8.6.2005

Wittgenstgein & Russell – Giant pygmies

Reading notes on the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921, 1922, 1961
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, introduction by Bertrand Russell

Walter Stanners

Abstract:     Wittgenstein and Russell both in their different ways showed that they believed that ultimately, there were better things to do with one’s life than study or talk about philosophy. Both were remarkable men. The words of both appear in the English translation of the Tractatus, Russell’s in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s book. This note comments on these words, almost one at a time. The lack of clarity, logic and coherence of both authors raises the puzzling question – in what does greatness lie? Is it in personality, debating skill, membership of a mutually admiring elite? This note discovers nothing of interest or importance in anything actually written between the covers of this book.

Introduction

Wittgenstein and Russell both in their different ways showed that they believed that ultimately, there were better things to do with one’s life than study or talk about philosophy. Both were remarkable men. The words of both appear in the English translation of the Tractatus, Russell’s in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s book. This note comments on these words, almost one at a time. The lack of clarity, logic and coherence of both authors raises the puzzling question – in what does greatness lie? Is it in personality, debating skill, membership of a mutually admiring elite? This note discovers nothing of interest or importance in anything actually written between the covers of this book. Oddly, at the moment of writing, I hear that the BBC radio programme, “In our Time”, is running a poll of its listeners to identify “the Greatest Philosopher”, and the current front-runners are Nietzsche and Wittgenstein! It is surely the safest of bets that the voters for the latter are not voting for his (probably unread) words but for his personal myth. Nietzsche, by comparison, whatever his status as a philosopher may be, was a brilliantly readable writer, and it would be impossible to say of his words, as I have of Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus, that they are totally lacking in objective (as opposed to rhetorical) interest or importance.

Since this note is essentially reading notes, as was my note on Keynes’ General Theory, I recall that when Keynes’ friend and rival, Pigou, vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. The notes below follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Pigou chose to challenge Keynes on the latter’s home ground, as a debater, a predictably hopeless task. For Wittgenstein, as for Keynes, I might argue that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to lay bare its lack of discipline, coherence, logical development, and content.

Preamble

I had the English and German versions of the Tractatus on my shelf for several years. I had barely read them. When one picks up a book whose first words are, “the world is all that is the case” (the reason I have the German version is that I could not believe that this could be a good translation, but it was - “die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist”), and which finishes with, “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”, one’s reaction must be to put it back on the shelf. The initial sentence is clearly something well beyond what can be discussed, and the last sentence says that the author has not heeded his own very good advice.

So I tended to hear or see the word “Wittgenstein” as one to be greeted with a pursing of the lips and a shake of the head. That was my initial reaction when I received as a present the biography “Wittgenstein – the duty of genius” by Ray Monk (Vintage 1991).

I soon found that Wittgenstein agreed with my assessment of him - the penultimate sub-sub section 6.54 of the Tractatus says, “my propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them”. The only thing was, that I had prematurely recognised it as “nonsensical”.

Monk’s biography

Monk’s book justly points out that the message of the Tractatus can be “said in three words” or rather in fact, eleven:

“what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”.

What disarmed me was Wittgenstein’s modesty. But it really is inane of him to preface these wise words with:

“what can be said at all can be said clearly”,

What would everyday intercourse be like if remarks were meaningless unless they were, or could be made, clear! And does the great Wittgenstein imagine that he can be allowed to walk off without telling us very, very clearly, what on earth it might mean to certify that a remark “can be said clearly”. In the end, isn’t it just yet another rhetorical cop-out?

It is clear from the biography that Wittgenstein lived a lie like the rest of us. We know that if you peel off all superficial conceptions, and reach the inevitable conclusion that the meaning of life and existence is in principle beyond the grasp of anyone past present or future, the only escape route, which all the Nietzsches and Dostoievskys of this world take, is to turn back and go on making a life and career among our contemporaries.

If one acted from total conviction, one would cease living. Wittgenstein came as close as may be to this suicidal alternative, and the Monk makes very clear that he was influenced all his life by a Viennese journalist or writer named Weininger who wrote all this down, and then acted on it. Wittgenstein died in fact of cancer at the age of 62, but he was obviously on the edge of despair most of his life, and on the very page I have reached (p154), it is stated that his uncle found him at a Vienna railway station in 1918 and dissuaded him from suicide.

The initial motive for writing this note came from the inanity of something I read in the book (p182).

It was the first meeting of Russell and Wittgenstein after the war, in 1919, at The Hague. They had “intense discussion”. Russell said Wittgenstein was “full of logic”. The latter “would rise early and hammer on Russell’s door until he woke, and then discuss logic without interruption for hours on end”. Wittgenstein had “the euphoric feeling that, at last somebody understood it (the Tractatus).”

It goes on:

“Not that Russell agreed with it entirely. In particular, he refused to accept Wittgenstein’s view that any assertion about the world as a whole was meaningless. To Russell, the proposition: ‘There are at least three things in the world’ was both meaningful and true. During discussion of this point Russell took a sheet of white paper and made three blobs of ink on it: ‘I besought him to admit that since there were these three blobs, there must be at least three things in the world; but he refused resolutely: He would admit there were three blobs on the page, because that was a finite assertion, but he would not admit that anything at all could be said about the world as a whole. This part of his doctrine’, Russell insisted, ‘is to my mind definitely mistaken.’”

The picture of two allegedly great men discussing for hours on end such blatantly ridiculous stuff is mind boggling.

There are two nouns in this Russellian “proposition” – “thing” and “world”. Would one not imagine that serious people would first make sure they knew what these nouns actually mean? And that when they realised they could not ever be sure, would one not then imagine that they would stop wasting their time in “discussing” nonsense? Indeed, since the very book they are discussing says in its fourth-last sentence (and very correctly) that “anyone who understands me eventually recognises them (my propositions) as nonsensical”, why did they not go off and have a beer, instead of engaging in idiocies?

In what sense is a blob of ink a thing? If I somehow marked 100 specific molecules in the air, would it make any sense to call this collection one thing? Or would they need to be concentrated together to be one thing? Is a thing not whatever I choose to designate as such, and could another person not say that this thing was in his view one million things, or nothing to do with “thing” at all? And why three? Why not one? Or five hundred and ninety seven? And what does “the world” have to do with this “proposition”? If I say “here are three things”, what does it add to this statement if I pause and continue: “in the world”. In the normal meaning of the word, where else could they be? If I were to insist that the added words were meaningful, I would have to explain that they might be “here”, but not in the world.

Clearly, the discussion of Russell and Wittgenstein did not touch on anything as basic as the above, and yet they talked for hours about it! And Russell apparently concluded that Wittgenstein was “definitely” mistaken, instead of realising that they were both talking nonsense. Imagine that a man who is written up as possessing a quite exceptional mind might feel a sense of satisfaction or even triumph if he extracted agreement from another that “there are at least three things – in the world”. Of course, he could have gone into the street and extracted unanimous agreement from the first 100 passers-by, since the “proposition”, although when associated with blobs it has no objective sense, is perfectly acceptable in the ordinary unreflective speech of the street. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, would be dismissed by 100 passers-by (and by himself!) as an eccentric, albeit a harmless one. Russell would not, of course get any satisfaction at all from this poll of opinion, since the man in the street does not qualify as a member of his debating club, and could not conceivably have a 580-page book written about him.

The quotations from Russell above come, apparently, from his book, “My Philosophical Development”, clearly the work of a great man confident of being read as such. Note, too, that Wittgenstein concedes that he is talking nonsense, but the concession is made only to “anyone who understands me”, and that person must only “eventually” recognise this, after the effort of understanding. That is, an ignoramus like me, who dismisses him at once, would not count. Frege (whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica credits with being the founder of mathematical logic) did not count. Frege thought Wittgenstein was talking nonsense, but admitted (and Wittgenstein trumpeted this) that he did not understand what Wittgenstein was driving at. Wittgenstein felt that Russell understood him, but only up to the point where disagreement entered. At that point he “refused resolutely”! Russell would first have had to agree with Wittgenstein, and then they could concede jointly that their agreement was worthless. Wittgenstein, in this vein ends his preface by saying that his is the “final solution” of “the [unspecified] problems”, but that “the value of this work is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved”.

His style is that he insists on dismissing himself, but will not tolerate anyone else doing so without his permission.

On p 210 is recorded the “last time the two [Russell and Wittgenstein] met as friends”. This was in 1922, the date of Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, at a dreadful hotel in Innsbruck. They fell out apparently because Russell was now a 100% atheist for whom saving the world was of much more importance than saving himself or his soul, whereas Wittgenstein, apparently, was “at the height of his mystical ardour”, and took to extreme lengths his conviction that his thoughts should be directed inwards.

The story of the young Wittgenstein moves rapidly to Russell (1911), who appears on p36 of this 600-odd page book, moves swiftly to Wittgenstein’s 5-year service with the Austrian army, during which he wrote the Tractatus (appeared 1921). This is Wittgenstein’s only publication in his lifetime, and indeed the only one anyone has taken real notice of. Essentially, the story is then over. Wittgenstein had his 10-year drop-out period in rural Austria. He returned to Cambridge in 1929, dropped out again 1939 to 1945 as a hospital porter, returned again to Cambridge and finally dropped out in 1947, 4 years before his death at age 62. Pages are filled with his personal agonisings, his constant changes of direction in his philosophical interests, the young undergraduates whom he “loved” but we are never told what this meant apart from snippets from letters, and the constant reminders of his overpowering personal qualities. He talked endlessly about what I would call nothing, and what he too calls nothing, only he won’t stop going on about it. He allegedly reversed his Tractatus position in his posthumous book, but that book has no visible coherent thread of any sort, and in any case, from what I gather from Monk, his position changes even within the Tractatus – the positivists apparently read it and assumed that the great Wittgenstein was one of them, only to find quite rapidly that he was not – by a long chalk.

Wittgenstein was an odd, remarkable, complex and interesting person, a rich man who wanted to be poor, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge who had never been a philosophy undergraduate and apparently never read Aristotle, a man who breathed “philosophy” but basically thought it was nonsense compared with school teaching or hospital portering, a half-Jewish Catholic who did not believe in any Catholic tenet and only barely in “god”, a homosexual (presumably) about whom no mention of homosexuality is made. And so on. He believed that the world is everything that is the case, as daft or empty a proposition as anyone could imagine.

I thought that that concluded my interest in this book. To go on, I would really need to spend 6 months wading through the Tractatus word by word, and what would be the sense in that, given, that the first and presumably fundamental proposition of the book is the daft and empty statement just referred to?

A digression

But something said by another re-sparked my interest, and I did a bit more. The “other” seemed to stress Wittgenstein’s homosexuality a lot, and quoted one Kimberley Cornish (“author of The Jew of Linz 1998”) as referring to Wittgenstein’s two elder brothers who apparently committed suicide when he was 13 and 15 respectively, because “both were homosexual”, then going on: “Ludwig, a delicate boy with a high-pitched voice and a stammer, also became an active homosexual as an adult”.

Monk has only a hint of this and that only for the second son. As for his picture of Wittgenstein, he mentions no evidence whatever of “active” homosexuality. He indeed devotes a 6-page appendix to a sceptical examination of stuff by one W W Bartley III, which alleges, without revealing sources, that Wittgenstein for a short time engaged in rough trade in the Prater (post WWI).

Wittgenstein, of course, had a consistent history of forming mutual attachments with younger men.

I made a list as follows:

David Pinsent (to whom the Tractatus was dedicated)
Frank Ramsey
Gilbert Pattison
Francis Skinner
Keith Kirk
Maurice Drury
Ben Richards
Yorick Smythies
Norman Malcolm (US)
Rowland Hutt

to whom should be added, to give some balance,

Marguerite Respinger, a Swiss girl whom he met through family links in Vienna, and with whom he had a close relationship (no more, no less) 1927-31. He imagined he was destined for marriage, but when he eventually made this clear, she skedaddled. Also G E M Anscombe, a young girl who was a member of the young group around Wittgenstein at the time of his death.

All of the above-named young men were attached to Wittgenstein, and he had varying degrees of attachment to them. Some he self-confessedly “loved”, for example, Pinsent, Pattison, Skinner, and Kirk, but Pinsent and Kirk were apparently not at all aware of this. Ramsey was solidly married. Malcolm was merely a good friend in Wittgenstein’s last years. In the case of Skinner, the affair was passionate and mutual. They lived together in Skinner’s digs above a shop in East Road, Cambridge, for one year, ending in Wittgenstein drifting guiltily off. But even if, in this case, there may be knowing winks and nods, there is apparently no evidence of “active” homosexuality. Wittgenstein was an intensely guilt-ridden man. Monk records him as insisting on presenting a written list of confessions to his embarrassed circle of colleagues, including G E Moore. The list was of shortcomings which would normally pass without comment, but presumably they tortured Wittgenstein.

I saw a TV programme by Jarman about Wittgenstein. A highly made-up boy-friend called Johnny was shown. They held hands in a cinema, the boy’s father was said to be a miner, and Russell is shown quarrelling with Wittgenstein about his plans to get Johnny out of academic life into useful industrial work Jarman presumably presented Johnny as a composite picture of Wittgenstein’s young friends. There is no “Johnny” in Monk. Wittgenstein was keen on popular films, especially westerns, and his meetings with Drury in London usually consisted of a talk in a Lyons tea-house, and a visit to the cinema. He did persuade some to abandon academic philosophy, including Drury (who became a doctor) and Skinner (who joined Cambridge Instruments as an ordinary worker, to the fury of his Letchworth, non-miner and non-working-class family). The only candidate of working-class but non-mining origin was Kirk, a non-academic Cambridge lad working at Cambridge Instruments introduced to Wittgenstein by Skinner. Astonishingly, Wittgenstein tutored this boy weekly in his Trinity rooms to help him to pass his City & Guilds apprenticeship exams. Wittgenstein records in his private diary that he “loved” Kirk, but there is no evidence that Kirk was made aware of this.

The Tractatus – the first two pages

Wittgenstein once more brought to mind in this way, I made a tentative start on the Tractatus.

The result is the following notes.

First I noted that the 70-page English version had a 14-page “introduction” by Russell. This really was a monstrous piece of cheek, given that Wittgenstein recommended a “passing over in silence”, and no doubt Wittgenstein regarded it as that, but acquiesced in that a recommendation by the famous man was worth a lot.

And so to the masterwork itself.

“The world is all that is the case.”

Here we have, right at the start, a statement which, coming from somebody claiming to be getting to the most basic fundamentals of philosophy, simply beggars belief. His preface says that “the whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”.

So, are we understand that “the world is all that is the case”, having been said “at all” by the man who wrote that preface, must in his view be something that has been said clearly?

Wittgenstein plunges into this word-soup without a word of preamble or definition. Generally, if someone writes something solemnly down for our attention, its purpose is to bring that something to our attention.

Oddly (and I have found the same thing in economics - see the critical note on Keynes) nobody, and certainly not Russell, stoops to taking up the commented-on author’s prose word by word. The nearest I have seen to this are Frege’s comments to Wittgenstein about this very page. I quote:

“Right at the beginning, I come across the expressions ‘is the case’ and ‘fact’, and I suspect that is the case and is a fact are the same. The world is everything that is the case, and the world is a collection of facts. Is not every fact the case and is not that which is the case a fact? … Why then this double expression? …. Now comes a third expression: ‘What is the case, a fact, is the existence of a Sachverhalte’. I take this to mean that every fact is the existence of a Sachverhalte, so that another fact is the existence of another Sachverhalte. Couldn’t one delete the words ‘existence of’ and say ‘Every fact is a Sachverhalte and every other fact is a Sachverhalte’? Could one perhaps also say ‘Every Sachverhalte is the existence of a fact’?”

Monk explains that translations differ:

                            Sachverhalte               Sachlage
Ogden, 1922         atomic fact                 state of affairs
Pears, 1961           state of affairs           situation

And adds that Wittgenstein had to explain to both Frege and Russell that a Sachverhalte was a “true atomic proposition”.

Klar?

At this point, I look up Frege in the Encycopaedia Britannica. The reason is that my reading around Wittgenstein has left me with the impression that he was in his time a backnumber, if a fairly prominent one, and certainly the above comments do not have the stamp of brilliance (they are very similar to my own). But not a bit of it, not by a long chalk. According to the EB, Frege was the founder, no less, of mathematical logic, and is credited hence with the shift from reflection about this and that to reflection about the meaning of the words “this” and “that”, a shift which led to Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre. The odd thing was that his originality was appreciated by almost nobody apart from Russell, but it happened (naturally) to be Russell who torpedoed Frege in full flight in 1902 by showing that his work fell foul of the “Russell paradox”, which as far as I remember was something about the class of every class.

