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Wittgensteins Tractatus Lecture 1

1. Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was largely composed while itsauthor served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. He

had studied engineering at Manchester before becoming interested in thefoundations of mathematics and thence in more general philosophical issues.

He visited Frege upon whose advice he came to study with Russell inCambridge from 1911 to 1913. The book itself may be considered, in part, as

a contribution to a variety of debates with those philosophers.

2. Prominent among these was a dispute between Russell and Fregeconcerning names. Frege had a two-step view of the relationship betweennames and their referents. For him, a name had a sense that acted as acognitive intermediary between the name and the world. This, he thought,was shown by the fact that Hesperus [i.e. the Evening Star] is Phosphorus

[i.e. the Morning Star] expresses a genuine item of knowledge, whereasHesperus is Hesperus does not. If there were nothing more to the meaningof the names Hesperus and Phosphorus than the planet they denote, then

the two sentences would have identical content and hence express the samepiece of knowledge.

3. Frege was thus driven to say that associated with the name Hesperus is asense, that is, a mode of presentation of the object it denotes (the planetVenus). It is a mistake to think, as Kripke did (though see Naming andNecessity n4), that this sense is identical with some particular definite

description (The brightest celestial body apart from the sun & moon, orsomething) or cluster of definite descriptions. That would controvert the two-step picture, relegating the sense entirely to the realm of language; whereassense is meant to supply a connection between names and the things thatthey name.

4. Furthermore Frege gave an argument in The Thought to show that senses

are neither denizens of the physical world nor of the purely mental realm ofideas, emotions and so on. They could not be the former because they didnot exist at any particular spatiotemporal location. And they could not be thelatter because they were in principle accessible to anybody. Only I, Frege

thought, can feel my pain; whereas both you and I can mean the same thingby Hesperus, that is, grasp the same sense. Frege expressed this by saying

that senses occupied a third realm of completely objective but also non-physical items.

5. Russell held a contrary one-step view of denoting: names had unmediated

reference to things. That Hesperus is Phosphorus has a different cognitivevalue from Hesperus is Hesperus shows only that Hesperus andPhosphorus arent genuine names. The fact that they apparently function asnames in English shows only that English stands in need of a philosophicalanalysis that reveals the true names. The analysis will replace English nameswith definite descriptions, and the latter can be eliminated in Russells way(see On Denoting).

6. Wittgenstein agreed with Russell on this (Tractatus 3.2-3.221). For him, as for

Russell, genuine names do not have a sense. This view raises two difficulties.The first, which is Freges argument concerning Hesperus and Phosphorus

(s2), could be finessed by denying that those are genuine names. The seconddifficulty is the occurrence of names in modal contexts. We can meaningfully

say that Socrates might not have existed; but on Russells view, if A is a

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genuine name, then we cannot say truly that A might not have existed. In that

case it would make sense to say A does not exist. This sentence describesa situation in which A has no reference, and hence, for Russell, no meaning.

But in describing such a situation by saying A does not exist, we are clearlypresupposing that A does have meaning, for we are using that expression.

(This was plainly not a problem for Frege. For him, a names lacking areferent would not deprive it of meaning. It would still have a sense).

7. So on the Russell/Wittgenstein view, what is named by a genuine namecannot be said to exist contingently. This raises a problem regarding thenature of what is named by genuine names, that is, a problem concerning thefundamental objects of the universe. Whatever they are, they must be utterlyunlike the things that are named by the apparent names of English, things likeSocrates or Paris. It is clear that thesethings might not have been existed;

the same is true of any (physical) object you can think of.

8. Russells answer to this was his identification, in The Philosophy of Logical

Atomism, of genuine objects with sense-data. He thought that if you have aname for an occurrent sense-datum (the red patch in the top left hand cornerof the visual field), the name must refer; it plainly makes no sense to say, of

an occurrent sense-datum, that it does not exist (The green dots present inmy line of sight dont exist). A properly analysed language would be one inwhich all I could do would be to specify my sense-data. And it wouldnt makesense to deny, of any such sense-datum, that it existed, nor to affirm, of any

non-occurrent sense datum, that it might have existed. For Russell, therefore,necessity and possibility (when understood non-epistemically) drop out oflanguage altogether. He held that it is wrong to ascribe necessity or possibilityto closed sentences. And all you mean, when you say x is mortal is possiblytrue is that for somex, x is mortal is true (See Philosophy of Logical

Atomismin his Collected Papers vol. 8, ed. Slater, pp. 222f).

9. Russell, then, argued from his analysis of objects into sense data to theconclusion that there is no sense in which true statements might have beenfalse or in which false ones might have been true. Wittgenstein does notdispute the validity of this argument. But in interpreting him we seem forced to

suppose that he would have contraposed it. He believed that for a sentenceto say anything, it must say something contingent (2.2-2.225, 4.462). That is

because what makes it true that a sentence picks out a particular situation isthat it must pick it out from among other possible situations. Otherwise, thereis nothing in virtue of which the sentence picks outjust that possible situation.So that in a language in which no truths were contingent, we could not point

to any fact in virtue of which a true sentence S picked out a particular factdifferent from that picked out by any other true sentence S. It follows that thegenuine names of a language cannot denote sense-data as Russell thoughtthey did.

10. The general direction of Wittgensteins philosophy is the opposite of that ofRussells. Whereas the latter argued from what he took to be the nature of the

world, to conclusions about language, Wittgenstein moved rather from thepossibility of language to the nature of the world. If language says anything, it

must contain, at some reachable level of analysis, genuine names. And thesenames must barely denote objects, the basic constituents of the world. As far

as the Tractatus is concerned, the precise nature of these objects is a distinctand quite open question.