Abstract
This paper will address four related questions.—What is the account of truth that Wittgenstein gives in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein (1922).
- 2.
Wittgenstein (1953).
- 3.
Wittgenstein insists (3.13) that a proposition (in his usage of the term) does not contain its sense (in his usage). So the material that must be added to the mere propositional sign in order to arrive at a proposition is not the possible fact it represents. Rather (and as just suggested in the text) it’s an assignment of referents to the component words. Granted, this assignment will determine which possible fact is represented. But that possible fact will not be contained in the proposition.
- 4.
Note Wittgenstein’s 3.1432:
We must not say, “The complex sign ‘aRb’ says ‘a stands in relation R to b’”;
but we must say ”That ’a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that aRb”.
Clearly, the “certain relation” is: —x is just to the left of “R” which is just to the left of y.
- 5.
For elaboration of this reading of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of representation, see Horwich (2012)
- 6.
Why this restriction? According to Wittgenstein, “My fundamental thought is that the logical constants don’t represent” (4.312).—That is to say, the words, “and”, “not”, “or”, and so on, don’t stand for bits of reality. And, in that case, how could his picture theory of representation conceivably work for sentences containing those words? Consider, for example, “It’s raining or snowing”. If his theory were to explain how this logically complex sentence represents what it does, the word, “or”, would either have to be part of a representing component of the sentence, or else it would have to be part of the pictorial arrangement of those components. But Wittgenstein’s “fundamental thought” appears to preclude the first of these options. And his requirement that the represented entities exhibit exactly the same arrangement with respect to one another as the representing components appears to preclude the second. (Since surely the noise, “or”, doesn’t feature in the possible fact that it’s raining or snowing!).
Admittedly, Wittgenstein’s formulations often seem to allow that his picture theory applies across the board. But in some passages (e.g. 4.0311) the restriction to logically simple sentences is explicit. And we have just seen why that’s called for.
- 7.
To be discussed further in Sect. 4.
- 8.
Hans-Johann Glock puts the point nicely as follows: “The Tractatus marries a correspondence theory of depiction to an obtainment theory of truth”. (“Wittgenstein on Truth”, in Löffler and Weingartner (2004).
He goes on to allow that it is still appropriate to call Wittgenstein’s view “a correspondence theory” since the similar view of truth that’s proposed by both Moore and Russell around 1912 is standardly taken to be paradigmatic of such theories.
But it’s worth noting a relevant dis-similarity. As we’ve seen, the foundation of Wittgenstein’s account is his distinction between those possible facts that are actual and those that are not; and actuality is not a correspondence notion. But there’s no analogous distinction in the account offered by Russell and Moore. They hold, for reasons we’ll be examining in Sect. 4, that there can be no such things as false propositions. And this reasoning would lead them to the same skeptical conclusion about merely possible facts.
- 9.
For amplification of these points see Horwich (2010)
- 10.
Ramsey (1927).
- 11.
Chapter 13 of The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
- 12.
This biographical material is taken from pp. 80–82 of Monk (1990).
- 13.
I don’t see how we can follow Goldfarb (1997) and Zalabardo (2019) in maintaining that the existence of merely possible facts is not endorsed by Wittgenstein. For this would go against his 2.202 and 2.221 (quoted above) in which the sense of a proposition is explicitly identified with what it represents, which is in turn explicitly identified with a possible fact.
- 14.
Zalabardo—in support of his above-mentioned view that Wittgenstein wasn’t ontologically committed to possible facts.—argues (op.cit. 2019) that the picture theory of representation enables Wittgenstein to define sentential truth directly, that is, without bringing in possible facts (or any other represented items) as intermediaries. For an elementary proposition consists in referring elements, e1, e2, …, ek being arranged in a certain way, A. And Wittgenstein’s definition (according to Zalabardo) is that such a proposition is true if and only if the referents of the elements are also arranged in that way. In other words: the propositional fact that A[e1, e2, …, ek)] is true if and only if A[Ref(e1), Ref(e2), …, Ref(ek)].
But Wittgenstein doesn’t proceed in this way. Instead, he begins by explaining, via his picture theory, how the sense of a proposition—a possible fact—is determined; and he then goes on to tell us (in 2.222, quoted above) that that the proposition is true or false depending on whether that sense agrees or disagrees with reality. Thus senses (qua possible facts) are invoked, as is the idea that some of them agree with reality and others do not.
No explanations are given of how the arrangements that constitute merely possible facts would differ from those that constitute actual facts, or of what it is for a sense to agree with reality. And, granted, these problems would have been avoided had Wittgenstein defined sentential truth in the way that Zalabardo thinks he does. However, that ‘better’ account amounts to the deflationary idea (i) that the possible fact that p is actual ↔ p, and (ii) that s represents that p → (s is true iff p). (See the text below). And Wittgenstein didn’t appreciate the merits (and radical implications) of this approach until well after his Tractatus had been published.
- 15.
This is not the so-called Identity Theory of Truth, which is advocated by Hornsby (1997). Yes, she too maintains that true propositions are facts. But her idea is that this equation will define “true” in terms of “fact”—where the latter, roughly in the spirit of the Tractatus, is taken either to be a primitive or to be defined as a ”combination of objects and properties”. But my deflationary suggestion goes in the opposite explanatory direction—relying on the trivial Equivalence Schema to fix the concept of TRUTH, and then proceeding to define “fact’ as “true proposition”.
- 16.
See the Preface to Philosophical Investigations.
- 17.
As far as I know, Wittgenstein never explicitly renounced his picture theory of elementary sentential representation and its truth-functional extension to logically complex sentences. But there can be little doubt that he came to recognize that no such account is needed. For it’s a fundamental triviality that—no matter which meaningful categorical sentence we substitute for “p”—the sentence, “p”, means that p.
- 18.
The present publication is a slightly revised version of an article of mine that appeared in Argumenta, Issue 3, December 2016—available online at http://wwww.tandfonline.com/ [Article DOI]. I am most grateful to the editors of Argumenta for permitting me to reprint that paper.
My thanks also to Hans-Johann Glock for the stimulus of his excellent above-cited essay on this topic, to Charles Djordjevic for an enjoyable and illuminating conversation about these matters, to Massimo Dell’Utri and Alex Miller for their astute comments on earlier versions of the present paper, to José Zalabardo for the stimulating challenges presented by his alternative interpretation of the Tractatus, and to all those who helped me by raising tough questions during my discussions of these ideas at the University of Zurich (June 2016), the University of Sassari, Sardinia (September 2016), and the University of Minnesota (November 2016).
References
Frank Ramsey, “Facts and Propositions” (1927), in D. H. Mellor (ed.) Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978.
Horwich P “What is truth?”, Chapter 1 of my Truth-Meaning-Reality, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Horwich P Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 80–83.
Jennifer Hornsby “Truth: The Identity Theory”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97: 1–24, 1997.
Jose Zalabardo “The Tractatus on Unity”, Australian Philosophical Review, 2019.
Ray Monk Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, The Free Press, New York, 1990
The Problems of Philosophy, New York: H. Holt and Company, 1912.
Warren Goldfarb “Metaphysics and Nonsense: On Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit”, Journal of Philosophical Research 22:57–74, 1997.
W. Löffler and P. Weingartner (eds.), Knowledge and Belief , Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna 2004, 328–346.
Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Kegan Paul, 1922. Translated by C. K. Ogden.
Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright.
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Horwich, P. (2020). Wittgenstein on Truth. In: Wuppuluri, S., da Costa, N. (eds) WITTGENSTEINIAN (adj.). The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27569-3_11
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