(EB: Russell's paradox of the class of all classes not elements of themselves - if this class is a member of itself, then it is not; and if it is not, then it is. Example: "This barber shaves everyone in town who does not shave himself." Does the barber then shave himself ? If he does, he does not; if he does not, he does. Personally I don’t see it. The fact is that the basic claim about the barber is defective by missing out “apart from himself” as a qualifier of “everyone”. In ordinary speech that would go without saying, but one would have thought a Russell or a Frege would, if called upon to correct the barber, insert the more exact and rigorously necessary qualifier.)

Be that as it may, Frege apparently had the stuffing knocked out of him, and did little more. Wittgenstein was only 13 in 1902 (Russell was 30), so Frege was a spent force when Wittgenstein contacted him in 1911.

Frege’s comments of course are right – that Wittgenstein flannels around with different words without pausing to say what if any distinction he intends to draw between the meanings of words which in ordinary communication have similar meanings – and this from a man claiming to be putting the world to rights on the meaning of meaning! I note in passing that although Wittgenstein had to explain to his most eminent readers in 1919 (i.e., 2 and 3 years before the German and English versions appeared in print) that Sachverhalte meant “atomic fact” and had received Frege’s ridicule (for it is in fact that), he apparently did not change one jot – surely a sign of maniacal self-conviction.

But surely these comments, damaging as they are, are superficial. The enduring puzzle is: Why did Russell write his rather favourable introduction? Why did both Frege and Russell, to say nothing of the whole G E Moore Cambridge club, not only tolerate this stuff but seemingly admire it? Why did nobody not only make observations on this or that, but actively pull it to shreds?

So, I come back to what I wrote before beginning this lengthy digression on Frege:

“So, are we understand that ‘the world is all that is the case’, having been said ‘at all’ by the man who wrote that preface, must in his view be something that has been said clearly? Wittgenstein plunges into this word-soup without a word of preamble or definition. Generally, if someone writes something solemnly down for our attention, its purpose is to bring something to our attention.”

What is “the world is all that is the case” meant to bring to our attention?

Is he in effect answering a question addressed to him – “Mr Wittgenstein, could you please tell me what this odd word ‘world’ means”? In ordinary speech, the word is used in a totally unspecific way. “The world is round”, “round the world in 80 days” are unexceptional examples where world means the planet Earth. People go to another world when dead. Other more material worlds are said to exist. Hardly ever is the word used to denote what is usually referred to as “the universe”, i.e., the totality of everything that exists.

Clearly, Wittgenstein does not mean the planet earth. So what does he mean? Well, he means that it is “everything that is the case”. Now why should anyone imagine that a normally vague word, like “world” can be clarified by using another vague word like “case”? If you wanted to press someone strongly on something he has just said, would you say, “Is that true or false?” or would you say, “Is that the case or not the case?”? “The case” is surely just a phrase to use when nothing much hangs on the matter at issue, or to fit the euphony of the sentence, or vary the language used. Did an angry school teacher ever say “Is what you are saying the case, boy?” instead of “are you telling the truth?”?

Why did Wittgenstein not start with “everything is all that is true? Is it not because it sounds like either nonsense or a tautology, whereas the equally nonsensical or tautological “the world is all that is the case” can pass muster long enough for the reader to have passed on to the next line?

Come to that, does not “the world is all that is the case” boil down to the basic tautology “all is all”? Or at most, “when in future I use the word ‘world’, then I mean ‘all’, and that in turn means everything in god’s universe.” If that is so, Wittgenstein might just as well have begun, “to save duplication and space, I am going to use the little word ‘all’ to mean every thing, and relationships among things, anywhere in the entire universe.”

So, having dealt with proposition 1, we go on to:

1.1 “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

As Frege said, to follow up

“the world is all that is the case”

with

“the world is the totality of facts”

is to replace “all” with “totality” and “is the case” with “is a fact”.

Why the redundancy? Where has Occam’s razor gone?

But something has been added: “of facts, not of things”. This is a way (and why choose an obscure way rather than defining terms outright?) of saying that his “world” is not (just) an inventory of things, but of the relationships between them, the true “propositions” made about them. A “fact” seems thus to be equivalent to a true proposition and the things involved within it. It is an example of Wittgenstein’s sloppiness that the “just” I have put in brackets is missed out by Wittgenstein. In other words, his “world” apparently consists only of true propositions, and somehow excludes the things they concern, except in so far as they occur in such propositions. I guess that for most of us, this is exactly the wrong way round – the universe for us is things.

The next proposition:

1.11 “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.”

This is simply, and grotesquely, redundant. The preceding two lines have already told us, twice, that the world is all the facts, i.e., the facts are primary, and the world is defined as being all of them. Not only does this third proposition tell us of this equivalence again, but it muddies the waters by replacing the verb of simple equivalence, “is”, with one of causality, “is determined by”. If I say “my character is determined by my genes”, I am certainly not saying that “my character is my genes”. I have checked incidentally that none of what I have criticised above is due to the English translation. Wittgenstein says the same redundant things in German.

And on to:

1.12 “For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.”

This is mind-bogglingly grotesque. The first three propositions said “all is all” three times. This one verges on incoherence. If Wittgenstein had said, “the totality of facts is all that is the case”, it would have been rendered coherent by the use of “is” instead of “is determined by” and the insertion of “all that”, but it would have been self-evident that tautologies 1 and 2 have simply been coalesced, eliminating the middle man, “the world”, which has already been explicitly equated with both halves of this identity.

As it is, he seems to be inventing a sense of “what is the case” which restricts it to what he has already called “the world”, the single “all” which is the case. And to add “and also whatever is not the case” is just daft, for of course if you use the phrase “all truth”, or for that matter, “all rabbits”, then you are excluding anything which is not truth, or describable as a rabbit.

Now the final point before leaving 1.1 (see the footnote for remarks on this “decimal” system of numbering):

1.13 “The facts in logical space are the world.”

First (or rather, second) we were told that the world was all facts. Now we are told that the facts (note, this time, not all facts) are the world. Is there a difference between “(all) facts are the world” and “the world is (all the) facts”? Remember that Wittgenstein is said to have taken years to assemble this stuff. But wait a minute. The facts referred to here are those “in logical space”. This is the new information. What can this possibly mean? Well at the very least, it must imply that there are other facts which are not in logical space and which do not come into the makeup of the world. But we have already been told that the world is the totality of facts. So there cannot be any facts outside of logical space, and proposition 1.13 makes a 5th member of the redundant propositions which say “all is all”.

With relief, we pass to:

1.2 “The world divides into facts.”

Remember that 1.1 was “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

Suppose I said first that “my cash is the totality of my coins” and then that “my cash divides into coins”. Would I qualify for the admiration of Bertrand Russell and G E Moore? Well, I might, providing I separated the two statements with a few lines of incoherent but pretentious twaddle.

And lastly, before we pass to proposition 2:

1.21 “Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.”

One really cannot help wondering if anyone ever read the Tractatus when a line like this has presumably passed muster. Each item! Each item!! What item? No item has so far been mentioned. We’ve had a world, a case, a fact, a thing, but no item. I look at the index of the English version, which is headed with: “The translators’ aim has been to include all the interesting words, and, in each case, either to give all occurrences of the word, or else to omit only a few unimportant ones”. And, sure enough, world, case, fact, thing, are all there, but no item. It really strains belief that the two translators, who went to considerable trouble to list all “interesting words” (I calculate roughly 4-500 of them) and enumerate each line of their occurrence, just did not notice that this word “item” was there, in the very first half-page of the text. So what was the problem? What Wittgenstein wrote in the German original was:

1.21 “Eines kann der Fall sein oder nicht der Fall sein und alles übrige gleich bleiben.”

Ah hum. “Eines” is neuter. The immediately preceding word is Tatsachen, feminine plural …. check …. . So it cannot mean “one of them”. It presumably means anything, but stressed as any thing, or any (one) thing, but of course the German does not mouth the word “thing”, it merely, literally, says “a” (neuter). So Wittgenstein, in writing it, did not have to risk confusion with Dinge (things), which occurs in 1.1, or indeed with Tatsache (fact, literally deed-thing) already mentioned 6 times. Note also that the German says “all else” not “everything else”.

This must have been an embarrassing thing to translate. Literally it says

“a (-) can be the case or not the case, while all else remains the same.”

Said like this, it sounds like an axiom of general applicability, not a remark related to the foregoing text. In other words, it could be true no matter what is put inside the bracket..

After a minute’s reflection, I think it probably is not. If A is true and B is true if A is true, then if A for some reason becomes untrue, B must also become untrue.

If I am right, then Wittgenstein’s 1.21 is wrong, unless the thing in the bracket is what is later called a Sachverhalte, which Ogden (see above) translates as an “atomic fact”, and Pears, idiotically, as a “state of affairs”. (Pears’ idiocy was not in translation, which as far as I know is arguably correct, but in trying to render literally the idiotic word chosen by Wittgenstein. As noted above, Wittgenstein had to explain to both Frege (who of course was a German) and Russell that he meant by Sachverhalte what is better rendered as an atomic fact, i.e., one which concerns only one thing.). I suppose that the truth of an atomic fact A is by definition independent of the truth of any other atomic fact B. Maybe it was this which made Pears choose the totally unjustifiable translation of “eines” as “each item”, since an item does perhaps sound rather like an atomic fact! And perhaps embarrassment made him keep it out of the index.

Whatever one makes of the above, and whether my various judgements are totally right or not, there can be little doubt that both the German and the English versions of 1.21 are unworthy of a serious text on language and philosophy.

And so to proposition 2:

2 “What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.”

Yes, really. One wonders whether Pears and McGuinness writhed in embarrassment as they had to render this on to the page. They “improve” on Wittgenstein’s German, since he has the fact, not a fact. I have quoted above, in full, Monk’s quotation of Frege’s wrestling with this word-soup. Surely Frege could intend nothing but ridicule when he said, “could one perhaps also say ‘every Sachverhalte is the existence of a fact’?” thus inverting Wittgenstein’s order of words. If a first-term philosophy student wrote in an essay that “a fact is the existence of something else”, the script would be returned with red ink applied furiously to such an absurd equation. One cannot but imagine that the same would have been the fate of Wittgenstein, if he had submitted his stuff anonymously to a philosophy tutor at Linz instead of to the world’s two most eminent men in the field! Puzzling, or what?

We go on to:

2.01 “A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).”

Note first that whereas Wittgenstein judged that 1.1 should follow 1 in his extremely odd system of “decimal numbers” (his own term), he now, half a page on, decides that 2 should be followed by 2.01. I check forward to find that 3 is followed by 3.001, which is followed immediately by 3.01! One wonders if anyone else has looked closely enough to have noticed this. In all probability it does not matter a jot. But really, given that Wittgenstein did not dash this stuff down, but laboured over it, one does wonder if the man was all right in the head.

In an effort to drag Wittgenstein’s prose into some semblance of coherence, the translators add the first bracket, which is simply not there in the original, and ignore the fact that their second bracket, which is there in the original, contains two words, Sachen and Dinge, not one. The purpose of the first bracket is, I suppose, to rescue the sentence from complete incomprehensibility by having the word “thing” on both sides of the equation. As regards the second, the question arises as to what Wittgenstein wanted to achieve by writing down three words for “thing” when one would have done.

Wittgenstein’s original was, “Der Sachverhalt ist eine Verbindung von Gegenständen (Sachen, Dinge)”. If he had abbreviated it (with no loss of sense in my opinion) to “Der Sachverhalt ist eine Verbindung von Sachen” then the German provides the echo of “Sache” automatically, and indeed “Verbindung” is not very far from echoing the meaning of the root “verhalt” in the word “Verhältnis” (relationship). The net effect is that in so far as either the English or the German has any sense at all, it is very near to a tautology – a state of things is a state of things.

And now:

2.011 “It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs”

The German says “it is essential to the thing that it is able to be a component of a state of affairs”.

In my humble opinion, this is fairly loose talk. Remember that in German, a thing is a Sache and what the translators render as a “state of affairs” is a Sachverhalt, a thingsituation. Given this choice, it would in fact be more faithful to the German if the translation was “it is essential to the affair that it is able to be a component of a state of affairs”. Only the obscurity saves this from being patently ridiculous. Logically, it is fully equivalent to, “it is essential to an egg that it may be among the contents of an eggbasket”. Perhaps logic was not Wittgenstein’s strong point.

To add to the dubious quality, Wittgenstein uses the alternative “Ding” for thing. Was this to cloak the verbal redundancy of the remark?

And that isn’t all. Surely someone who claims to be about to clarify the use of language in logic should be careful about using the word “essential” (wesentlich in German). This word rings all the existential bells of Wittgenstein’s era – for example Heidegger and Sartre. To say that an egg may be among the contents of an eggbasket says nothing. It is true but devoid of content. To say that it is essential to an egg that it may be among the contents of an eggbasket is grotesquely untrue. It might be among the utterances of a harmless madman. Of course, it would make a certain amount of sense to say that it is essential to an eggbasket that it should be capable of containing eggs!

Finally, it may be noted that the Sachverhalt has now occurred three times and still neither Wittgenstein nor the translator has said anything at all to convey what the first translator, Ogden, conveyed, helpfully but unjustifiably, by the translation “atomic fact”. Russell says in his introduction, “facts which are not compounded of other facts are what Mr. Wittgenstein calls Sachverhalte, whereas a fact which may consist of two or more facts is called a Tatsache”. Interesting, but I await the evidence that Wittgenstein makes this distinction himself – and his reasons for this not-at-all-obvious lexicographic choice.

2.012 “In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.”

My first feeling on reading this is that comment fails me. Possibly one should read on to see if light appears. The first five words read as if Wittgenstein is quite clear as to the meaning of “logic” and “accidental”. If the latter means “purely by chance” then the view might be taken that absolutely nothing the universe, let alone in “logic”, whatever that may be, is accidental. On the other hand, one might take the view that “by chance” is one of those concepts which qualifies for Wittgenstein’s famous last sentence of the Tractatus, “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. If I am right, that both of those words are either difficult or impossible to define, then this sort of flat, dogmatic statement is out of place. Be that as it may, what to make of the rest? Let’s think of an example, say the (supposed) fact that “Mr. Peter Tomkins is at this moment in China”. Wittgenstein has not, of course, condescended to tell us what he means by a “thing”, or even whether a Ding is different from a Sache, but I assume that both Mr. Peter Tomkins and China are things, and that the whole statement is a Sachverhalt or a “state of affairs”. Now Wittgenstein tells me that “if Mr. Peter Tomkins can occur in “Mr. Peter Tomkins is at this moment in China”, the possibility of “Mr. Peter Tomkins is at this moment in China” must be written into the thing called Mr. Peter Tomkins itself. (In order to be sure this puzzle is not a matter of translation, it is noted that the German says “is already pre-judged in the thing (Ding)”). Again, it seems to me that we are in the realm of tautology. If I say, “Mr. Peter Tomkins can occur in ‘Mr. Peter Tomkins is at this moment in China’”, this is entirely equivalent to saying that the possibility of Mr. Peter Tomkins being at this moment in China is already pre-judged, since “can” (is able) and “possibility” (the state of being able) convey the same information.

At this point Wittgenstein abandons the staccato style, or perhaps he thought that if the following five paragraphs were separately decimally numbered, the resulting 5-digit numbers would look a shade overdone.

2.0121 consists of five paragraphs as follows:

“It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own.

“If things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.

“(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.)

“Just as we are unable to imagine spatial objects outside space, or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.

“If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.”

I’ll take these paragraphs one at a time.

Para 1 “It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own.”

Here yet another unexplained word turns up – “situation”. The German, Sachlage, is another Sache word to add to Sache, Tatsache, Sachverhalt. I look up the German for “state of affairs” in my Langenscheidt dictionary (over 1000 pages, English-German only). It says for “state of affairs”: die Lage der Dinge (the situation of things), die Sachlage (the thingsituation), and (legal) der Sachverhalt (the thingsituation, thingrelationship). This is a Sache soup. It would be difficult for a German fully to distinguish these words, as the remarks of Frege tend to show. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the English attempts to translate them cannot show the thing-basis which is there in German. The translations, so far are: thing, fact, states of affairs, and now situation. The fact that Wittgenstein seems to feel not the slightest need to clarify his usage, even after being questioned by Frege and Russell, is in my humble view a sign of almost incomprehensible stubbornness, deafness to nuance, self-assurance, and arrogance. After all, he claims in his preface that “the truth (his italics) of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me to be unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems”. To be fair to Wittgenstein, he did not in his German say “the final solution”! He said “I am of the opinion to have essentially finally solved the problems”. Be that as it may, anyone who, in such a linguistic minefield, claims to have reached unassailable and definitive truths hidden from all the thinkers of history, must surely be suspected of having a screw loose, somewhere. The odd counter-fact is that in his penultimate proposition 6.54, he concedes that “anyone who understands me eventually recognises [my propositions] as nonsensical”, and it is a matter of history that in his later years, he more or less repudiated the Tractatus. Could he not appreciate that to insist that readers could dismiss his propositions only after they had been certified as understanding them is to impose an objectively irrelevant condition?

