Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein

"Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, final chapter of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Wittgenstein is known as an Austrian philosopher, but he was first and foremost an engineer. He wasn't classically trained as a philosopher and because of this and his engineer background, he brought a fresh outlook on philosophy and logic; he was not not bound up in the same ideas which had been taught for the last thousand or so years.

Wittgenstein was a contemporary of Russell, Einstein and Freud. The philosophy espoused in the Tractatus was the foundation of the Vienna circle's beliefs - a collection of eminent minds who would meet regularly at the beginning of the 20th century and discuss their attitudes to philosophy, science and mathematics. They were all logical positivists, were great proponents of scientific method and analysis, and rejected metaphysics and the idea of perfect Platonic forms. Incidentally, this gave them some quite robotic ideas about 'beauty' and what made something beautiful; beauty to them was something that is perfectly designed to complete a certain function. If you were to look at that in terms of architecture- out go fancy houses, in come tower blocks.

It was Wittgenstein's training as an engineer could have influenced him to look upon human beings and elements of language as cogs in a machine. He initially thought (before coming pervasively pessimistic of his own life's work) that language could be taken apart and studied in this manner, rather than looking at language as an organic whole. One of his claims was that words in themselves have no intrinsic or therefore metaphysical worth but are merely parts of a 'language game' that all participants agree to play. He likens language to a game because the meaning behind an arbitrary collection of sounds or marks on paper must be agreed upon before they have any worth. A language game can be found at any level - where anyone meets and begins to speak about specific things, they are playing a language game. There is the language game of a certain religion (words like 'rapture' take on a very definite and emotive meaning where to a layperson it might not); the language games contained within actual games (vocabulary within card games, for example, like hit, stick, twist, flop that must be learned to effectively play the game); and so on.

Entire languages themselves are language games at a macro level as stated before - everyone who speaks English is implicitly agreeing to the rules of English; the grammar, the vocabulary, the idioms, etc.

Idioms (such as "It's raining cats and dogs") are another example of a language game - it is a meaningless and nonsensical expression which is given meaning simply by consensus.

Wittgenstein also held a belief that language 'infects' you, and influences you and everyone around you in ways that you don't even realise. Previously it was thought that language is just a transparent medium, a means to an end of purely expressing whatever was in your head. He also believed that reality was bonded by language: that you can't have a idea of something without some means of describing that idea, and that means is language.

George Orwell was clearly greatly influenced and inspired by the above when writing his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four - throughout the book, a dictatorship only known as the Party is constantly screwing around with language, working to transform Standard English in to the pared down 'Newspeak'. A government branch is even dedicated to the destruction of words, where in the aim is for every new edition of the dictionary to be thinner than the last; the idea is if you destroy dangerous or 'rebellious' words, then you destroy the ability to even conceive of rebellious thoughts, or 'thoughtcrime' as it is called in the book. This ties in exactly with what Wittgenstein was saying - if reality and language are inexorable, then you can mould the shape of reality by changing or restricting language.

Another key point in the book is where the Party issues a correction that only the main character Winston seems to notice - all of a sudden a speaker changes mid-sentence from saying 'Oceania is at war with Eurasia' to 'Oceania is at war with East Asia' and it goes on to say that it has always been at war with East Asia; so overwhelming is the propaganda and the complicit response of everyone around him at the rally that Winston begins to doubt his own sanity.

Verification Principle - Freddy Ayer

Freddy Ayer was a logical positivist. He was deeply inspired by the Vienna circle and their wholesale rejection of anything that was not, to put it simply, 'scientific.' He thought that anything that could not be verified in some way or another was meaningless; in his book Language, Truth and Logic he says religious discourse is meaningless as all religious language is non-verifiable quacking of the duck (see below.) To this end, even though he himself was not a religious man, he rejected the staunch atheist claim of 'There is no God' with the same vigour as a fanatical 'There is a God and he loves me' - both cannot possibly be verified, so both are nonsense.

The Verification Principle sorts statements out in to the following:

• Statements that can be verified as provably true (i.e. non-contradictory) e.g. The sky is blue
• Statements that can be verified as definitely false (contradictory) e.g. The sky is green
• Statements that cannot be verified (non-verifiable - gibberish, quacking of a duck) e.g. Tea is nice.

This last one is effectively nonsense, it's just people emoting. And incidentally that's what a journalist should be looking for in a good, solid quote. You don't want someone to write in to your show or newspaper and dispute the truth of a quote - 'Nope, that's not true, I can prove it with logic' - you just need a person's opinion for linguistic 'colour', as Frege might put it.

Ayer also said: "The method of verification IS the truth of a statement." This means that a statement is only as truthful as the means of testing it are reliable. Scientific method has been axiomically established as reliable, so therefore by studying the behaviour of light the sky can be shown to be verifiable blue, and the statement "The sky is blue" has meaning.

The Tractatus

Technically one of the 'shortest' books ever written, consisting of seven one-sentence chapters. Of course, (and we all saw this coming from a mile away when we were assigned to read this for a seminar) the book comes complete with a few thousand miles of footnotes to accompany the complex ideas expressed in each chapter. This has the overall effect of visually breaking each idea down to increasingly less complex bits of information in a sort of logic tree form - 'atoms of thought.'

Here, sans footnotes, is the Tractatus:

1. The world is everything that is the case.

2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

4. The thought is the significant proposition.

5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)

6. The general form of truth-function is: [, , N()]. This is the general form of proposition.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Atomic facts are those which cannot be broken down any further - atoms of thought, as mentioned above. These atoms are all chained together and each object illuminates another - the totality of all of these facts gives you reality, which is the idea expressed in 1. By studying a facts relation to other facts, you can determine which objects are actually true or not true. The existence of an atomic fact is a 'positive fact', and the non-existence is a 'negative fact.'

So essentially Wittgenstein is saying that the universe is made up of things which are true, and things which are not true. The 'negative facts' fill in logical gaps created by propositions such as 'There is nobody on the road.'

He also staunchly believes that you cannot conceive of an object without first relating its existence to other things.