Abstract
The received view is that Ernst Mach should not be counted as among the important influences on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought. Recently, though, some affinities between their works have been brought to light, and two scholars, Henk Visser and Jaakko Hintikka, have gone beyond this to claim that Wittgenstein took specific and important philosophical ideas about science and logic from Mach. These claims have not been addressed by Wittgenstein scholars, but they do deserve attention. I argue that strong and general claims of positive influence are false, and also that Mach’s influence was not, pace Visser, on the most important aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But a more accurate picture of the Mach-Wittgenstein relationship will be an ambivalent one, and the received view is untenable.
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, an award from whose Research Leave Scheme enabled me to work on this article. I am also grateful, for helpful comments, to Peter Hacker, Joachim Schulte, Severin Schroeder, Maximilian de Gaynesford, and members of the audience at the Ernst Mach Centenary conference, Vienna, in June 2016.
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Notes
- 1.
Visser (2001, p. 140), lists several people who had done so: Friedrich von Hayek (a distant relative of Wittgenstein’s), Philip Wiener, Stephen Mason, Nicola Abbagnano, John Blackmore, and John W. Cook. Few of these are Wittgenstein scholars, though, and their associations of Wittgenstein with Mach are almost always made in offhand comments, not as a result of sustained investigation. In his book Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics, however (Cook 1994), Cook presents Wittgenstein as an adherent of Mach’s ‘neutral monism’.
- 2.
This last claim, though, which is an exaggeration, I have addressed in (Preston 2006).
- 3.
Cook regards Mach’s influence on Wittgenstein as disastrous, and interprets Wittgenstein as an empiricist, phenomenalist, behaviourist, and Humean. Because my concern here is only with logic and philosophy of science, and Cook’s reading of Wittgenstein goes far beyond these, I leave that reading to be considered elsewhere.
- 4.
The idea that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus follows Mach in its treatment of solipsism is certainly important, perhaps more so than the issues I am dealing with here. But I must leave that for another occasion.
- 5.
I am grateful here to Professor Kenneth Blackwell, of the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, who confirmed to me that Volume 7 of Russell’s Collected Papers shows him using this book of Mach’s early in 1913.
- 6.
Russell does mention Mach in this book, of course, but not any part of Mach’s works in which this issue is discussed.
- 7.
Here I am grateful to my colleagues Severin Schroeder and David Mutch. For a change in Wittgenstein’s attitude towards such ‘nonsense’, see Wittgenstein 1975, p. 53.
- 8.
The connection between these remarks and Wittgenstein’s later discussions of plants of different kinds coming from identical seeds is striking.
- 9.
Visser claims that Russell endorsed the idea that the only necessity is logical necessity, and also claims that this is ‘an un-Kantian view’ (Visser 1981, p. 400). But what he quotes from Russell there does not establish the former claim, and the latter characterisation is mistaken.
- 10.
Martin Kusch’s in-depth study Psychologism (Kusch 1995), shows that this psychologistic conception wasn’t ubiquitous. But Kusch supplies no evidence that Mach wasn’t psychologistic, and his chart (p. 97) shows that Mach was one of a long list of thinkers most often labelled psychologistic (fourth most often, behind only Husserl, Theodor Lipps, and J.S.Mill).
- 11.
I would argue that this is a general idea Wittgenstein hangs onto in his transitional works, where he uses various metaphors to explain the general idea that ‘hypotheses’ are, as it were, of a higher dimension than ‘propositions’.
- 12.
Chapter II of Mach’s book, ‘Critical Discussion of the Concept of Temperature’ was also published in stand-alone form, in a two-part English translation in the philosophy journal The Open Court (Mach 1903). Its translation there differs slightly from that of the published book-chapter.
- 13.
I have addressed the claim that Wittgenstein used Hertz’s method in (Preston 2008).
- 14.
For this suggestion I am grateful to my colleague Maximilian de Gaynesford.
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Preston, J. (2019). Mach, Wittgenstein, Science and Logic. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04378-0_5
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