So much for the introduction of the word “situation”. But what does para 1 mean? What on earth can it mean to specify “a thing which could already exist entirely on its own”, while clearly implying that such a thing would be very odd, almost unthinkable. But what sort of readership did he imagine he was addressing? Admittedly, my Mr. Tomkins could not exist on his own, and a China on its own would be difficult to conceive, but a pebble seen on a beach, say, would in the conceptions and word-usage of most people be a thing which could exist entirely on its own, and there would be no difficulty whatever in imagining a situation which would fit this thing, to use Wittgenstein’s vague language. Or did Wittgenstein imagine that the reader would automatically tune in to the idea that the pebble cannot be said to exist if it is not in the “situation” of being perceived by him, or by somebody? The root of the difficulty, I imagine is Wittgenstein’s insistence in proposition 1.1, the world is made up of facts, i.e., relationships between things, and specifically not of things. To give primacy to relationships, and regard things as mere secondary entities which happen to find themselves related to each other within those relationships is simply to specify a way of thinking totally alien to the world specified in the language we use every day. To imagine that “Mr. Peter Tomkins is at this moment in China” is somehow (presumably along with a whole collection of such “facts”) going to define both Mr. Tomkins and China, entities entirely subordinate to the relationships (facts) which mention them, is an entertaining idea, but totally contrary to normal narratives in which Mr. Tomkins and China are the actors, and any relationship between them results from their primary existence and subsequent actions and movements.

Para 1 is thus simply not comprehensible, and could be made so only if Wittgenstein embarked on a lengthy redefinition of language, which he shows no sign of doing, and indeed shows no sign of recognising any need to do.

Para 2 “If things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.”

My seemingly impudent questioning of Wittgenstein’s mental capacity takes some credence from this paragraph, since it restates, almost word for word, exactly what has already been stated in proposition 2.012, to which the present five paragraphs are supposed to be supplementary. In the normal world, one might expect a publisher’s proof reader to suggest the elimination of such a paragraph.

Para 3 “(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.)”

The first reaction to this (apart from wondering why it is in brackets) is similar to the reaction to 2.012 – Wittgenstein writes as if knows exactly what “logic” is, or as if he has ownership of the meaning of the word and that it is whatever he declares it by fiat to be.

Let’s leave that aside for the moment and look first at the last five words. “All possibilities are the facts [of logic]”. The mind simply boggles at this. All possibilities? Can anyone even conceive what all possibilities might be? And even if some individual might claim to find no barrier to his imagination, how could anyone defend himself against the response, “whatever you have imagined, they are not all the possibilities”? The phrase is no doubt used, and usefully used, in everyday contexts, and it will convey something meaningful to a person who is aware of that context. But Wittgenstein is not in the business of contexts. He means his “truths … to be unassailable and definitive”.

Let’s pass over this and take the next point that all these possibilities are the facts of logic. This opens a new vista of Wittgenstein’s definition of the world in proposition 1.11. It is necessary to quote this in full:

“The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all [his italics] the facts.”

It occurs to me now that in this para 3 of 2.0121 is, apart from a throwaway insertion of “in logical space” in 1.13, the first mention of logic in the Tractatus, which remember is qualified by “logico-philosophicus”. If he now insists that all possibilities are the facts of logic, he is stating that what determines the world is all possibilities, since these are the facts of logic, plus perhaps some more.

Now, all possibilities are simply not facts in any normal meaning of the word “fact”. Wittgenstein himself in his proposition 1 said that the world is all that is the case, not everything that might conceivably or possibly be the case, and he went on immediately to say that the world is the totality of facts. Thus he is using “is the case” and “fact” in the normal conversational meaning of objective truth. There is no such thing, in this normal usage, as an untrue fact, or an untrue fact which is the case.

Thus, in the context defined by what goes before in Wittgenstein’s text, it is nonsensical to state that “all possibilities are [logic’s] facts”, since “the window is open” is a possibility, but obviously it is not necessarily a fact. The only alternative construction on this para 3 is that Wittgenstein conceives that there are true “facts”, and untrue, but possible, “facts”.

Then Wittgenstein says that logic deals with every possibility. Well I’m not sure about “deals with” or “every”, but at least there is no internal contradiction.

As for “nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible”, one can only wonder what on earth the word “merely” is meant to convey. The German says literally, “Something logical cannot be merely possible”. Presumably it is implied that something logical is possible, but is more than that. In what way? Usually a formulation like this would go, “x is not merely possible but ….”, perhaps “but likely”. Maybe Wittgenstein thought that the immediately following words gave an answer to that, but I fail to spot it.

Para 4 “Just as we are unable to imagine spatial objects outside space, or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.”

“Just as” usually introduces a helpful familiar illustration of something obscure which follows, for example, “just as a key fits into a lock, an atom fits into a molecule”. Leaving aside the point that I find no meaning to attach to “temporal object”, I simply do not see any similarity between Wittgenstein’s helpful illustration and what it is meant to illustrate. Indeed, “there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others”, stands out, in the farrago of obscurity already considered, as something which is rather clear, and in the least need of a “just as” illustration.

I note that the German provides at least a verbal bridge between the illustration and the illustrated by using the word “outside” instead of “excluded from” in the latter, to complement the two uses in the former. For me, this helps a little, a very little.

If it is accepted that “there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others” is the only message of this paragraph, I see no reason to quarrel. After all, “A is not B” combines any two different objects. But I cannot see the intention in inserting this banal thought here.

Para 5 “If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility [his italics] of such combinations.”

First, it should be said that the translation departs perceptibly from the German, perhaps because a literal translation would appear odd, or even because the translators thought that maintaining the plural “objects” and the root word “combine” carried the thought from the previous paragraph better than Wittgenstein’s German did. A literal translation might run:

“If I can imagine the object in the association of the state of affairs, then I cannot imagine it outside the possibility of this association.”

The word “association” is Verband, a new member of the Tractatus lexicon. The translators have used the word “combined” because the previous paragraph used the translation “combining” where the German uses the noun Verbindung, and Verband is related to Verbindung. Nevertheless, as far as I can see from my Wahrig dictionary, Verbindung does mean combination and a Verband is an association, as in stamp collectors’ association, (or a bandage!). And again note the opposition of the “in” and “outside” in German which is not so clear in the English.

Anyway, the considerable differences in the nuances of the English and the German make it unprofitable to search for a new thought in this paragraph. Wittgenstein’s intention seems to have been to re-word the previous paragraph to reinforce its message, “there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others”.

2.0122 “Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connection with states of affairs, a form of dependence . (It is impossible for words to appear in two different rôles: by themselves, and in propositions)”

Again on a point of translation, the German says “the thing”, not things. “Situations” is Sachlagen already encountered in para 1 of 2.0121. Wittgenstein has not condescended to define this or any other term.

The first phrase seems to mean that if a thing can be found in a “situation” (the meaning which I really cannot distinguish from the meaning of a “state of affairs” – that is I cannot distinguish between a Sachlage and a Sachverhalt), combined with any other things whatever, it satisfies a plausible notion of independence. But, says Wittgenstein, the fact that it can occur in a “state of affairs” is a form of dependence. This harks back, I think, to what I noted above, that Wittgenstein somehow, and contrary to normal language, regards “states of affairs” as primary, mere things as secondary. Why it is necessary or useful to point out this independence which is also a dependence, Wittgenstein does not say.

The bit in brackets (“it is impossible for words to appear in two different rôles: by themselves, and in propositions”) defeats interpretation. Why is it there? What does it mean?

I note that the German word translated as “proposition” is Satz, which I think in common parlance usually means “sentence”, but can mean a proposition in logic. The word “word” makes its appearance here for the first time, and does not recur for several pages. Thus its introduction here is not a preamble for further clarification.

My answer to my two questions is “no idea” in both cases. I do not know why elucidation of “word” is called for. I cannot even imagine what Wittgenstein means by “impossible” here, and I would need to know what he means by “appear” and “rôle”. Clearly words can “appear” by themselves, and clearly they can “appear” in propositions or sentences, and these appear to be the different rôles which Wittgenstein says it is impossible for them to appear in. It is at this point that one is tempted to say that Wittgenstein either has a screw loose, or he is a genius beyond the experience of ordinary mortals. The world seems to have judged in the latter sense. My inclination is clear.

2.0123 reads as follows:

Para 1 “If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.”

Para 2 “(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.)”

Para 3 “A new possibility cannot be discovered later”

It must be said at once that this, even on first glance, looks like a pile of unmitigated nonsense. Still, on with the neutral analysis.

I had not till now remarked on this word “object” . In 1.1, Wittgenstein introduces “thing” (Ding). In 2.01, he talks of “objects (things, things)”, those three words being (in the singular) Gegenstand, Sache, Ding. Now why, to echo Frege, does this thinker of fundamental thoughts proliferate nomenclature? Had he heard of Occam’s Razor? If an object is just a thing, and if two more words in German also mean thing, why does he not choose one and stick to it?

Coming to the substance of para 1, how is it possible for anyone to utter those words, “if I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.”?! What can the meaning of “know” be here? Let’s try it in more normal English. “If I know a teacup, I also know all its possible occurrences in statements of fact”. Well, surely anyone can claim to “know” “a teacup” (although, even in a pub conversation, someone might ask what exactly is meant by knowing a teacup), but to go on to claim to “know” all the possible occurrences of “it”, this one known teacup, in “all its possible occurrences” in statements of fact simply does not fit in with any notion of the word “know”. Of course, anyone is at liberty to make up his own lexicon, but he must define this lexicon, and Wittgenstein makes not the slightest attempt to do so.

Para 2, in brackets simply re-states what has been said twice already, in 2.012, and para 2 of 2.0121.

Para 3 is a further breath-taking dogmatic assertion: “A new possibility cannot be discovered later”. The German says “found”, not discovered, but this changes little. What, one asks, is meant by a new possibility? Does he just mean that nothing can be discovered later? Later? Later than what?

2.01231 “If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.”

Oh dear, oh dear. A stupid physicist would reply immediately to this, “then you can never know any thing”. What can any sane and normal person mean by knowing all the internal properties of a teacup? There is no one in the world who knows the internal properties of even the first molecule of a teacup. And what exactly is the difference between an external and an internal property? If you knew all the internal properties, would they not be bound to encompass all external (presumably visible and tangible) properties too?

2.0124 “If all objects are given, then at the same time, all possible (his italics) states of affairs are also given.”

If Wittgenstein’s foregoing text about “an object” is taken as read, then this extension to “all objects” is banal, but I believe correct.

2.013 “Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.”

Here again, we have the repetition of the idea first implied in proposition 1.1 (the second line of the Tractatus) that the state of affairs is primary, the thing is secondary. Wittgenstein is supposed to be saying fundamental truths about logic but this idea has absolutely nothing to do with logic. If philosopher A starts off with “the world is the totality of things”, and philosopher B starts off with “the world is the totality of facts” each may go on to say identical things about logic. There is no harm, but also no logic, in a dogmatic but more or less irrelevant starting point. Wittgenstein may prefer to say that there is a fact, namely that the teacup is red, whereas the physicist might prefer to say that there is a thing, namely a red teacup, but so what?

Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that he cannot imagine the thing without space, but that he cannot imagine the thing without, “as it were”, a space of possible states of affairs, that is, “space” in a totally metaphorical sense. Why should it matter to us what Wittgenstein’s powers of imagination may or may not be?

2.0131

Para 1 “A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place).”

Para 2 “A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.”

To specify in para 1 a “spatial” object implies that Wittgenstein envisages non-spatial objects, non-spatial things. He has not however condescended to say just what he would call by the name “thing”, or specify what the different categories of thing might be.

To say that a spatial object must be situated in space is a tautology. In the German as in the English, “spatial” and “space” are etymologically related. To say that it must be in infinite space is going too far. We are using language here, and our language is necessarily restricted to what we experience. Even Wittgenstein cannot make dogmatic assertions outside of language. This is another example of the “what we cannot speak about” of his own famous last line, and of his (much remarked) reluctance to follow his own diktat.

As for the bit in brackets! The German does not help here. “Argument-place” is Argumentstelle! The German as the English uses the word “point”, then the unnecessarily different word “place”. I suppose, by loose analogy with the use of the word “argument” in algebra what may be meant is that the space at or around an object may have qualities inserted into it , like redness, pitch, hardness, as listed in para 2.

In mentioning notes with pitch in para 2, Wittgenstein implies, without actually saying so clearly, that a note can be “an object”, perhaps even a spatial object, with the “argument” of pitch added. For someone in Wittgenstein’s trade, it is perhaps best not to get too specific. An obscurely presented bit of plausible rhetoric can become ridiculous if re-phrased too clearly.

2.014 “Objects contain the possibility of all situations.”

Remember that Wittgenstein has never indicated what he means by Sachlage, thing-situation, translated here as “situation”. Nor has he said what he means by a Gegenstand, or, seemingly equivalently, a Sache or a Ding, here translated as “object”. Treated as ordinary English speech, the sentence is simply incomprehensible. Or alternatively it contains the banal or even tautological “all is all” thought, namely that if, as in the ordinary man’s view of the world, the universe is made up of tangible objects (the physicist would say the fundamental particles) then it goes without saying that all such objects, the universe, must contain the possibility of all situations, whatever anyone may conceive that to mean. The third alternative would be that Wittgenstein should explain what the words of the sentence mean to him, and how they fit together to make sense, but plainly he is not going to do that. So this proposition is either, in a roundabout way, a tautology, or it is meaningless.

2.0141 “The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object.”

The previous proposition was in my judgement, a tautology or meaningless. But it was at least made up of everyday words - object, contain, possibility, situation - which any one of us may read and try to interpret. This one contains the word “form” which simply defies any attempt by anyone, other than the writer who uses it, to put a meaning to. If, compared with honest-to-goodness “it is true”, the expression “it is the case” is a relatively rare and relatively elusive, the word “form” goes much further into the realms of word-soup. The form you fill in is a standard article . A form of insanity is just a kind of insanity. Beyond that, you are in the clouds. The German is no help. Wittgenstein’s German word for form is Form. So, is the sentence before us of any help, by providing context? Well, hardly. The form of an object is the possibility of it being part of a state of affairs, which, remember is an atomic or simple fact. So, this nebulous noun “form” is assigned the meaning of the nebulous noun “possibility”.

Wittgenstein has already told us, several times, that, to take one quotation, “I cannot imagine objects excluded from the possibility of being combined in states of affairs”. I take this to mean that it is certain, not just possible, that any object will “occur in states of affairs”, if this is taken, in turn, as meaning “occur in one or more states of affairs” (the German also has states of affairs in the plural). To take my example, “this teacup is an object which is bound to be present in any number of ‘states of affairs’ or simple factual statements”, e.g., “the teacup is red, is round, weighs more than 10 grams, etc., etc.”

So why does Wittgenstein not say “The certainty of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object”? (He could, I suppose, observe that possibility includes certainty, but normally in normal use it excludes both impossibility and certainty).

Be that as it may, both certainty and possibility are abstract nouns. Although Wittgenstein has not been forthcoming on the matter, I imagine (with no great confidence) that he would not describe them as objects. In what sense can the certainty of some state (in this case, the occurrence in factual statements) be the form (whatever that may be) of the object which is the thing occurring? And, come to think of it, the object does not in any case occur in the factual statement, it is the name of the object. (Here, the spare style of Wittgenstein is a good defence. He could say that a fact is not a factual statement, it is the Sachverhalt, the thing-relationship, which lies behind the factual statement. But he cannot escape the reality that he is swimming in a word-soup, merely by missing out most of the words.)

When all the above is said and done, the main point remains that the word “form”, which conveys absolutely nothing to the reader, is dropped in here for the first time (this is not literally true – it has occurred in the common usage, equivalent to “kind of”), with no preamble or post-amble. This is worse than tautology, or obscurity. It is, unless clarified later, meaningless nonsense.

When I started this word-by-word examination, I intended to persevere for two pages of the Routledge paperback English version. Not to do it at all would debar me from expressing an opinion, on the grounds that I obviously did not understand the profound material of Wittgenstein, and to carry on for another 68 pages would be torture.

