Philosophical Investigations 9 2 April 1986 ISSN 0190-0536 $2.50

Frege and The Picture Theory: A Reply to Guy Stock

Bernard Harrison, University of Sussex

I think that in one way Guy Stock is quite correct. So let me begin with the mea culpa part of this reply. Stock is right to point out that the early Wittgenstein distinguishes sharply between propositions and names, and that the ground of the distinction is supposed to be that propositions possess assertoric force: that a proposition, in Stock’s words, “points reality in the direction of truth”. This, Stock’s central point, is conclusively borne out by Tractatus 4.022:

. . . A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.

This and other related remarks certainly commit Wittgenstein to a rejection of one element of Frege’s philosophy of language: the doctrine that a proposition is a compound name designating the True or the False.

The words of mine which Stock quotes can certainly be taken as implying a denial of 4.022. They suggest that a proposition about Lake Como, for example, has as little assertoric force - as little tendency to say anything - as a picture of Lake Como. I certainly did not intend the words to suggest a thesis which I have myself argued against elsewhere’ (and which I think I knew better at the time than to attribute to Wittgenstein) - but the fact remains that they do. Had the point been raised before publication I should have changed the wording of the paragraph or added a caveat.

So much in the way of public retraction of error. On now to self-extenuation and apologia, since they will, as we shall see, raise some interesting questions.

First, the line of exegesis I was pursuing in the passage Stock 1. Bernard Harrison, “Meaning and Mental Images,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. LXIII (1962-63) 237-250.

134

Bernard Harrison 135

quotes, though certainly misleading in the way he suggests, is not without textual foundation. Consider the well-known stick figures of Notebooks 1914-1916 (29.9.14).

: If the right-hand figure in this picture represents the man A, and the left-hand one stands for the man B, then the whole might assert, e.g.: “A is fencing “RX with B.” The proposition in picture-

writing can be true and false. It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case.

”

At the end of this day’s entry. Wittgenstein remarks:

This is still very much on the surface, but we are on good ground.

The picture of the boxer in the footnote to Investigations 1.22, which “can be used to tell someone how he should stand, should hold himself. . . ,” does, now, seem rather reminiscent of the stick figures. And in the 29.9.14 Notebooks entry Wittgenstein does seem to be sketching very much the view Stock regards as wholly alien to the Tractatus: the view according to which, in Stock’s words, “the ‘sense’ or unasserted content” of a propositional picture “can be thought or understood (‘read off from the propositional sign) quite independently of any act of assertion, denial, doubt, questioning, etc. ”.

It is open to Stock, of course, to argue that Wittgenstein, by the time he drafted the final version of the Tractatus, no longer regarded the entry of 29.9.14 as “on good ground”. But the entry of29.9.14 has too many echoes in the Tractatus for that move to work. At 2.22-2.221, for instance, the sense of a (propositional) picture is equated with its pictorial form, and declared independent of truth and falsity.

2.22 What a picture represents it represents independently of truth

2.221 What a picture represents is its sense. and falsity, by means of its pictorial form.

Again, consider 4.024:

4.024 To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true. (One can understand it, therefore, without knowing whether it is true.) It is understood by anyone who understands its constituents.

The gist of this is surely that “the ‘sense’ or unasserted content” of a

136 Philosophical Investigations propositional picture can indeed be “thought or understood” quite independently of whether the proposition concerned is true or not, and thus, presumably “independently of any act of assertion, . . .”; and that the sense of a proposition can indeed be ‘read off (my phrase, objected to by Stock) from “its constituents”: that is, from the elements of the propositional sign.

If we grant this, and at the same time grant, as I did earlier, the essential justice of Stock’s central point, then of course the question arises whether Wittgenstein contradicted himself in the Tractatus (between 4.002 and 4.024, for instance) and misrepresented his earlier views at Investigations I. 22.

In fact, I think, he did neither. 4.022 is inconsistent with one rather peripheral element of Frege’s thought, the doctrine that sentences are compound names. By contrast, at 4.024, 2.11-2.221 and elsewhere, Wittgenstein adopts and makes central to his own thought a far more important Fregean doctrine which is quite independent of Frege’s identification of sentences with names: the doctrine that what a proposition expresses - a thought - does not ‘have being by being true’.2 Frege’s reason for stressing the priority of thoughts to considerations of truth and falsity is, in the first instance, that the opposite view seems to make is impossible to understand the possibility of false assertion.

If a thought has being by being true, then the expression ‘false thought’ is just as contradictory, as ‘thought that has no being’.3

This argument, however, connects immediately with Frege’s claim, also echoed by Wittgenstein, at 4.026-4.03 for instance, that the senses of propositional signs must be public and accessible in common to all speakers.

. . . it must be possible to put a question to which the true answer is negative. The content of such a question is, in my terminology, a thought. It must be possible for several people who hear the same interrogative sentence to grasp the same sense and recognise the falsity of it.4

The words of mine to which Stock takes exception are extracted

2. Gottlob Frege “Negation”, in Logical Investigations, ed. P. T. Geach, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1978), 31. 3. Ibid. 4. Frege, op. cit . , 36.

