The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Episode 8: Wittgenstein's Tractatus (and Carnap): What Can We Legitimately Talk About?
Sep 4, 2009
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Two Legitimate Domains Of Meaning
- Wittgenstein divides meaningful talk into two domains: empirical facts about the world and logical talk about language itself.
- Everything else—ethics, metaphysics, talk of God—becomes nonsensical because it lacks verification or picturing of states of affairs.
Verificationism's Self-Undermining Problem
- The verification principle judges meaningfulness by whether propositions can be tied to possible observations or deduced verifications.
- Carnap and the Vienna Circle adopt this to reject metaphysics but face the self-refutation problem for verification itself.
Laws As Logical Scaffolding
- Wittgenstein treats scientific laws as 'forms' or frameworks we impose to organize atomic facts, not as things in the world causing events.
- Laws like causality function as logical scaffolding for propositions, not metaphysical necessities.