The second page ends here, but I go on a little to chase this word “form” further.

The Tractatus – a look beyond the first two pages, at the word “form”

To do so raised the possibility of a lot of re-typing of the printed text. I found to my surprise that the original English translation by Ogden is available on the internet, albeit in a form which is about as difficult to download as it is possible to imagine. I assembled a few pages of the text, and this is used below:

The occurrences of “form”, ignoring common uses such as “to form” which are simply equivalents of other common English words, are picked out in bold.

Before commenting on the first occurrence, the preceding text has to be read, and it is impossible to do this without tripping over 2.021 (nothing to do, in this case, with obscure language - the verb “to form” is used here in the banal sense of “to make up”):

2.02 The object is simple.

2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.

2.021 Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.

My criticism (indeed this applies to all my comments, but here it is particularly pronounced) is not at a level of philosophy, or in this case, a matter of probing beneath the surface of obscure rhetoric, but at a level at which a secondary school teacher might patiently try to point something out to a first year entrant. To imply by the use of “therefore” in 2.021 that the second sentence (“they cannot be compound”) follows by logic(!!) from the first (“objects form the substance of the world”) is simply – one searches for a word – wrong? idiotic? insane? mistaken? Or just incomprehensible? If this second sentence had been appended to 2.02 (“the object is simple”), it would be strange, it could be taken as an odd way or re-saying, or further defining, what has already been said in “the object is simple”, but at least it would make some sort of sense. As it is, the link is just not there. If it was, then it would be possible to say:

“x forms the substance of y, therefore x cannot be compound.”

Or even:

“x is substance, therefore it cannot be compound.”

I check in the rather useful index of the Pears paperback that both “substance” and “compound” make their first appearance in this place, so everything I have written above, about introducing new words in unfamiliar contexts without preamble, applies here as well.

It happens that Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911, just when Rutherford in the same place, proposed the nucleus and electrons theory. It was thus evident from then on that atoms, the smallest then-known constituents of “substance”, were made up of smaller “objects”. Was Wittgenstein implying that what he meant by “objects” were the smallest constituents of matter, whatever they might turn out to be? Was he implying that a teacup is not an object, as I had assumed in my illustrations above (and somewhere Wittgenstein himself implies in a incautious illustration that a chair qualifies as an object)? If so, should this assertion not have preceded the first mention of “object” in 2.01, “a state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things, things)” (2 words for things in German). If in ordinary language you said that the “constituent parts” of facts were made up of protons, neutrons and electrons (or in later speech, of the two or three score of elementary particles of the Standard Model), would hearers not make for the door?

Let’s get back to “form”

2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.

2.0212 It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).

2.022 It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something -- a form -- in common with the real world.

2.023 This fixed form consists of the objects.

The first of these two mentions in 2.022 and 2.023 seems to be the first (unannounced) stab at a “clear” (!) definition, or rather, a wave in the general direction of a definition, of the word. There is no argument presented here, no train of thought. We are just invited by Wittgenstein to agree that it is clear. And again the suspicion arises that this proposition, which is posing as philosophical elucidation, is at best a banality. “Yes”, we might say, “it is difficult to think that anyone could imagine something which has not already entered his brain from his sensory experience of the ‘real world’”. “But, who knows?”, we lesser mortals might go on to say. Or, “it is relatively clear or plausible, but that does not mean certain”.

But when all that is said, the question remains: what does this concept, “a form”, have to do with this banal and tentative thought?

When no answer comes to mind, we read on to the second mention, and what do we read there by way of clarification? Something so irrelevant, incoherent and inconsequential that Pears and Ogden come up with two completely different translations.

Ogden says: 2.023 This fixed form consists of the objects.

Pears says: 2.023 Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form .

Wittgenstein says: 2.023 Diese feste Form besteht eben aus den Gegenständen.

I translate: 2.023 This fixed form consists [exactly, simply] of the objects.

Is this not an intolerable word-soup? If the German that Ogden translated had the word “eben” in it (which is not at all sure), he preferred to miss it out in the translation, as well he might. If the German being used by Pears was in the same order as Ogden’s, then he must have decided to “improve” on Wittgenstein by inverting the whole sentence, which necessitated a change of verb. I’m not sure that a translator should do that unless it is unavoidable, which is certainly not the case here.

Be that as it may, what does the sentence mean? First we are told that “an imagined world must have something -- a form -- in common with the real world”, which can only mean that a “form” is what an imagined world has in common with the real world. To be told just after this vaguest of definitions that this form is “fixed” is breathtaking. And what is it fixed as? Answer: “objects”, presumably the things which “cannot be compound”, and so must be the basic building blocks of “substance”. Note that it is “the objects” for Ogden and Wittgenstein, but only “objects” for Pears. The Ogden translation would tend to mean all objects and hence the whole material world. “Objects”, on the other hand could be any unspecified number of objects.

In either case, 2.023 specifies that the elusive-sounding “form” is not in the least elusive. The form just consist of all, or perhaps some, of the objects “which make up the substance of the world”. Far from being a ghost, it is as tangible as a house.

But, having established that, what can one make of the implication, that all or some objects are what the imagined world has in common with the real world. For normal people, this would come close to saying that real world is what the imagined and real worlds have in common. We then have to remember that for Wittgenstein (1.1), “the world is the totality of facts, not of things”, and possibly he meant by this “world” the “real world” (who knows?). So maybe the real world, minus the relationships embedded in facts, is what the imagined and real worlds have in common, and this is named “the form”.

Does this sound like the ravings of a madman? Yes, it does. But the original text looked OK, when read in the normal spirit of “well, a bit obscure so far, but let’s read on and see what develops”.

2.0231 The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions -- first formed by the configuration of the objects.

Oddly enough, this makes sense in my interpretation as above, except that to speak of “a” form implies that there is more than one. Did Wittgenstein really agree with this?

2.0232 Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.

2.0233 Two objects of the same logical form are -- apart from their external properties -- only differentiated from one another in that they are different.

This really is disgraceful. What is a logical form? Are there forms other than logical forms? If so what are they? If a form is just (eben) fundamental particles, or bits of substance, minus any qualities (including colour, roughly speaking – see 2.0232), what can be logical or illogical about it?

2.02331 Either a thing has properties which no other has, and then one can distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is quite impossible to point to any one of them.

For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it -- for otherwise it would be distinguished.

This is incomprehensible. In the first sentence, we are back to “things” (why does he not stick to one nomenclature?) which have “properties” and may be distinguishable. So we are back to teacups. What happened to the proposition that objects cannot be compound or composite? If a thing is distinguishable, must it not be composite? Or is Wittgenstein (improbably) saying that quarks and leptons are distinguishable objects? On another tack, did it not occur to Wittgenstein that objects cannot possibly have the totality of their properties in common, since spatial position is certainly a property. Or did he think that one is a liberty to say there is a teacup, or alternatively ten teacups superimposed on each other?

The second sentence sounds like a joke.

2.024 Substance is what exists independently of what is the case.

2.025 It is form and content.

Comprehensible in Wittgenstein’s terms if there is a full stop after “form”. “Content” is introduced for the first time here, and is incomprehensible.

2.0251 Space, time and colour (colouredness) are forms of objects.

Totally incomprehensible, in the light of the “definition” (!) of “form” given above. If Wittgenstein by any chance means “kinds of objects”, then it is equally incomprehensible, given the definition of “object”.

I END THIS DETAILED ANALYSIS HERE – THERE IS A LIMIT!

Russell’s introduction

Even at first sight, some ten or eleven years ago, the Tractatus seemed to me to be on precarious ground. On beginning this current exercise, I genuinely thought that if I examined the text word by word, some light might dawn. However, the result has been a growing, or rather, constantly reinforced, conviction that the stuff verges on mindless nonsense. The question then arises: why did quite unarguably clever and even brilliant men regard Wittgenstein as someone quite special? Even Frege, if Monk has got it right, made some polite remarks, and refrained from saying “put this in the bin”.

It occurred to me that the most convenient material at hand to look further into this is to examine Russell’s introduction with some care. Generally, I regard editor’s and friends’ remarks as disposable, since what I am after is the author’s own work, so I had till then merely glanced at Russell’s 14-page text. I was now fairly keen to make out just what he made of the stuff analysed above. Note that he was a mathematician, he got two first class degrees, and took only one year for the second one. On the face of it, an excellent man to read Wittgenstein critically. Or maybe it will turn out that he is evidence that a mathematics mind can be a 100% humanist one, i.e., one unused to dealing with the facts and only the facts, as opposed to the approach of “how does this sound? does it convince? is this fantastically clever?”.

The first sentence is: "Mr Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whether or not it prove to give the ultimate truth on the matters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and scope and profundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world".

This is mirrored by the last two sentences of the introduction: "To have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficuly and importance. This merit, in my opinion, belongs to Mr Wittgenstein's book, and makes it one which no serious philosopher can afford to negelect".

It will be seen in the detailed commentary below that there is nothing in the 14 pages which separate these publisher's blurbs which gives objective support to them.

He then says that he is going to tell us “the problem with which he (Wittgenstein) is concerned”, as if he could not leave that to Wittgenstein (which as it happens is true, but that in itself should turn the reader off). It turns out that there are several “problems as regards language”:

1. “what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it” - psychology

2. “what is the relation between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean” – epistemology.

3. “using sentences to convey truth rather than falsehood” – depends entirely on the subject matter.

4. “what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other.”

Russell concludes: “This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr Wittgenstein is concerned”.

So there we are. Let’s go over that a bit. The first overall comment is to remark the sheer lackadaisiacal effrontery in presenting this stuff as if he was enumerating definitively the “problems of language”, more or less in the style of someone saying “there are four varieties of chaffinch”.

Problem 3 does not seem to me to be a problem at all. The entire human race from its beginnings has been using language, not to convey truth rather than falsehood – that is a philosophers’ kind of statement – but to convey useful or entertaining or sociable information whose content usually includes bits which are more or less true and, at the same time, more of less false. Is “it’s a nice day” true or false? Is “you’re an idiot” true or false? Both convey information - not “true or false” information, but non-empty information perfectly well understood by the hearer.

Problem 1 is obviously a line of enquiry, especially if the word “brains” is substituted for “minds”. It is woolly stuff, however, and I would guess that the word “psychology” can be defined in a far better and more informative way.

Problem 2 is woolly and nothing but woolly. If that defines epistemology, then that explains why I have reached advanced years without knowing what epistemology is.

So we come to 4, with which “Mr Wittgenstein is concerned”. First, I should make clear that this woolly language has by now caused it to be lost to sight that Russell has previously said that he is now talking about “the part of his [Wittgenstein’s] theory which deals with Symbolism”. So Wittgenstein, according to this earlier assertion (just 15 lines before), is concerned about more than symbolism.

In the wording of what I have denoted by problem 4, we read the extraordinarily loose phrasing, “one fact (such as a sentence)”.

If I say “one animal (such as a fox)”, I am surely implying that all foxes are animals, or to use what I imagine is Russellian language, any fox is one member of the class named “animals”. Or, going back to Socrates, all foxes are animals, but not all animals are foxes.

So, to me, this wording implies that Russell is making the obscure and ludicrous claim that all sentences are facts. I would not mind in the least, of course, if Russell were to say this in as many words, since I would then know that from there on, when he says “fact”, he is not using the word in any sense known to English speakers. In that latter sense, hardly any sentences are facts. If I say in ordinary speech, “that is a fact”, or, “is that a fact?”, then the sense I intend to convey is that the matter indicated by the word “that” is a sentence which is more or less objectively true, and there are very few sentences in ordinary speech or writing which qualify for that description. For example, “it’s a nice day” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be mistaken for a fact, any more than “she is beautiful” could be. Both are obviously opinions.

If one strives to comprehend “what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other”, one is driven to the conclusion that it would have to read, “what relation must one thing (such as a word or sentence) have to an object or fact in order to be capable of being a symbol for that object or fact”. In this version, a word is a mere label, and the sentence is a mere thing, a succession of squiggles or sub-symbols (or sounds) which taken together form one “symbol” which somehow mirrors a fact.

If this is so, and I believe it is inescapable, it means that Russell, who is supposed to be elucidating Wittgenstein, is confusing an object with a fact, a confusion even more confusing than anything in the Tractatus

All of this is extremely tedious, but it is only thus that one can convey the essential point that it is no good wading through Russell or Wittgenstein hoping that light will dawn. That is perfectly normal in ordinary speech or indeed in any writing that can be classed as literature, entertainment or rhetoric. There, the process is like that of enjoying a meal. When it is finished do you feel better? Perhaps there are some who might regard Russell as enjoyable bed-time reading, and there would be no harm in that, but it is safe to say that Russell himself, and the great majority of his thousands of readers, did not regard this writing in this way. They regarded it in exactly the way that a scientist regards his own scientific paper, or a new scientific paper by another which comes before him, that is, something which conveys, word by word and line by line, information previously unknown to the reader. A scientist expects to understand each word he reads, either because its meaning is one in general circulation, or because it is assumed to be known in his circle of experts, or because, if not known in the precise sense intended, he or the author has taken care to re-define it. Clearly, neither Wittgenstein, nor Russell who is setting out to explain Wittgenstein, nor indeed their numerous audience, seem to know what business they are in. They pretend to be conveying new information, but they use the age-old methods of rhetoric, in which the test of value is not “is it true”, but “does it make me feel better”, or “does it pass for clever, novel, plausible, convincing, etc”.

I have now reached the bottom of page 1 of Russell’s 14-page introduction, and indeed, I more or less ignored the first half-page of waffle. The starting idea was to find out why certified clever men like G E Moore and Russell could take very seriously the more or less idiotic introductory pages of the Tractatus. I think the answer may be becoming clear. They were all a “good turn” on their respective stages, and in front of their respective audiences, but none of them, apparently, had the bad luck to be confronted by an innocent lad who might ask, and be heard asking, “where are his clothes?”. Indeed, they had the good fortune to mark the examination scripts of their audiences!

I hinted above that Russell begins by wading through a thick mud of confusion. After an introductory paragraph, he listed what Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is supposed to deal with, namely:

the logical structure of propositions and
the nature of logical inference
theory of knowledge
principles of physics
ethics, and finally
the mystical

It would be helpful indeed if he or Wittgenstein gave a page-index along those lines.

All this in 69 rather small pages?

But then immediately, this list is abandoned, and in the very next sentence, we read that, “in order to understand Mr Wittgenstein’s book, it is necessary to realise what is the problem with which he is concerned”. So now there is one problem.

But, again immediately, he goes on, “in the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism, he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language”. So is this the one problem with which he is concerned, although it is only a part of his theory?

The very next sentence says that there are “various” problems, enumerated as the four referred to above, code-named psychology, epistemology, objective science, and one last one, where we jump off the cliff of comprehensibility into the morass of word-soup – “what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?” So, is this the one problem, while the other “various” problems are left behind? And is this question the same as the one problem mentioned a line or two before – “what is the condition which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language”. Russell does not pause to say. He is a certifiably clever man, he can write such clever prose at speed, his readers read the clever stuff at speed, presumably gasp, “how clever”, and move on.

And is the whole project not nonsense from the start? What reasonable person would pretend to set about a task of finding “the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language”. Is a language whose typical remark might be, “nice day – is your mother well?”, ever going to be logically perfect, whatever that may mean? And please note that Russell does not make the mistake of setting down in words of one syllable what it may mean. Even the one word “perfect” itself is invariably used in real language in demonstrably imperfect ways. If we cannot imagine what “perfect” means, and have only the vaguest idea (even after reading Russell and Wittgenstein) of what “logic” means, how can we possibly discuss the meaning of “logically perfect”?

So what now? Every sentence of Russell is bound to be unsatisfactory. The Russell race course can be negotiated only as a race horse “successfully” jumps over each hurdle as it comes, landing safely on the other side, and running on immediately to the next one without a backward glance. This is what the student-reader does. He is being coached in rhetoric, and he is successful if he can reproduce the rhetoric, or, if he is outstanding (getting a first), he may be able to produce similar or cleverer rhetoric himself.

If I can bear it, I should try to emulate the student. I’ll try this, beginning now. I’ll enumerate the paragraphs, and annotate them, as a student might do in preparing for an exam.

Russell's text occupies 14 pages, numbered (in lower case Roman numerals) from 9 to 22. There are 31 paragraphs, some of around page-length.

Para 1 (p9) This is the introductory paragraph already dismissed as containing nothing but airy words.

