Okay, and this is cool. Is it, am I right in thinking this is called a picture theory of language? It's

often, could, could call that. It's inspired by a, his, in the Eastern Front in 1914, according to sources, one of his students, Norman Malcolm recounts this. He, he's reading about how they're using models in the Parisian law courts to settle disputes. So what you've got is an example here of, so picture is not like the picture hanging on the wall. No. It's, it's pictures in the sense of a model. So imagine you had little elements of the cars and the individuals, and they sort of say one, one group of disputants or in, in the law case say, this is what happens. This is how it went down. And the opposite party presumably says, no, that's not correct. It went the other way or something like this. What he was interested in was the way that the elements are in the different cases could be used to stay things, say things. And then he kind of reverses that analogy and then tries to say, well, think of a proposition itself as a model. Right. So that's the sense in which he's operating with a picture theory.

Okay. I mean, what, if you say it's not like pictures as in images, it's logical pictures or something like that. So what, what is the import of using the analogy of a picture rather

than anything else? Well, I mean, I think in his more German original, that was more to build on. It's more closer to the notion of a model itself. So the, so the interesting take will be to say some elements as you point

out

of the pictures will be accidental. Some will be essential. But what's essential is that it connects up with the elements of the situation so as to form

a possible

proposition with sense. So even the idea of picture is itself a metaphor rather than. It's, well, it is. And I think it, it, when you have something like that, inspired analogy that that was its source. And then what one can say is that to fully understand it, you'd need to understand the mechanics of the overall story. But the thought would be you can picture a possibility. Right. Even if it's not the case, it still makes sense. It reaches out to its, is he?

It's a good meaning sample.

Well, that, that example was the case of the law board. Right. Okay. So I say to you that the person was speeding at 70 miles per hour and I bring out a toy car. It doesn't have to be. I can do this in words or cars. So these are all the pictorial elements are all accidental. But what's important is that in each case, when I talk about the same situation or I model it with toy elements, I'm picking out one situation. And I'm doing it precisely. Right. So it picks out that and only that situation unambiguously. If I can sign, use another metaphor here, it says, you know, it reaches out to reality like a ruler. But it's reaching out to a possible situation. So it's a possible state of affairs. That's what it depicts. It's not depicting things that are actually the case. They may or may not be actually the case. Oh, yes. As long as it's possible, then it's meaningful. That's what it is. As long as it's possible, it's meaningful. And in the other cases, it's contingently possible. It's important to you too. Right. So it could have been otherwise, but it turns out not to be so on some occasions. Why

does

Vikkenstein think that this way of thinking about language and logic has solved or rather negated the problems of philosophy? Yeah. I think he thinks that the problems, he solves his line in this and the preface is that it solves the problems of philosophy, but it reveals also how little has been done when this happens. I think that the sweeping and important feature of this was as a track back to that debate with Russell, if where does philosophy sit in, as a, what's its job, what can it do? If it's just like the sciences, but not reducing to the other sciences, and this is a very pertinent question for today because there's a lot of philosophers who see themselves as just doing more general theories of in the same mode and sometimes in the same boat. Alongside scientists, Russell and others didn't have that view. They seemed to think that there was something special about the philosophical contribution. Nevertheless, it was a form of scientific contribution. For Vikkenstein, he thinks that these, if this was right and we followed that thread through a argument that logic doesn't have that kind of status, then it leaves us into places. If we're concerned not with the merely contingent, that would be a domain of the sciences according to Vikkenstein, but if philosophy is concerned always with what's essential, what's true across possible worlds, what's analytic, any of those different ways of putting the point, then you might generally say that what he sees as philosophy is now transformed from the making of positive theories about its domain where things are necessary. There isn't anything one can substantively say. So either you have one of two choices. You're either rehearsing formalisms and logic, tautologies and contradictions or other descriptions which are senseless and strictly speaking. So you haven't maybe talked nonsense at that point, but you haven't said anything. Right? Or your other option is you trade into talk about things that you treat as if they were contingent matters of fact. But in fact, you can't say anything. You're literally

