believe it to be true. “We are

confused by our language,” Russell believed.

“The king of France is bald” actually masks a complex logical triplet. Its three ingredients

are:

There is a king of France.
There is only one king of France.
Whoever is king of France is bald.

Once this logic is exposed, we can see how this statement makes sense but is false: it is

because the first premise is untrue.

Wittgenstein had come to see the linguistic scrutiny of objects/concepts as of value in

itself. His book, The Tractatus, opens with: “The world is all that is the case” and

concludes with “Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must remain silent.”

For Wittgenstein, a thought is a linguistic picture of reality.

Since language is governed by rules it is essentially public and embedded in practice in

public through rules which have to be interpreted through consensus—that we all agree

on the rules. Otherwise language would not work.

The idea of a “private” language is incoherent even though you can make up your own

language. Since you must create the rules for your own language (all languages are

made-up, that is created over time), you may teach someone how to speak it, but only

through this public consensus.

Therefore, Descartes, by looking inside himself for knowledge sought certainty from the

wrong direction. His proposition, “I think therefore I am” is nothing more that a linguistic

circular statement equal to the “King of France is bald.” From this insight, Wittgenstein

overturned several hundred years of philosophy and emancipated his followers from the

search for rock-bottom certainty.

For Wittgenstein, the aim of philosophy was to disentangle ourselves, to show the fly the

way out of the bottle. To discourage those who stare at objects and feel that they can

somehow penetrate phenomena and reach immaterial core.

Philosophical problems then are puzzles.

Wittgenstein writes that philosophical problems arise because we misunderstand the logic

of language. Our troubles arise when we try to burrow below the surface.

He writes that people say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that

we are all still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the ancient

Greeks. But the people who say that don’t understand why this is and don’t understand

that it is because language, our language, has remained the same and keeps seducing us

into asking the same questions.

And so the theory that meaningful statements have either to be analytic where truth or

falsity can be established by examining the meanings of words—for example: All

triangles have three sides (true by definition) or open to observation by testing, became

known as logical positivism and many logical positivists took the Tractatus as their Bible.

They extracted this principle of verification from the Tractatus and they accepted, as had

Russell, one of Wittgenstein’s core claims: that all proofs and all logical inferences such

as, “if it is raining, it is either raining or it is not raining” are merely tautologies. In other

words they give us no information about the actual world. They are devoid of

substance. They are only about the internal relationship of the statements or equations.

Do you believe Wittgenstein was right, that what cannot be expressed through langauge cannot be thought? In other words, is it possible to think without a word or some compenent of language? Can you think without a language of some kind?