Para 2 (p9) This is the list of subjects allegedly “dealt with” by Wittgenstein.

the logical structure of propositions and
the nature of logical inference
theory of knowledge
principles of physics
ethics, and finally
the mystical

Para 3 (p9) This is the ramble which concludes that Wittgenstein is concerned with how one fact can be capable (Russell’s italics) of being a symbol of another.

Para 4 (p10) This paragraph approaches half a page in length and says absolutely nothing.

Para 5 (p10) There must be “something” in common between the sentence and the fact. “This is perhaps [note] the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein’s theory”. Wow! And, “so he [Wittgenstein] contends”, this cannot be said, it can only be shown (Russell’s italics). Mon dieu.

Para 6 (p10) A “simple” needs a simple symbol. Russell then quotes, for no obvious reason, a bit from Wittgenstein’s 4.003 about most philosophical questions being nonsensical. Then, again for no obvious reason, he goes on a bit about Sachverhalte being simple facts, whereas Tatsache are complex facts. He gives no rhyme or reason. He states and runs.

Para 7 (p11) He quotes Wittgenstein as using the metaphor of an object projected in many ways – so a fact of the real world can be “projected” into many different languages. In my view, this gets us nowhere at all.

Para 8 (p11) A totally ga-ga paragraph which is presented as elucidating the previous paragraph, but ends, incomprehensibly by quoting, evidently with approval, Wittgenstein’s 3.1432, as follows. “We must not say [why not, says I, but Russell says nothing] the complex sign ‘aRb’ says ‘a stands in a certain relation R to b’; but we must say [why, says I, but Russell says nothing] that [Wittgenstein’s italics] ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that [Wittgenstein’s italics] aRb”. This Wittgensteinism seemed to me to be so loopy, both in its thought, and in the expression of the thought, that I turned to Pears’ translation (Russell was using Ogden’s), and sure enough they seemed to have wrestled with it too.

I put the two versions below:

Ogden: “We must not say the complex sign ‘aRb’ says ‘a stands in a certain relation to b’; but we must say that ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that aRb”.

Pears: “Instead of, ‘The complex sign ‘aRb’ says that a stands to b in a the relation R’, we ought to put, ‘ That ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that aRb”.

The rewording shows evidence of struggle, but of course it is in vain. Wrestle as one will, it is impossible to make any sense either of what Wittgenstein is trying to say, or of his way of saying it, or of what he might have in mind in telling us what we must or must not say.

I check the German. The words “must .. must not .. ought to” appear nowhere! So the English makes him look more of an ass than he is. At the risk of going back on my decision to press on without minute examination, I render literally (without my own quotation marks in order not to introduce confusion) what he in fact says:

Not: “The complex symbol ‘aRb’ says that a stands to b in the relation R”, but: That “a” stands in a certain relation to “b” says that aRb.

This is idiotic. Even the punctuation, the upper case "That", the italics, are idiotic. And the translators knew they had to do something about it, and were on a hiding to nothing. But at least it is not dictatorial in the way the English is.

It is this idiotic nonsense which Russell chooses to pull out and quote, without comment or elucidation, claiming by implication that it illustrates or clarifies in some unexplained way the stuff about reality being capable of being “projected” into language in a large number of ways.

Para 9 (p11) This is a word soup. The message is that we make a “picture” of a “fact”, and the details of the picture, which itself is a fact, form “something identical” [yes, I quote] in their relationships, with the details of the fact. Neither Wittgenstein nor Russell pause to tell us how they know this, how they know anything about this mysterious unknowable something called a fact. Surely the thing that we really can claim to know is the fact (yes, they give me permission to call it that) that they call the picture of the fact a fact. Oddly neither Russell nor Wittgenstein, to my knowledge so far, speculate as to what a dog or a worm makes of a fact. They seem to observe and know the relationships between objects, and between objects and themselves, just as we do.

Para 10 (p12) This paragraph is a whole page long. Russell picks out Wittgenstein’s statement that a gramophone record, and the sound it produces, bear the same relation to each other as that between language and the world. Well, it is far fetched. No light is thrown. Also we are told that every philosophical proposition is bad grammar. With no sense of the ridiculous, Russell quotes Wittgenstein as saying that philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were [!], opaque and blurred, while going on in the very next sentence to say:

“In accordance with this principle the things that have to be [note: have to be] said in leading the reader to understand [!] Mr Wittgenstein’s theory are all of them things which that theory itself condemns as meaningless [no pause for laughter]. With this proviso [some proviso!] we will endeavour to convey the picture of the world which seems [seems? - is this the right man to explain Wittgenstein?] to underlie his system”.

Did Russell have any sense of humour, I wonder? If Wittgenstein presents himself as a man who is appearing on earth at last to make the opaque clear, is it not odd that Russell “has to” come along to “endeavour” to make us understand what Wittgenstein “seems” to say, by methods which are stated in advance to be “meaningless”? And could anybody who lives on this planet associate the Tractatus with the notion of being clear??! What is the point of writing a "clear" book if someone else has to write an, in the event incomprehensible, 14-page introduction to “lead the reader to understand” it?

Para 11 (p13) This begins, rather as the Tractatus does, with the assertion that “the world consists of facts”. Like Wittgenstein, Russell does not bother to explain this very odd notion. He himself goes on in the same sentence to say what I would say, if he did not, namely, “facts cannot strictly speaking be defined”. Even a child would say, naturally, that the world consists of himself, his mother and the rest of his family, his toys, the house, the street, and so on. That is, he would enumerate things, and he would not add that things cannot be defined. Would Russell have said that Cambridge consists of facts? Would he say that his father consisted of facts? Does a jar of marmalade consist of facts? What on earth is a fact? If I say, “this shoe is heavy”, is that a fact? Surely, if facts are what the world is, Wittgenstein and Russell should do us the honour of explaining exactly what they mean. Maybe he does that in the following sentences …..

To reprise: Russell echoes Wittgenstein in saying the world consists of, i.e., in normal language, is made up of, facts, whereas I would say that in the normal use of language absolutely nothing is “made up of” facts. In ordinary speech, just as my house consists of bricks and many other objects that I could enumerate, so is the world made up of numerable things, including human beings. Russell more or less bows in this direction, although staying silent on the whole matter just as Wittgenstein does, by going on with: “facts cannot strictly speaking be defined” but then adding, “but we can explain what we mean by saying that facts are what make propositions true, or false”, which to my mind is not explaining very much. Is he saying that a fact in his usage is a true proposition? If so, why does he not say that facts are true propositions, instead of the weasely way he chooses? And even if that was clear, in what way does that explain why it makes sense to say that the world consists of true propositions? My hunch is that to do so would infringe one of the rules of rhetoric – do not be too clear. As expressed, it passes muster. As I have re-expressed it, it is simply and openly ridiculous.

A little later he says that “Socrates was wise” is a fact. But what sort of fact is this? “Socrates was a man”, and “Socrates was born in 470BC” are both facts (although even there, there is room for argument), but in normal speech, “Socrates was wise” is a matter of opinion, and is thus not even a candidate for facthood. This drunk man’s walk continues that the fact “Socrates was wise” is what Wittgenstein called an “atomic fact”, but when “analysed as fully as possible”, simples or objects must be found. Not that he volunteers to find any, because “it is not contended that we can actually isolate the simple”, but nevertheless, “it is a logical necessity, like an electron”. Wow! I suppose the master rhetorician means (without making the mistake of saying it) that just as an atom needs electrons, so an atomic facts needs simples. Of course, no physicist ever said before the discovery of electrons that an atom must have electrons as a logical necessity. In physics you discover things, or in the nearest approach to Russell, you guess they might exist, and then you go and look for them. In the last three sentences of this paragraph, the rhetorician really gets into his stride. Having lulled his audience with quite muster-passing absurdities, he feels safe to launch a barrage of clever-sounding but undiluted 100% incomprehensible nonsense. I now quote it in full. I could take it, phrase by incomprehensible phrase, to show that it is nonsense, but surely this is unnecessary.

“The assertion that there is a certain complex reduces to the assertion that its constituents are related in a certain way, which is the assertion of a fact: thus if we give a name to the complex the name only has meaning in virtue of the truth of a certain proposition, namely the proposition asserting the relatedness of the constituents of the complex. Thus the naming of complexes presupposes propositions, while propositions presuppose the naming of simples. In this way the naming of simples is shown to be what is logically first in logic.”

Para 12 (p13) Now get a load of the first sentence of this paragraph. “The world is fully described if all the atomic facts are known, together with the fact that these are all of them.” Isn’t this just saying that the world is fully described if it is fully described, together with the fact that fully is indeed fully? The inane assertion is then made that the world is not described by merely naming all the objects in it. Here again, and with no discussion, the English language is being mangled. No one would dream of saying that anything can be described by any process whatever which consists of naming. This would be equivalent to answering the request “describe your mother” with “her name is Mary” Along the way, we are told (not directly but as an aside) that “a proposition (true or false)” can assert an atomic fact. So the master, without actually saying so, entertains the notion that a false proposition can be a fact. This again flies in the face of the language. Although the language as used is very hazy about just what a fact is, and indeed about what the truth is, the notion is universal that a fact is a fact, i.e., it is true. When Wittgenstein says in his proposition 1.1 that “the world is the totality of facts”, is Russell telling us that we should understand facts as facts (true or false)? However, from of this mess, Russell seems to bear out the message that atomic facts are logically independent of all others. Logic is thus about “molecular facts”

Para 13 (p14) In one short sentence, Russell introduces the name “truth-function”.

Para 14 (p14) This para explains what a truth function is. A truth “function” of propositions p, q, r, …. is another proposition, containing p, q, r, …. which is true only if p, q, r, … are all true. Russell points out that propositions “A believes p” and “p is a proposition about Socrates” cannot on the face of it be truth functions. But he says that Wittgenstein “proceeds” to show that this is not so – according to Wittgenstein, apparently, all propositions are truth functions of their constituent propositions.

Para 15 (p14) It is here that a list of contents or a good index would be useful. Russell says that Wittgenstein uses a certain symbol, and it is so odd and recognisable, that it is feasible to turn pages to find it. It turns up in proposition 6. Now the Tractatus ends with proposition 7, which is a single 11-word sentence, the famous one-liner, and proposition 6 is on p58 in a work which ends on p74. So just when I was wondering when Russell was going to cut to the chase, here he is, nearly at the kill. And the tone changes from rather empty waffle to densely obscure symbolic logic. Oh dear. I fear that this will enable Russell to talk nonsense at will, and undetected. He says that a certain Sheffer has shown that all truth functions of p and q can be “constructed out of” the single proposition (not-p and not-q). This, he says, is “easy to see”. For example, he says

(p or q) = not(not-p and not-q).

This shows how clever these guys are (no sarcasm intended) and if they are going to talk nonsense, as they inevitably do if you track it down in detail, it is going to be clever nonsense. Anyway, Russell says that Wittgenstein, in a “very interesting analysis”, extended the process from p’s and q’s which “are given by enumeration”, whatever that means, to “general propositions …. which are given as all those satisfying some condition”. Wittgenstein now introduces a new term. We’ve heard about atomic propositions and molecular propositions and truth functions which are propositions, propositions given by enumeration, and “general” propositions which satisfy some condition (why this restriction makes them general, goodness only knows). Now we have a propositional function, e.g.,

fx = (x is human).

Presumably x is a thing, like Socrates. We proceed to (fx is false for all values of x), meaning absolutely nothing is human, in which case human is a totally unuseable adjective, but Russell says nothing about that. The negation of this would be (there is at least one x for which fx is true), let’s say Socrates, and this is represented, he says, by a symbolism which I cannot type. It is a backward facing E, which I will represent here by an italicised E. OK, the symbolic representation of this negation is (Ex).fx. Very rum.

This “very rum” formulation means that fx, a “propositional function” standing for “x is human” is false but for one exception, namely x=Socrates, say. Maybe this odd “E” means “exception”. Who knows?

Anyway, on to para 16.

Para 16 (p15) Russell begins by saying very gingerly that, “Mr Wittgenstein’s explanation of his symbolism at this point is not quite fully given in the text”. As if any explanation whatever is fully given in this wall-graffiti text. The symbolism in question is, as said above, in proposition 6, so Russell has skipped from seemingly preliminary coughs, to near the end of Wittgenstein’s text. In trying to reproduce this symbolism, I have to use µ instead of the Greek letter ksi, or xi:

                                    [p,µ,N(µ)]

(also, in the text, p and µ have hyphen-like top-hats).

Para 17 (p15) Russell elucidates:

p is all atomic propositions
µ is any set of propositions (presumably atomic or otherwise)
N(µ) is the negation of all the µ-propositions.

Para 18 (p15) The whole thing, [p,µ,N(µ)], means whatever can be obtained by taking any selection µ of atomic propositions, negating them all, then taking any selection of the set of propositions now obtained, together with any of the originals – and so on indefinitely.

“This is, Wittgenstein says, (Russell again seeming not to be too keen to endorse) the general truth-function, and also the general form of proposition”. No wonder Russell took to the streets with CND! In a further elucidation, Russell says that “it follows that all propositions which are not atomic can be derived from such as are, by a uniform process which is indicated by Mr Wittgenstein’s symbol”. To a simple guy like me, it does not seem like a very wonderful insight to say that all complex propositions can be “derived from” simple propositions. And what is the point of putting it this way round anyway? Isn’t it more direct to say that complex propositions can always be analysed into a set of simple or “atomic” propositions? After all, that is the normal direction of progress in human insights. We daily observe unutterably complicated events, the flight of a bird, say, and progress comes from analysing it down to the beating of wings against air. Could Russell give one example of the opposite process, in which one starts with “atomic” facts, and proceeds to as yet unknown complex facts? (Added later: It occurs to me that going from the observed details, not to the complex observed whole, but to the theory behind the observed whole, is what science does, and the process could be called inference by a “philosopher of science”. But in no way is the resulting theory a “complex proposition” derivable from “atomic propositions” by “a uniform process which is indicated by Mr Wittgenstein’s symbol”.)

Para 19 (p16) Anyway, Russell charges on: “From this uniform method of construction we arrive at an amazing simplification of the theory of inference, as well as a definition of the sort of propositions that belong to logic”. Is Russell ever going to say just what “logic” is, and how one becomes qualified to judge what does not belong to it? We proceed to clever, clever nonsense. Because, if p follows from q, the meaning of p is contained in the meaning of q, it “of course” results that nothing can be deduced from an atomic proposition. Yes, p may follow from q, but it cannot be deduced from q. Again one wonders at the towering conceit by which Russell speaks as if he is free to assert that “follow from” is totally different from “deduced from”. (If somebody said, “I have deduced A from B”, Russell/Wittgenstein would reply with the “amazing simplification”, “no you didn’t – the fact that you were able to deduce B from A shows that B was present in A all the time, and so merely followed from A”) And so, Russell concludes the paragraph with, “all propositions of logic, Wittgenstein maintains (note again the stepping back – he could have said ‘he was the first to discover’), are tautologies”.

Again, this discovery or assertion is not so revolutionary in its own terms. If Russell or Wittgenstein can persuade themselves that they can even conceive of all atomic propositions (and they can, if they can entertain statements like “the world is all that is the case” – a tautology if ever there was one), then clearly all can be known, and everything implies everything else. Any proposition is either an atomic proposition or a mere assemblage of such propositions. Indeed, in such a picture, it makes little sense even to talk of non-atomic propositions. After all, a bag of potatoes, is only atomic potatoes plus an atomic bag. However, this picture makes sense only to those who still after two millennia illustrate their arguments with “Socrates is human”. What would they make of “Socrates is beautiful”? – let alone “µp.µx=h” (typology forces me to use µ instead of the usual capital delta in Heisenberg's formula) or “time cannot flow backwards” – three statements which provoke an “eh?” rather than a stroking of the chin in a contemplative search for true or false.

Para 20 (p16) Russell continues simultaneously to promote and undermine Wittgenstein in saying that there cannot be “in Wittgenstein’s logic” (he avoids saying "in logic") be any such thing as a causal nexus. “We do not in fact know” whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow. Only in Wittgenstein’s logic, of course. We all do not indeed know whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, and we all know as well that in that case we might as well fall silent, because if we do not know that the sun will rise tomorrow, then the word “know”, and the whole of the English and every other language, is incapable of transmitting anything at all beyond the present microsecond. Russell quotes Wittgenstein, apparently approvingly: “the events of the future cannot (and yes, I’ve checked in proposition 5.1361 that these are Wittgenstein’s italics) be inferred from those of the present”. Well, we can only imagine that Wittgenstein is here inventing a new meaning for the word “cannot”, since in every conceivable meaning known to the rest of humanity, people can, and do, infer just that at every moment of their lives. Of course, if he had said “cannot be inferred infallibly”, then he would have been in line with possible normal usage, but even then, normal usage would imply that failure to infer correctly would be due to having an incomplete knowledge of the “events of the present”. In other words, normal usage would reject the notion of “cannot possibly be inferred infallibly”. Just as Wittgenstein has a blinding perception that all logic is tautology, most scientists have the perception that all of the world, past and future, is a tautology – the process at every moment is pre-determined to the smallest detail by the past.