talking nonsense. So basically he's saying that philosophy, because it doesn't talk about contingent facts about the world, is talking nonsense, but clearly he's advancing a philosophical theory to say that. So why doesn't he recognize that surely his logic must have gone wrong somewhere to get to that

point? Very good. So one of the things, I don't think he thinks he's putting forward a theory, but in fact he says he's not. He says philosophy is not a body of doctrine. It's an activity. However, that doesn't protect him from the point you're making. And interestingly, of course he does note this. So his penultimate remark at the end of the Tractotus is that now everything is set to explode or rather implode. So the famous latter metaphor that comes up, he's remarks are elucidations and if you understand him, then you'll realize that they will have to be just a latter that you climb to throw away. Well, consider, as you say, even if it's not advanced theoretically, even if these observations are somehow to be understood as, say, revelations about our situation. Nevertheless, it looks like where it looks like Wittgenstein would have had to put in towards, so it seems, for the readers, if we did a straight reading of this book, that he must have put in towards for the readers what he could not have put in towards for the readers, if these are going to be general truths that are substantive. If they're going to be truths that are necessary, not just contingent, noticing facts that could have been otherwise, if they're going to have the status of philosophical remarks, then they can't have that state. If the book actually says something of that nature, so it's got an inherent paradox in it. Well, I would say it's clearly indicative that, you know, his reasoning

has gone wrong somewhere. If he's saying, you know, the very facts of what I'm saying to you now are meaningless, and they clearly do have a meaning. In some sense, it's probably that, you know, his idea of meaning has probably gone wrong somewhere. Well, I think that this

is treading on to several different ways you could approach this in many different controversial readings. So one reading of late build as the new Wittgenstein readings, and they have their origins in the work of people like Cora Diamond and Jim Conant, is to say we shouldn't think that he ever made those claims that we were talking, I was giving you the story earlier, and I did highlight that there was a way of approaching this that deflates or takes away from the claims being advanced as substantive propositions themselves. So if we take seriously the idea that he claims not to be advancing any kind of theory, what we talk about him doing philosophical clarification, some think that the book is set to you up ironically, actually, for a therapeutic purpose. So the end line is for you to realize that to take it really, as they talk about these readings, as the resolute readings, so the resolute reading, when you finish the book, you resolutely understand that if you really understand the message of the book, you have to let go not of the entire picture that this could have prevented you those sort of arguments, and you let go of at the same time all of the assumptions that lay behind it. So one path is not to say, oh well, there's something wrong with the theory of meaning it contains, and therefore the other stories would be okay, but it would have an even more devastating effect that Wittgenstein recognized from the get-go that he couldn't argue this way. So it was a way of bringing his readers in to the serious depth of the situation. One of the things that makes the book compelling is that possibility. That's not the only possibility, of course, I mean the more standard reading would be to say, and we could come onto this, would be to say that those kinds of problems, paradoxical results, drive the generation of the later writings into course. That's not the usual official verdict of what makes the transition, but it may be one of the background concerns, because there is a recognition at the end of the book that he himself recognizes that he's encountered this paradox that the book itself can't be both saying and what appears to say, and also at the same time presenting that view of language. Okay,

and so we're going to look at his next step, which is a philosophical investigation after this track.