Bernard Harrison 137 from a passage in which I claim continuity between Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s views on precisely this point. It is perhaps because my attention focussed too narrowly on this issue that I failed to notice the implicit denial of assertoric force to the propositional picture to which Stock rightly objects. Elsewhere in that section, in fact, I speak (p. 216) of determining the sense of a proposition as ‘grasping what a proposition asserts’. Be that as it may, however, there seems nothing contradictory in holding both (1) that propositions (or propositional pictures) posses assertoric force, and (2) that the sense of a proposition (what it asserts) can be grasped independently of, and prior to, (a) any determination of its truth or falsity, and (b) any affirmation or denial of its actual truth as uttered in a specific context. According to the interpretation I took myself to be proposing in my book, and would in any event wish to defend here, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus held just that combi- nation of views.

What about Investigations 1.22 and the associated footnote? To my mind Stock fails to distinguish with sufficient care between assertion considered as something propositions do, and affirmation and denial considered as things speakers do: as speech acts, in other words. If we bear this distinction in mind, we shall not find it difficult to distinguish the doctrine (call it Doctrine A) that grasping the sense of a proposition (what it asserts in the first of the two senses just distinguished) is independent of, and logically prior to, affirmation, denial and the assignment of truth values, from the doctrine (call it Doctrine B) that assertion (this time in the second, speech-act sense of the term) consists psychologically of two stages, a stage at which the speaker merely entertains the proposition and a stage at which he assigns it the truth-value true.

Frege did not distinguish very sharply between Doctrine A and Doctrine B. In ‘Negation’ he is certainly concerned to defend doctrine A, but at times he states it, in terms of ‘acts’, in a way which powerfully suggests Doctrine B:

The very nature of a question demands a separation between the acts of grasping a sense and of j ~ d g i n g . ~

Wittgenstein’s target in Investigations 1.22, now, seems to be Doctrine B.

5. Ibid., 33.

138 Philosophical Investigations

It is only a mistake [to use an assertion sign] if one thinks that the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting (assign- ing the truth-value or something of the kind), and that in performing these actions we follow the propositional sign roughly as we sing from the musical score. Reading the written sentence loud or soft is indeed comparable with singing from a musical score, but ‘memifig’ (thinking) the sentence that is read is not.

The passage belongs, in fact, to the attack on psychologistic and platonizing theories of what it is to ‘mean’ or ‘intend’ something which constitutes a major theme of the first part of the Znvestiga- tions. It simply has no bearing on Doctrine A; but it is Doctrine A, and not Doctrine B, which I claim Wittgenstein took over from Frege and made central to the Tractatus; and which provided the main motivation for the picture theory.

Does Doctrine A play any role in the Investigations? I think it does, though here again I find myself partially in agreement with Stock. Stock is certainly right to claim that the Tractatus makes a sharp break with some of the more platonizing features of Frege’s thought: that the sense of a proposition, in the Tractatus, is not to be construed as a “‘third-realm’ entity” on the lines of a Fregean ‘thought’, and that

. . . it is only possible on occasions to query, doubt, suspend judgment [on], affirm, negate or, in general, use as a base for truth operations, something in the dateable constructing of which the existence, or non-existence, of a state of affairs has already been represented.

I think related things could be said of the Investigations. My concern, however, is with just how far, in either work, sense, or meaning, can be construed as a matter of dateable events. Something has to be said about how ‘the existence, or non-existence, of a state of affairs’ can be ‘represented in’ the ‘dateable constructing’ of anything. In the Tractatus the answer has to do with the ‘logical form’ of the propositional sign. The notion ‘logical form’ certainly has a platonizing ring to it, and an incautious reader adrift in the 3’s might even find grounds for doubting Stock’s essentially correct claim that Frege’s Platonism has been banished from the Tractatus:

3 3.1

A logical picture of facts is a thought. In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses.

What banishes Platonism from the Tractatus is, of course, the

Bernard Harrison 139

connection Wittgenstein forges, between the notion of logical form and that of the ‘logical-syntactical employment’ (in terms of the later philosophy, the use) of the propositional sign.

3.327 A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken

But although the ‘logical-syntactical employment’ of a sign is not a “‘third-realm’ entity,” it is still not something dateable, in the sense in which the actual production of an assertion by a speaker is something dateable. The whole distinction between signs and symbols in the Tractatus turns on this issue, and points towards the notion of use deployed in the later work, thus:

together with its logical-syntactical employment.

3.32 A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol. 3.321 So one and the same sign (written or spoken. etc.) can be

common to two different symbols - in which case they will signify in different ways.

3.326 In order to recognise a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense.

Grasping a sense (a ‘logical-syntactical employment, ’ a logical form) is in the Tractatus, then, prior to and independent of affirmation, denial and the assignment of truth values, because the latter concern the deployment of signs in discourse; whereas sense attaches to a sign only insofar as it is the expression or perceptible mark of a symbol. And I think a related treatment of sense as prior to affirmation and denial can be found throughout the Investiga- tions. 1.47 offers a case in point.

If it had been laid down that the visual image of a tree was to be called “composite” if one saw not just a single trunk, but also branches, then the question “Is the visual image of this tree simple or composite?” and the question “What are its simple component parts?” would have a clear sense - a clear use.

What is ‘laid down’ in this case is prior to and independent of what is (truly or falsely) affirmed in either case, because it is that which determines what, precisely, is being affirmed in either case. It performs, in other words, exactly the same role as sense (logical form, logical-syntactical employment) in the Tractatus.

Department of Philosophy University of Sussex Stanmer Brighton