Para 21 (p16) I note with amusement that this paragraph begins: “let us now take up another subject”. Yes, indeed. State and run.

The new subject is names. Well, a quick read through the paragraph yields no light, except that Wittgenstein “rejects identity”. Names are apparently “only given to simples”. It is typical of the lack of what Popper would refer to as subjecting a hypothesis to destructive analysis, that these guys talk on without boggling their minds over what a “simple” might be. They don’t call it a “thing”. But here I am struck by doubt. Doesn’t Wittgenstein talk about Sache and Dinge? I check. I find that “simple” has 13 proposition references, every one of which shows Wittgenstein using the words “simple” and “simply” only in their normal English sense.

The same index (English version) records that “Ding” has 20 mentions and Sache has 4. Gegenstand (object) has 43, including some over several propositions. I’ve read through a few of Wittgenstein’s propositions about objects, and they are simply incomprehensible. What can you make of proposition 2.021: “Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite”? The head simply spins with this. First you would need a glossary to explain what exactly is meant by “substance” and “world”. Then, taken literally, it reads that “objects cannot be composite because they make up the substance of the world”. Although not applicable to the world we know, it is perfectly possible to imagine a world made up of number of “objects”, all of which could be composite. I could say, for example, (true or not), that a world not unlike ours is made of objects called atoms, yet that would not imply that atoms cannot be composite. It would simply imply that when you have enumerated all atoms, you have enumerated the world. There is no “substance” outside of atoms. This is only a snippet. There are oodles of this stuff. At one point, he specifically states that objects may or may not be spatial, and has a throwaway remark that “notes must have some pitch”, implying clearly that a note is an object, and perhaps also that pitch is an object. Of course he does not pause for one instant to clarify.

Ah ha! At 2.024, I find that he does belatedly provide a glossary on the meaning of substance. Wait for it. “Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case”!!! And in case this is not clear, he adds as a separate proposition, 2.025: “It is form and content”!!!!

I hurriedly exit from this sea of confusion, back to Russell. What does he mean by “a simple”? He does not, of course, say. He introduces it without preamble by stating (para 6) that in an ideal language, there would be one unique name for every simple. Later (para 11), he talks of two men “assuming for the moment that the men may be treated as simples”. Well, if you can assume that, even for the most fleeting of moments, then a simple cannot be Wittgenstein’s object, which “cannot be composite”.

And then he does venture something to clarify “simple”, a page after its introduction. “If an atomic fact (I note again that Wittgenstein does not use this term – he uses Sachverhalt, which Pears translates as a state of affairs!) is analysed as fully as possible, the constituents finally reached may be called ‘simples’ or ‘objects’”

So, there we are. A simple is an object, a thing, a Ding, a Sache, a Gegenstand. Would it be too much to ask that these supposedly accurate users of language could settle on a strict vocabulary? After all, Russell himself says that an ideal language should do so, so why does he not make the slightest attempt at discipline in this regard. For scientists, it is a sine qua non.

Para 21 began with Russell turning to another subject – that of names (which are given only to simples).

I check the English index for “name”. This index gives the impression of being laboriously full. So I may assume, I think, that the very first occurrence of the word is in prop 3.142. I quote it in full:

“Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot”.

On the level of street-speech, this gives an impression of comprehensibility. Indeed, my reaction would be that “a set of names” cannot express anything whatever, any more than a list of invented nonsense-words can. The first part of the sentence presumably means that one or more facts can express something, which you can call anything you like, including “a sense”. But then you pause. Since when has “a sense” been used in street-speech? “Does that make sense?” or “what is the sense in that?” is typical usage. There, sense means “meaning”. Americans can be heard using the word to mean “opinion”, as in “what is your sense of that (the complicated yarn under discussion)”. So I now look up “sense” in the index. Its first use by Wittgenstein is in the preface, where he talks of “the whole sense of the book”, using sense in the street-speech way I have defined. The same goes for its use in 2.0211. The next mention leads up towards the first mention of “name”. It is in 2.221 and 2.222, which together read:

“What a picture represents is its sense. The agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsehood.”

And what do I do now? Of course I look up the index for “picture”, and I could go on with “thought”, “form”, and so on. Clearly, Wittgenstein is not using “picture” in its ordinary sense(!). I spend quite a lot of time looking at pictures. I have never, or very, very, rarely, asked myself, “is it true or false”. When Wittgenstein states as if laying down a diktat, “what a picture represents is its sense”, he is simply inventing a new language. And of course he is perfectly free to do so, but not unless he specifically warns us, and provides up with a glossary of his new meanings. He would need to tell us exactly what he means by a picture, and what he means by its sense. As it is, he seems to me to be dressing up in contorted and proliferating pseudo-English the banal idea that what is expressed as a fact may or may not be a fact, i.e., true.

So I will not chase this will o’ the wisp further. I go back to Russell’s:

“in Wittgenstein, names are given only to simples”

and Wittgenstein’s:

“only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot”.

but I find I cannot resist pointing out that if facts express a sense, why bring in the word “picture” to “represent” its own sense? Why not just use a fact or facts to “express the sense”?

I am at Wittgenstein’s 3.142, quoted just above, and I am about to try to find out what Russell is referring to in the quotation just above it.

Wittgenstein’s very first mention of “name” is in 3.142. It is mentioned twice in the next six propositions. In the seventh (3.202), we find “the simple signs employed in propositions are called names”. How can anyone whether called Russell, Keynes, Moore, or Joe Bloggs, take seriously a man who issues a (presumably carefully mulled-over and edited) book in which he gives an English word a totally individualised meaning, but does not give that meaning until (and then incomprehensibly) its third mention?

Wittgenstein goes on (3.203), “a name means an object. The object is its meaning. (‘A’ is the same sign as ‘A’)”. Yes, that bracket is copied from the text, and the two entries of ‘A’ are indeed absolutely identical, as far as my eye can make out. What, I want to yell, does it mean? When I cast round this thick word-soup, I see in 3.1431 text which explains it all!! As follows:

“The essence [Wittgenstein gives no meaning for this] of a propositional sign [eh?] is very clearly seen [!!] if we imagine one composed of spatial objects (such as tables, chairs, and books [yes, that is Wittgenstein talking]) instead of written signs. Then the spatial arrangement of these things will express the sense of the proposition”.

Here, Wittgenstein comes near to breaking a rhetorician’s rule, the one about never being too clear. A chair is a spatial object, and therefore an object within the meaning of the act. (Remember that in proposition 2.02, Wittgenstein has said that “objects are simple”, and in 2.021, “objects make up the substance of the word – that is why they cannot be composite”. Is a chair not exceedingly composite?) And we’ve just been told that a name means an object. So a name can “mean” a chair. (Maybe the name “chair” means the object, chair.) But Russell says that “in Wittgenstein, names are given only to simples”. So a Russellian simple is a Wittgensteinian object, and could be a chair. Is that clear? No, by George it is not. If an unimaginably complex thing like a chair can be a simple, then an even more complex thing like a dog can be a simple, and why shouldn’t a thing more complex still like a pack of dogs be a simple, why not the entire nation of Switzerland, why not the entire United Nations, why not the world, which according to this abysmal idiot Wittgenstein is “all that is the case”? If a simple can be anything you care to mention, why bother to invent a specialised Russellian name for it? And why, oh why, having decided to do so, is the invented name the grotesquely inappropriate one of “simple”?

After some lapse of time, I read the above paragraph with a mixture of despair and contempt. If I were to say to anybody, high or low, GCSE-level or Nobel-level, “I, Walter Stanners, achiever of nothing very much, am wasting my time with the idiotic, incoherent, lazy, random drivel of a couple of verbal comedians named Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein”, they would either give a puzzled look (is this some sort of joke?), or laugh so uncontrollably that their trousers would fall down. Yet, with absolutely no possible shadow of doubt, what I have written above (yes, not only just above, but all the way to the top), shows (to use one of Wittgenstein’s favourite words) that all of those dismissive words apply with knobs on.

In my attempt to use Russell to reveal to me what there is in Wittgenstein, I innocently pick up a promising phrase in Russell, “in Wittgenstein’s theoretical language, names are only given [sic] to simples”, only to find that (a) Wittgenstein nowhere in his “theoretical” or any other language uses the word “simples” or any German word that has anything to do with “simple”, and (b) that Wittgenstein nowhere that I have found makes any prominent play at all with the word “name”. His main point is not that a name can be given only to a “simple”, or as I and Wittgenstein would say, to an object, but that all you can say about an object is its name. Put that way round, the need for an object to be in any way “simple” disappears, and all my quibbling difficulties disappear too. With this understanding, there is no problem whatever in naming a dog, and also naming a pack of dogs, or anything else whatever, including the ultimate object, the world. According to Wittgenstein, you can picture an object, and you can show various relationships involving objects, but you can never talk about an object or the relationships of objects, because they are unknowable. Always you are talking about pictures to which you have given a name. Personally, I see no point, i.e., no usefulness, in this distinction, but I unlike Russell, I grasp what is being said. Was Russell just too stupid to understand that his “a name can only be given to an object” is not the same as Wittgenstein’s “the only thing that can be said about an object is its name”?

It is odd that my motive in reading Russell was to look for light on Wittgenstein, but I find here that I have perfectly understood (and pronounced it, for once, perfectly correct but leading nowhere) this little part of Wittgenstein which Russell has failed to understand.

I add that if I am right in what I’ve said above about Wittgenstein’s names, this does not credit Wittgenstein with anything original. I imagine that even when I left school, or quite soon after, I was already familiar with the idea, which you might never think of yourself, but need to hear just once at any age to be convinced, that what we know about the world is only and inevitably, our sense-data. The normal person, I think, nods and passes on. It is true, unarguably true, but by its very nature, something from which nothing follows, so not worth the least further talk or thought. Wittgenstein’s originality is to think, but quite wrongly, that it is worth going on about.

I’m now going to trawl through the dozen or so mention of the word “name” in Wittgenstein, in order to check what I wrote above, “Wittgenstein nowhere that I have found makes any prominent play at all with the word ‘name’”.

I discover I first have to grapple with the word “sign”. This occurs for the first time about one page before the first appearance of “name”, and of course, is just dropped in without preamble. Five lines later, we learn that “a proposition is a proposition sign”. Yes, I quote. Does Wittgenstein know what the word “is” means (it is said that President Clinton once defended himself by saying that the accusation depended on what was meant by “is”)? What I think he means is an extension of my thoughts above on “name”, namely that the written “proposition” is inevitably merely a “sign” – a “proposition sign” - directing you to “project” (his word) your faculties to “think of the sense of the proposition” (his words again). And again I would accuse Wittgenstein of finding a high-flown and rather obscure way of stating something that everybody already knows, but does not think there is any use in talking about – that a written symbol is merely a sign to something else, and that something else is in turn a symbol for a “something” which is unknowable but which we know from experience is fairly predictably imaged by our senses.

Wittgenstein notes in parentheses that Frege called a proposition a composite name. Yes, why not? It is possible to imagine a language in which you could either say “the sky is blue”, or, to save time, “skyblue”, or “hohum”. The only reason we do not do this is that you would need an infinite number of proposition-names. You get round this if you say that “the-sky-is-blue” is the proposition name. So I agree, Mr Frege, but what is the point of saying this?

I have scanned the entire book for “names”. There are 25 mentions, scattered throughout. There is no concentrated discussion or exegesis. I found absolutely nothing at variance with what I have started with above. What I have found, and I confess it is grist to my mill, is an example of clear contradiction. On page 14, I read that “only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have a meaning”. On page 63, I read that “the propositions of logic ….. presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connection with the world”.

I read the second quotation without difficulty. It says that the name “Bill Clinton” has a meaning – it means him – and that “Bill Clinton is quite tall” has a meaning too, or if you want to quibble about distinctions, a sense. Contrary to Wittgenstein’s reputation, I think I am the one who would insist on more rigour, because, after all the name “Bill Clinton” does not have a meaning; it is merely a label stuck on the man, an arbitrary designation. The fact that he is quite tall is not in any sense arbitrary. It is in fact, a fact. Not for the first time, I feel the lack of a word in English which means “a statement formulated like a fact, which is a fact only if it is true”.

The first quotation, on the other hand says nothing to me. As I have just said, a name never has meaning in any rigorous sense of this word, and insofar as it does have meaning in street-speech, i.e., as a label, then it has this meaning independently of any nexus with a proposition. Needless to say, Wittgenstein does not condescend to defining or discussing what he means by meaning.

That finishes my appreciation of Wittgenstein’s position on names. So, back to Russell para 21!

With my new-found expertise, I can see at once that he is talking nonsense. He begins “Let us take up another subject – that of names”, as if Wittgenstein makes some big thing of this which he most certainly does not. He immediately goes on to assert that Wittgenstein “only (sic) gives names to simples”, which sounds like a statement of doctrine, whereas all Wittgenstein says is the quite elementary truth that to talk about anything at all (an object), whether simple or complex, you have to give it a label. Then without pause Russell asserts that “we do not give two names to one thing”, which Wittgenstein specifically contradicts, again in agreement with all of the rest of us. Of course we can (and we do) give any number of names to one thing, as long as we know that we are doing it. For example, I do not care whether I have a cup of tea or une tasse de thé.

It becomes clear that the main point of para 21 is not names, the subject that we were now supposed to be taking up, but “the rejection of identity” by Wittgenstein. This turns out to refer to a short sequence of propositions on pp52-3, not to do with identity in the sense of an identity card, but in the sense of the “identity” a=b. At one level, I have no difficulty in agreeing with Wittgenstein (in those places where his meaning is clear!). When he states “to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense”, then as a physicist I have no difficulty. Even if two crystals of salt were identical in their local properties (and of course I do not concede that), they would still not be identical, in the sense that they could not both occupy the same spot in place and time. But I imagine Wittgenstein and Russell are debating expressions in formal logic involving the equals sign, “=”. I think Wittgenstein accuses Russell of according meaning to “=”, which (I think) he denies. Be that as it may, he leaves the subject without apparently giving it too much prominence.

With a feeling of relief, I leave para 21

Para 22 (p17) This one is easy! Apparently, the rejection of identity implies (I have not established exactly how) that you cannot say “there are more than 3 objects in the world”, although you can say “there are more that 3 red objects in the world”. Of course, it is lunatic to say that one cannot say such and such, but since I have been bombarded by loose talk by both Russell and Wittgenstein from the beginning, I put that aside. I can then accept that if the word “object” is being used to refer to the constituents of a proposition, then in that sense, you could not say that more than 3 of them exist, because the rejoinder would be “3 of what?”. However, if I say “here are four objects each of which is a chair”, then I could indeed say that “there are more than 3 objects in the world”. Russell and Wittgenstein would still be right in the sense that my statement really means “there are more than 3 chairs in the world”. But for me this is semantic quibbling, not a matter for a PhD thesis.

Para 23 (p17) Para 23 is easy too. Apparently it is “one instance of Wittgenstein’s fundamental thesis [why does Russell not put us all out of our misery by telling us what this fundamental thesis is, instead of giving us one instance of it?], that it is impossible to say anything about the world as a whole, and that whatever can be said has to be about bounded portions of the world”. The only surprising thing here is that Russell says he “does not profess to know whether [this] is ultimately true [should a logician talk of something being ultimately true?]”. Anyway, I side with Wittgenstein completely. If he defines the world as being everything, and he does, then, since he is inside it, and cannot even conceive a meaning for “outside of everything”, and therefore cannot even imagine standing outside looking at the whole, he cannot say anything about that all-encompassing everything, only about the bits he is qualified to talk about. I only make my usual quibble – is this worth saying at all, let alone worth calling it an instance of a fundamental thesis? Just what thesis does this contention (or rather, self-evident truth) illustrate? And what does it say about Russell that he chooses just this point to distance himself from Wittgenstein, and talks as if this contention might be true or not, as if he was considering some seemingly-factual “proposition”.

Russell gives almost a whole page to this trivial bit of fundamentalism.