The Sitting in the shadows and the evening oscillating, feeling light and fading lights are gonna change, hoping for a moment for some gentle consolation, waiting at the station with a tutor out of range, she's sitting in a carriage being jostled by the motion, but hearing a conversation with the grinding of the steel, stands flat past the curtains that lay darkness, peace and sin, in the years of me, this remote diffs our conceit, three country sides and mountains and the village by the ocean, where the stranger's waiting for, in the precious of his cup, winding and rewinding, pushing all directions to the limit of implosions, which is never very fun, however, one time to see, was just invisible to me, without their inner distance, their eyes and its resistance, the sun will fall still drunk, and on the roughest of the days, rushing past the ruins of the churches and the porsches, reflected in the mirrors and echoes and the haze, in transportation fingers of the chromium on the feather, running through the reasons and the corners of his run, safety time, he dine inside the shaking hands of our hands with our hands aside from the structures of our fire, was just invisible to me, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, two, three, was just invisible to me, without their inner distance, the the the

the church and invisible, welcome back to Philosophy Now on Residence FM, I'm Grant Bartley from Philosophy Now magazine, and my guest is Dan Hough from Wollongong and Houghfortshire, Universities, we're discussing the philosopher of language Ludwig Grittenstein, and now in the second half of the show in relation to his later theories in the philosophical investigations published in 1953 after his death. So Dan, I wonder if you could tell us, why did Wittgenstein repudiate the views we've just been talking about from his first book?

Right, so I think where we finished up, even though he finishes the first book with an acknowledgement that there's a sort of, well, it's got a kind of paradoxical element to it, that I think could be one reason, the paradox of his

own theory is meaningless according to his own theory, right? Well,

even at the time, well, he, again, like I said, careful with the notion of theory, we'll come back to that, but let's suppose that he recognizes there's some form of internal paradox, I don't think at the time of writing, at least if the tension is there of writing the Choctatos, he thought it was something that would push you away from it. The more technical reason, apparently, in his middle period writings is that part of the story about there being only one complete analysis of every proposition, and that they all serve the same function meant that they would reduce in an analysis to what he called elementary propositions, and they would describe the world, and those he had to assume would not, in any way, contradict one another, and yet there were examples, philosopher Ramsey had noticed these, where this didn't seem like we could rule that out in advance without doing it by fiat.

So basically, the theory of language as a sort of a logical representation of facts is doesn't cover all uses of language. Well, it's

not that it doesn't cover all of you, but that's what we're going to get to now, but that's what, virtually, there was more of a, put it simply like this, there was more of a technical problem about these assumption about there being elementary propositions at the base that all function the same way, but never could contradict. And that was something that he would have to make a substantive claim himself again about, and we saw moments ago that we really weren't able to make those substantive, necessary claims in advance. So this is a problem for the original account, but I think that that technical problem, even though it exists, underates what you were just gesturing at, which is the more positive observation, is that Wittgenstein came, I think, to realize and do course that this was a non-necessarily restrictive imposition, the picture theory itself made an assumption, as you put it, about the nature of language, one that, by the way, he inherited, rather uncritically from Russell and the others, that was in the air, but it was an assumption nonetheless that language functioned in one sort of way, the language was always a fact-stating activity. If you applied the same attention to the idea that the language, remember his fundamental idea was that the logical constants don't represent. So suddenly this recognition that some aspects of language, or some logic

at least- Sorry, a logical constants being not or anything that you'd use in a logical analysis of language which isn't the language

itself. That's right, and or not, etc. So the idea that the logical, well, the so-called propositions of logic don't depict facts and that their elements don't name entities, so they're non-representational. So one way you might have gone is to think that logic isn't really a formal aspect, but it's not a language itself. But now apply the same thought that some parts of language themselves don't represent. One of his famous examples is you shout fire in a cinema, but you're not naming this, or ouch, or ow. So there's lots of or no itself, right? So their aspects of our- They're

not statements

of facts, in other words. So not just statements of facts, but they're also not names. So one of the opening bars of this was that all words have names, names, name objects of some kind. And if you think there's a comparison here that even in logic, not all of their elements pick out logics or denote objects, sorry. So too, you might think, well, no, here again, he's taking that same original thought, now apply it to other domains of language itself, and that would break the idea that there'd be a formal unity to all forms of language that they're always fact-stating discourses, and when you get down to brass tacks, that these have elements that denote or depict things.