Para 24 (p18) This paragraph simply gives the wonderful news: “This”, i.e., the above, he says, “gives the key to solipsism”! But, what I have written-up above as “what everybody already knows” includes the knowledge that this just happens to be called, i.e., named, or given the label of, solipsism, the idea that nothing is known to me outside of my little self. Everybody knows this, or will agree the moment it is explained, but passes on. Life is just too short to express “this tea is too sweet” in some convoluted and qualified way. We are all solipsists in theory, but we all reject solipsism in practice, and without a further thought. Indeed further thought about solipsism is impossible. It is a thought-stopper. I check that Wittgenstein does indeed go on a little about solipsism – not much, but far too much. His conclusion (I think) is correct, i.e., the same as mine.

But needless to say, Wittgenstein is wrong to say that anything in his book is the “key” to solipsism. There is no key. Solipsism is a truism. Anyone can grasp it immediately, agree that it must be so immediately, see immediately that it can lead nowhere, and immediately cast it aside.

Para 25 (p18) More good news. Russell says that we “must” take up the next question, so presumably it leads somewhere. It is the question of some “molecular propositions”, propositions which “at first sight” are not truth-functions of the propositions they contain. Since the example Russell gives is “A believes p”, this presumably means that if p is true, “A believes p” is not necessarily true. I check at once that the word “molecular” does not occur anywhere in Wittgenstein. Par for the course. It would be deeply silly if it did. However, by tracking the word “belief” I find that Russell is referring to text beginning with proposition 5.54.

Para 26 (p18) Russell in fact refers specifically to 5.54 here. He quotes, sometimes in inverted commas, sometimes without. In this way he manages to quote the entire content of 5.54, 5.541 and 5.542 except for a cutting little parenthesis where Wittgenstein says “And in modern theory of knowledge (Russell, Moore, etc.) these propositions have actually [Wittgenstein undoubtedly means erroneously] been construed in this way”. The point at issue is that Wittgenstein says “A believes p” is a truth function, Russell says it is not.

Wittgenstein’s claims that “A believes p” is in the same category as “A says p”. In the latter case, I presume, the truth of p is not at stake. p could be “abracadabra” or any other nonsense (or sense). If A said it, the statement is true. To me as a boring scientist, the difficulty of “A believes p” is not whether it is a truth-function or not, but whether it is an admissible statement at all. In Popperian terms, it is simply a hypothesis incapable of any possible verification. “A behaves as if he believes p” and “A claims (or says, admits, agrees, etc.) that he believes p” are obviously OK, and I believe that when anybody says “A believes p”, that is what they mean, and what they would agree that they mean if the point was explained once that you can never know what any other person really believes.

But Wittgenstein’s final argument against Russell is that both of the above statements are of the form “ ‘p’ says p”. This to me is voodoo. I may return to it after looking at para 27.

Let’s see what our gladiators say.

Para 27 (p19) I have skimmed through both Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s thoughts. Both are at first reading incomprehensible. Indeed, Russell says that “what Mr Wittgenstein says here is said so shortly that its point is not likely to be clear to those who have not in mind the controversy with which he is concerned”. This implies that he is about to make all clear. So I take Russell first.

Russell seems to be saying that “A believes p” looks like “A cuts an apple”, i.e., that A is somehow acting on p. It seems to me (in agreement) that this is equivalent to saying that “A believes p” looks like “A says p”, but is not, as I said above. Russell then talks about “a fact on its own account”, without explaining what that might be. Lets suppose that “it is raining” is a fact on its own account. So we are considering “A believes it is raining” compared with “A says it is raining”. But, says Russell, “the proposition as a fact on its own account … is not relevant to logic”. He then goes on … and on… Obviously he doubts himself whether he is talking nonsense or not, since, after a dose of word-soup, he continues, “It would perhaps help to suggest the point of view I am trying to indicate, to say that in the cases we have been considering the proposition occurs as a fact, not as a proposition. Such a statement, however, should not be taken too literally”!! How abject can you get? Look at this trail of words – perhaps, help, suggest, trying, indicate – ending up with “but don’t hold me to this”! He then has a third go. I think I remember criticising Keynes, Russell’s fellow word-spinner, for exactly this. If you have to have one go, and then say, “to put this another way”, and then conclude with “in other words”, then it is time to go back and rub out the whole caboodle.

What is his third go? It begins, “the real point is … ”. Is this not the weasliest of weasel words? This comes at the end of a paragraph which goes on for a page and a quarter. One is entitled to ask what qualifier goes with his previous points. Were they unreal points? I quote:

“The real point is that in believing, desiring, etc., what is logically fundamental is the relation of a proposition, considered as a fact, to the fact which makes it true or false, and that the relation of two facts is reducible to a relation of their constituents. Thus the proposition does not occur at all in the same sense in which it occurs in a truth-function.”

In true waffly style, Russell does not bother to tell us whether a “fact on its own account” is the same as “a proposition considered as a fact”.

Now let us come back to Wittgenstein’s dismissal of this:

“It is clear [!] that “A believes that p” and “A says p” are of the form “ ‘p’ says p”: and this does not involve a correlation of a fact with an object, but rather the correlation of facts by means of the correlation of their objects.”

It adds to the merriment that Wittgenstein goes on at once to add:

“This shows too that there is no such thing as the soul … as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day”.

Yaaaroooh !!!!!!!

I repeat what I said above. Wittgenstein clearly (yes, I mean clearly) puts “A believes p” in the same category as “A says p”, which is just as clearly demonstrably wrong. “A says p” is a checkable statement, and may be true or false irrespective of what p may be. “A believes p” is simply not checkable. Although he uses different words, Russell seems to agree with me. The statements look similar, but they are not.

Whatever is going on in another person’s mind must be totally unverifiable. The only evidence is what that person says, and what he does, and that evidence has no demonstrable connection to what is “really” going on in his mind.

So when Wittgenstein goes on to say that both statements are of the form “ ‘p’ says p”, my confidence in him is already destroyed. So the fact that I cannot make head or tail of “ ‘p’ says p” does not incline me to think that if only I understood, I might agree with him. I think what it means is that the printed or spoken “sign” represented by “it is raining” says it is (in fact) raining, and that this may be true or false like any other statement.

My inclination is to cut through this morass by siding with Russell at least to the extent of saying that “A believes p” is not like a normal factual statement, or as both of these loonies would say, capable of occurring in a truth-function. In fact “A believes p” is a form of expression which should be banned by law, since it cannot possibly convey information literally. If I were to say, “my hedgehog believes that the earth is flat”, this might be dismissed, but it could not conceivably be shown to be false. If I said, however, “Tony Blair believes that George Bush is a clever man”, it would not be dismissed, although, as formulated, it is just as empty of fact. The reason it would not be dismissed, is, of course, that it would be taken that I was using the usual street-speech, and that what I really meant was something like “Tony Blair has been heard to say that George Bush is a clever man”, and that is a perfectly normal “truth-functional” statement. No credible similar interpretation could be furnished for the “beliefs” of a hedgehog.

Evidence that I am justified in leaving the matter thus is that Russell very evidently was unable to convince Wittgenstein, and vice versa. Evidently, both were pushing language beyond its useful limits.

I add a more detailed view of “A believes p”. My law banning this would, if worded more carefully, say that the verb “believe” can be used unqualified only in the first person: “I believe that ….”. This must not, on pain of the state’s punishment, be reported as “he believes that ….”. It must be qualified: “He says that he believes that ….”. I suppose that it is just possible that deeply hidden in Wittgenstein’s formulation is some sort of echo of that

Another poke at Wittgenstein’s “ ‘p’ says p”: This occurs in 5.542 on page 54. But in 3.1432 on page 12, he implies quite clearly that instead of a statement like “ ‘p’ says p”, we ought to put “p says ‘p’ ”! In other (my) words, Wittgenstein says the reality says the symbol, not, as is the general usage, the symbol says the reality. Both 5.542 and 3.1432 are word-soup, of course, but they are contradictory word-soups.

An additional word before leaving this. Russell was writing in 1922. Popper did not publish until 1935, in German, and it was the 40s before his stuff became current in English. Although it seems to me that no scientist at any time would regard as knowledge, or a candidate for knowledge, a statement or hypothesis which was inherently beyond investigation or proof, the very fact that Popper's notion of "falsifiability" gained great currency once enunciated shows perhaps that neither philosophers (and Popper was a philosopher of science, not a scientist) nor the reading public had encountered - had ever needed to encounter - this notion. Conceivably it occurred neither to Russell nor to Wittgenstein when thinking of "A believes p". Thus, conceivably I am benefiting from hindsight, although I feel strongly that this is not so.

Para 28 (p20) I need not dwell on this short paragraph. Russell says the Wittgenstein’s theory of number does not deal with “transfinite numbers”, but perhaps could be made to do so. I’ll take his word for that.

Para 29 (p20) This paragraph is about Wittgenstein’s mysticism. Russell traces this to Wittgenstein’s insistence that we can have only a picture of a fact, and it is impossible to talk about the picture, or rather, the picture cannot be rendered into words. Unfortunately, wails Russell, this “inexpressible” contains “according to Mr Wittgenstein”, the whole of logic and philosophy. The only business of a philosopher is to take every philosophical remark as it comes, and prove to the speaker that it is meaningless. Russell says that Wittgenstein brings “very powerful arguments” in support of this position.

Note that I have a simple answer to this as given above. We are all solipsists. Solipsism is inescapable. But since solipsism is immediately perceived to lead nowhere, we just forget it after a moment’s hesitation. Henceforward we continue to behave and speak as we have behaved and spoken since birth or since we first behaved and spoke, namely assuming or pretending that the real world is indeed exactly the one we feel and see and speak about. In other words, we do not (in effect) say to Wittgenstein, “you have powerful arguments but …. ”. We say, “you are perfectly right, but your arguments are unnecessary because we were convinced even before you came along”.

Russell does not take this line, needless to say. He has “some hesitation in accepting Mr Wittgenstein’s position”. Why? Because, as numberless lesser people have noted, Wittgenstein “manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said. …. (and) he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions”. Russell cowers like a disturbed cat. Just listen. “His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort.” I used the word “abject” above to describe Russell’s wriggling above, and it applies here.

What was it about Wittgenstein that made his Cambridge contemporaries (who almost to a man could not tolerate more than limited exposure to his intensity) so reluctant to say “sorry, you are talking huge amounts of nonsense”. Was it that they were only too aware that they were less strident players in the same game? After all, not only did they pay lip service to his brilliance, they actually gave this failed engineer the Cambridge professorship of philosophy, which, as far as I have understood, he voluntarily relinquished on the grounds that the whole subject was nonsense.

Para 30 (p21) This paragraph is about “the problem of generality”. Apparently, according to “the theory of generality”, it is necessary to consider all forms of a given type of proposition. Don’t ask me what this means. It does not seem to matter. All that matters is that this requires one to consider all the world, or as Russell prefers to put it, “the totality of things in the world”, and it is this which Wittgenstein says cannot be spoken of. As evidence, Russell refers to proposition 6.45. There I read:

“To view the world sub specie aeterni [oddly there are no italics here] is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical. When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle [his italics] does not exist.”

My rejoinder is given above. Russell, having raised the “acute difficulty” of generality, does not draw any conclusion as to Wittgenstein’s coherence. In effect, he shakes his head and say it is all very confusing.

Very oddly, he ends this paragraph by saying that Wittgenstein’s mysticism as expressed above in his 6.45, is “expressly argued when Mr Wittgenstein denies that we can make a proposition as to how many things there are in the world, as for example, that there are more than three”. Extremely odd since as discussed above, I thought that this was a rare instance when Wittgenstein, Russell and I were more or less agreed that this was a cheese-paringly correct but trivial position. You could not assert baldly that there are more than three objects in the world, but (I thought we were all agreed) if you first asserted that there were 4 chairs in the world, then you could go on to say that there were more than three objects.

For my part, I cannot see that the matter of three objects, or the whole position of solipsism, has much to do with what is usually understood by “mysticism”, or, for that matter, “the soul”.

Para 31 (p22) And so to the LAST RUSSELL PARAGRAPH. This is where Russell abjectly crawls. He hinges his last paragraph on the mystical world about which we cannot speak. It is a reprise of his para 29, in which he has already crawled. He tentatively proposes that Wittgenstein might be countered by a hypothesis in which “the totality resulting from our hierarchy would be not merely logically inexpressible, but a fiction, a mere delusion, and in this way the supposed sphere of the mystical would be abolished. Such a hypothesis is very difficult, and I can see objections to it which at the moment [!] I do not know how to answer. Yet I do not see how any easier hypothesis can escape from Mr Wittgenstein’s conclusions”. Then after admitting that he cannot find anything wrong with Wittgenstein’s theory, nor, as just said, can he propose an alternative free of objections, he concludes:

“But to have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance. This merit, in my opinion, belongs to Mr Wittgenstein’s book, and makes it one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect” Bertrand Russell May 1922.

Having just reached this point, my first reaction to this is that nowhere in the entire introduction is there anything which gives detailed support or substance to this publisher’s blurb. Just where did Wittgenstein correct the wrong parts of prior theories? If there were no prior theories, shouldn’t Russell have reviewed Wittgenstein’s stuff from that starting point?

A drawing together

The Tractatus has a “decimal” numbering system which is perhaps inspired by the similar system in Whitehead & Russell’s Principia Mathematica. There, the number, 1, 2, 3, …. before the decimal point denotes a chapter heading, the numbers after the decimal point being largely assigned to hierarchies of propositions expressed in logic-symbols. In order to see the structure of the Tractatus, I assume that the same idea is being used by Wittgenstein.

If this is so, there are seven main propositions in the Tractatus, namely (I quote in full):

1 The world is all that is the case (first page - p5)
2 What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs (also p5)
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought (p10)
4 A thought is a proposition with a sense (p19)
5 A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions (p36)
6 The general form of a truth-function is [[p,µ,N(µ)]. This is the general form of a proposition (p58)
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (last page – p74)

I read through this list with no feeling of much progress.

The first proposition means little, but might be re-expressed as “A collection of all true truth-functions is a symbol of the world.” Crazy of course, but one awaits the development.

The last is striking, and sounds like good advice – “it is better to say nothing than to talk nonsense” – but it is strictly not worth saying, a tautology. It says that what we cannot speak about we cannot speak about. There is no development of 7. The Tractatus ends with these words..

The items 2 to 6 are simply extremely fuzzy definitions, which could condensed into two sentences:

“A truth function, whose general form is [[p,µ,N(µ)], and which may be elementary or consist of two or more elementary truth-functions, is, when considered together with a sense, a thought, which in turn is a logical picture of all the facts involved. “All the facts involved” can be expresses alternatively as “all involved which is the case”, or “all existences of states of affairs involved”.

If all of this sounds like a load of pointless nonsense, it is because it strips the original of its rhetorical stage-props.

Now compare this with Russell’s endorsements which occur at the beginning and end of his introduction:

“Mr Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, whether or not it prove to give the ultimate truth on these matters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and profundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world.”

and:

“To have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance. This merit, in my opinion, belongs to Mr Wittgenstein’s book, and makes it one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect.”

There is a great disparity between what is signalled in Wittgenstein’s chapter headings and the words in these endorsements. I found neither depth nor profundity in my admittedly incomplete readings, and as for not detecting anything “obviously wrong”, my experience was that I could barely read three words without finding almost everything wrong. It was my difficulty in making progress with the Tractatus which made me look to Russell’s introduction for enlightenment. Not only does he write in English sentences, he does write in various places as if his object is to remove difficulties in the way of the reader.

Above, I have given my reading notes on the introduction, paragraph by paragraph. Below, I give a succinct summary of my notes, in order to give an overview. The same paragraph numbering is used.

1 nothing
2 a list
3 a ramble
4 nothing
5 perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein – there MUST be SOMETHING in common between the sentence and the fact, but it can only be shown, not said.
6 an object needs a symbol
7 a fact can be projected in many ways
8 Wittgenstein: Yes to a, b, --> aRb. No to aRb --> a,b. Russell’s comment on this is equally incomprehensible
9 details of the picture form “something identical” with the details of the fact
10 one page long – full of idiocy and confusion and self-contradiction
11 facts, opinions and names – nothing of note here, except for a long train of absurdities
12 nonsense – including false facts and at least one inane assertion
13 one sentence, mentioning “truth function”
14 definition of a truth-function – Wittgenstein/Russell discord on belief
15 a bit of symbolic logic – propositional function – nothing emerges from this
16 nothing except some explanation of [p,µ,N(µ)]
17 more elucidation - p is all atomic propositions - µ is any set of propositions - N(µ) is the negation of all the µ-propositions.
18 more explanation – but not impressed with the idea that simple to complex is the normal direction
19 “an amazing simplification of the theory of inference” – “Wittgenstein maintains that all propositions of logic are tautologies” - my contemptuous dismissal
20 there is no causal nexus – REALLY??
21 names, simples, things, objects – this paragraph is a huge load of confused nonsense, which I go on about a great length
22 this is the “more than 3 objects” paragraph – nothing of note – we all agree
23 we can say nothing of the world as a whole – I agree with Wittgenstein – Russell half agrees
24 solipsism – yawn! - we all agree
25 A believes p – I agree with Russell that this is odd. Wittgenstein says no, it isn’t. I say so what? Russell thinks it is important
26 gives the “too brief” Wittgenstein-version, that “A believes p” is a truth-function
27 more word-soup on “A believes p”
28 about transfinite numbers – not important
29 Russell does not like Wittgenstein’s mysticism, but cowers abjectly in trying to find the mildest and most tentative way of saying so
30 nominally about generality, but in fact more bleating about solipsism
31 last paragraph makes more heavy weather about solipsism but cravenly ends with a ringing recommendation, not based at all on anything foregoing

This list more or less aligns with the impression given by Wittgenstein’s 7 chapter headings.

There is a ramble through objects, facts, propositions, names, symbols, thoughts and pictures. There is (in my list at least) only one portentous word, “fundamental”, but that is applied to “there must be something in common between the sentence and the fact, but it can only be shown, not said”, a thought that surely did NOT need a Wittgenstein to point out. It is neither novel nor important.

An “amazing simplification of the theory of inference” proves to be denial of any theory of inference. “There is no causal nexus” is just too absurd for words. Space is devoted to whether it is or is not valid to say that there are more than 3 objects in the world, and whether “A believes p” is or is not a truth function.

At only one or two points does Russell give any indication that he is treating matters of great depth, profundity and importance (to use the words of his endorsements), where Wittgenstein is right and the rest of the world has up till now been wrong, and those points evaporate into nothingness within a few lines.

While I have heaped criticism on Wittgenstein, almost word by word, Russell finds little to criticise – indeed he says that he finds nothing “obviously wrong” – and when in one or two places he does criticise, it is in the most tentative and apologetic language.

Lastly, in moving from the obscurity, redundancy and incomprehensibility of Wittgenstein to Russell, my hope was to find rigor and clarity. Well, what I found was that while no one could come anywhere near Wittgenstein for obscurity, redundancy and incomprehensibility, Russell provided neither rigor nor clarity.

Footnote on “decimal” numbering

Every proposition in the book is numbered in a so-called decimal system. The system defies comprehension.

The Dewey decimal system of book-classification is relatively straightforward. 9 is history biography and geography. 940 is history-Europe. 942 is history-Europe-England. 942.06 is history-Europe-England-Stuart. 942.063 is history-Europe-England-Stuart-Cromwell

In the Tractatus, 1 is followed immediately by 1.1, but 6 is followed by 6.001 and 6.002. Before 6.1 is reached, we have 6.01, 6.02, 6.021, 6.022, 6.03, and 6.031. Of course, one could struggle through this, trying to make sense not only of the word-soup, but of the number-soup, but I would be inclined to bet that only half a dozen or so Wittgenstein buffs in the whole of history have tried to increase their understanding by doing this.

So what did Wittgenstein intend by this system? One can only guess that in his mind, just as the “truths” of his word-soup was, in the words of his preface “unassailable and definitive”, so his hierarchy of numbers was unassailably structured.

I wonder just how many readers of Wittgenstein over the last 8 decades were aware that something very like this system is employed in Whitehead and Russell’s unread and virtually unreadable Principia Mathematica (1913)? There too, every proposition is numbered in this way. But virtually all of these propositions are stated in the symbols of symbolic logic, and I imagine (I have not checked!) may visibly form a definite hierarchy. One wonders if Wittgenstein just tagged along with this model, even if, from the point of view of comprehensibility, the normal system of headings and sub-headings would have been far clearer.

Quotation from the introduction of “Bayle”, ed. Sally L Jenkins, CUP 2000

(Pierre Bayle was a Huguenot philosopher, 1647-1706, an influential precursor of the Enlightenment )

“Bayle thought he could use Descartes’s well-known account of the interplay between feelings, body and brain to explain the prejudices of certain historians. Why, for example, do scholars sometimes feel convinced of the truth of false propositions without further evidence, when at other times they dismiss true propositions without a second thought?”

I think this shows that Bayle was of the Andersen school of bystanding boys. How come that undeniably great men can spout quite obvious nonsense (unless, of course, their greatness lies in a hard science)? One wonders however if Bayle pursued this thought in an amused and sceptical reflection on his own Huguenot beliefs? A glance at the quoted book seems to indicate that he did, in a guarded way. After all, he wrote in a time when an unguarded remark could land you out of a job, in prison (his brother died in prison), or even on the scaffold.

Bayle seems to be expressing the obvious truth behind the title of this note – that giants of rhetoric may be dwarves when judged in terms of the question – does their rhetoric survive detailed examination any more than the wonderful clothes of the emperor survive the glance of the uninstructed bystanding boy?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Links to other papers

A LOGICAL VACUUM
- Reading notes on Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

Abstract:
When Pigou vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. These reading notes follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Keynes was one of the most fluent and plausible rhetoricians of his age, and it could be argued that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to expose the total logical vacuum which in cold objective fact the General Theory is.

Keynes’ book was seemingly written at speed, contains no bibliography, virtually no mention of factual data, little evidence, pseudo-algebra only for appearances, no attempt at anything which could be called scientific method. His acknowledged greatness lay in his cleverness, and his great skill as a debater, negotiator, journalist, and politician, not at all in his ability or interest in searching out the truth. His “theory” is presented in terms of mechanistic cause-and-effect models of economic society, but quite demonstrably, these models are based on nothing but the repetitious re-statement of Keynes’s prior and evidence-free conviction that the cure for unemployment and recession is to stimulate spending, any spending, useful or useless, either by individuals or by governments. Keynes used every rhetorical trick imaginable to hide the empty centre of his work, from “as I shall show … ” onwards. His mainstay, as Pigou remarked, was a deliberate lack of precision and clarity. The great sociological mystery is - how did this transparently fact-free “theory” sweep everything before it?
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THE OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS (ONS) AND THE "DECLINE" OF UK MANUFACTURING

Abstract:
We all, including economics professors, statisticians and journalists, know just by looking around that our comfort and prosperity is determined by the plethora of objects produced by technical innovations over the millennia, centuries and decades. The earnings of billionaire investment managers may come from their “services”, but their prosperity is manifest in their possession of, or ability to buy, things which have been grown, cooked, mined, constructed, or manufactured. However, by some quirk of social psychology, those economics professors, statisticians and journalists (and no doubt bankers too) apparently believe, simultaneously, that things are not “important”. Agriculture has already been written off as “contributing only 2% of the economy”, and manufacturing is “declining” towards the same invisibility. Recently headlines appeared in the Financial Times and the Daily Mail that “business and financial services eclipse manufacturing” and “the City is supreme as factories fade away”. What was the source of those preposterous views? None other that our Office of National Statistics, whose own press release had been headlined in a similar way. As usual there was no response from any quarter, not even from the CBI Manufacturing Council, to point out that the ONS data had absolutely nothing to do with the only aspect of manufacturing that matters for national prosperity, namely physical output. This note suggests that the ONS should put its house in order. We need not only facts, but a balanced presentation, without attention-seeking headlines.
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IS LOW INFLATION AN IMPORTANT CONDITION FOR HIGH GROWTH?

Abstract. It seems rash even to raise the question in the title. The universal belief is that the answer is and must be "yes". Yet factual evidence for this belief is curiously lacking, maybe even felt to be unnecessary. This paper takes what is thought to be all the, not very voluminous, post-war factual data which exists and which may bear on the matter, and treats this data in every plausible way to find if any convincing demonstration is possible that low inflation is associated with high long term growth rate in GNP. This includes special attention to Germany, the country which is the popular (and sole) paradigm among UK authorities and commentators. The paper concludes that no such demonstration is possible.
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INFLATION AND GROWTH

Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In this note, he examines a paper by R. J. Barro which tends to the opposing view. He suggests that the evidence of this paper in fact reinforces his conclusion.
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GROWTH IS NOT CORRELATED WITH INFLATION

Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In a later note, he examined a paper by R. J. Barro which tended to the opposing view, and suggested that the evidence of that paper in fact reinforced his conclusion. In this note he comments on a paper by W. R. J. Alexander, concluding that time series analysis, especially with additional variables as in this paper, is unlikely to be able to contradict cross-section results.
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THE FUNCTION OF THE CENTRAL BANK

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL January 2002 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. The general view of the media, bankers, business and politicians, not noticeably contradicted by academics, is that one of the main functions, or the main function, of the central bank is to analyse the progress of the economy, and then to steer it with skilful judgement towards health and growth, by making decisions to change their base interest rate, with carefully chosen timing, amount and direction. The data presented here show that it is impossible to sustain this notion of skilful time-critical steering, or even that the central bank does in fact lead or determine the short term interest rates available to savers or business. The contrary proposition, that commercial short-term interest rates are in fact observed and followed by the central bank, is mathematically sustainable, and generally in accord with the observed facts.
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CENTRAL BANK INTEREST RATE MONITOR

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL May 2003 Paper in pdf form

Abstract:     Following on from the note entitled “The Function of the Central Bank” (see above), this note brings the data up to date. It will be re-issued at intervals. It will monitor the tendency of short-term interest rates, give the author's judgement on the likely movement of the central bank rate in the UK, US and EU zones, and enable the reader to make his own judgement. An addendum shows that by the normal standards of statistical testing (which by their nature must always fall short of proof), the 3-month bank rate leads the changes announced by the central banks in their base rates.
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THE ABSENCE FROM PUBLIC DISCOURSE OF EVALUATIONS OF GDP BASED ON PURCHASING POWER

Abstract.     Politicians, journalists - commentators on economic matters generally - evolve a sort of quasi-stable rhetoric. They select two or three foreign countries with which they like to compare their own, either as models to be followed, or traps to be avoided. Other countries are rarely or never mentioned. They repeat over and over again mantras such as "we are the fourth largest economy in the world" in the UK, or variants of "the dot.com revolution" or "the new paradigm" in the USA. In arguments in the UK over the replacement of sterling by the Euro, it is almost a daily occurrence to hear growth in the UK contrasted with recession in Eurozone Germany. It appears likely that these stories emerge in part from appraisals of GDP expressed for the purpose of cross-country comparison in a currency unit (the Euro or dollar, say) calculated at the ruling rate of exchange. This calculation can be done instantly. It is "news". The more recent method of using purchasing power is much more complex and its results are published late. They are not "news", and do not affect the established rhetoric. Nevertheless, they are the truth, or as near to that as economic data can be, and often quite strikingly at variance with the current story.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL January 1996 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. The notion of de-industrialisation arises from the fact that industrial employment, having risen rapidly, is now in equally rapid decline. This paper presents the view that agriculture and industry together form, and have always formed, a "primary" sector which from the beginning, because of its inherent capacity for productivity gains, has progressively freed labour for non-productive work. The "industrial" revolution was really a "primary sector" (in the above sense) revolution. There is no new phenomenon of de-industrialisation, merely a speeding up of a process of labour-freeing from the primary sector, whose ever decreasing work force produces ever increasing output.
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ABSTRACTIONS, THINGS, WEALTH, AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL April 1998 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. Economic theory is dominated by abstract structures. Underneath, there is no firm foundation. Above, there is a lack of rigorous confrontation with established fact. Basic theoretical concepts have no acknowledged definition. The apparatus of graphs, algebra and technical vocabulary are often vehicles for rhetoric rather than descriptions of truth. In this abstract world, it seems to be accepted without embarrassment that all opinions are possible, while adopting the style of science in delivering each conclusion as if it was a fact. The closest parallel is perhaps with theology, where also each practitioner presents his story as fact, but there are differing stories. This paper illustrates this theme, with particular reference to "deindustrialization".

It points out that it is tangible things which are the primary measure, literally the sine qua non, of all material, cultural and intellectual progress. Official statistics necessarily aggregate market transactions involving tangibles and intangibles at monetary exchange values. However it is an error, in the sense of being a misperception leading to wrong action, to mistake this equivalencing of things and non-things as more than a necessary procedural fiction. In this system, one opera performance equals, say, 100 lorryloads of gravel, but the logical reality is that gravel is part of the primary inventory, opera and all other intangibles are secondary or consequential. This inversion of the important and the estimable lies behind the paradox of the deindustrialization which is in process and the deagriculturalization which has already run its course in some parts of the world - namely that our entire civilisation rests (and logically and factually must always rest) on the output of this (in employment terms) disappearing sector. Eventually, the sector which ultimately produces all value will appear in the statistics as one which adds zero value in current terms. Fortunately, the real word of affairs shows no sign of acting on this erroneous perception. For those accustomed to see the world in abstractions, misperceptions still seem to obscure the reality.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION II

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL July 2001 Paper in pdf form

Abstract: Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION III

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL December 2002 Paper in pdf form

Abstract:     The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic manufacturing must continually keep pace with gross domestic product, provided that the necessary "things" are not imported from elsewhere. However, many people are persuaded that domestic manufacturing is in terminal decline, and that the lost output is being replaced by imports from the developing world. Almost daily, one may read of manufacturing jobs being "exported" to the Far East. However, it is simply impossible to import goods without a more or less balancing volume of exports, and there is in reality limited scope for exporting a sufficient volume of services. Imports of goods must more or less be balanced by the export of domestically produced goods. How can a widespread perception of decline be reconciled with a reality of growth? The answer is that the "decline" which is perceived is a decline in employment in the industrial sector, but this decline is more than counterbalanced by the rise of productivity, so that the domestic output of goods by and large keeps pace with the growth of GDP. This note summarises the statistical evidence for the accuracy of this view. A substantial footnote discusses the role of journalists and academics in sustaining the perception of the decline of manufacturing.
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ESSAY ON BAYES

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL June 1999 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. It has been said, fairly plausibly, that "Bayesian inference is one of the most widely known eponyms in all of science". But unlike common scientific eponyms, it is by no means clear exactly what "Bayesian" means, and what it has to do with Bayes. "Bayesian", and the dozen or so words and phrases which are usually associated with it, seem to be more like unspecific words of the English language, deployed by an author as he wishes, rather than fixed technical terms. The obscurity of the language, relative to the precise meanings associated with, say, Newton's laws or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is matched by the obscurity of the history - the virtually unknown Bayes, the posthumous paper, the impenetrable and incoherent style, the muddled logic, the virtual silence on his work for 200 years, the sudden emergence in the last several decades, not of new knowledge, but of new Bayesian additions to the vocabulary. This note surveys the notions and the history. It concludes that the Bayesian vocabulary is vague and pretentious, and serves no useful purpose.
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Notes on REDMAN, ECONOMICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Abstract:
These are critical notes made while reading Deborah A Redmans's "Economics and the Philosophy of Science". The philosophy is largely that of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos. Redman begins in the style of a neutral reporter, but later shows her impatience with the confusions sown by those eminent people. Hutchison supplies the main sceptical comments. My main comment is that neither Redman, nor the philosophers she quotes, appear to recognise that it is simply impossible to discuss "science" if the unstated assumption is that science is whatever anyone chooses to call science. One has to start with the strikingly observed worldwide unanimity of physicists and chemists within their respective disciplines, and take account of the fall-off of unanimity (that is, the widening scope for disagreement) as one moves through biology, medicine, etc. (that is, as the matters studied become more and more complex). Economists are in the absurd situation of claiming to be scientists, or at least, wanting to appear to be scientific, when the matters they study are simply too complex ever to lead to consensus. The absurdity is demonstrated when, for example, Friedman is cited in this book as claiming that there is no fundamental distinction between economics and the physical sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, historians and philosophers do well to ply their trade without making inappropriate claims of objectivity.
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THE PIPEDREAM OF E O WILSON’S "CONSILIENCE"

Abstract:
E O Wilson’s book "Consilience" is a notably unscientific plea for science to take over the so-called social sciences, from economics to psychology, and extend also into art and religion. The text rambles on, with exalted brilliance according to one reviewer, over this whole field, but the brilliance sheds no new light, and fails to explain exactly what consilience is, how it might be achieved, and what benefit would result if any of these subjects (for example, art) was connected back to genes, biology, chemistry and finally physics. It is not mentioned that such a connection to the "harder" sciences is in any case a pipedream.
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Franz Grillparzer    DER ARME SPIELMANN   

This is my own translation of a work which appears from the bibliography to have a significant English-speaking audience, but of which there seems to be no readily accessible English version.
English translation

This counter is freely available from John and Ann Lockett's site at www.lockettpots.uklinux.net