The power of Frege’s logic to dispel philosophical problems was immediately recognized. Consider, for instance, the hoary problem of “non-being.” In the novel Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, the messenger says he passed nobody on the road, and he is met with the observation, “Nobody walks slower than you.” To this the messenger replies, “I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do,” which in turn makes it seem strange that he (the messenger) could overtake him (Nobody). The problem arises from treating nobody as a singular term, one that must refer to some thing—in this case to a mysterious being that does not exist. When nobody is treated as it should be—as a quantifier—the sentence I passed nobody on the road can be understood as meaning that the predicate ...was passed by me on the road is unsatisfied. There is nothing paradoxical or mysterious about this.
In his paper “On Denoting” (1905), the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) took the further step of bringing definite descriptions—noun phrases of the form the so and so, such as the present king of France—into the scope of Frege’s logic. The problem addressed by Russell was how to account for the meaningfulness of definite descriptions that do not refer to anything. Such descriptions are commonly used in formal mathematical reasoning, as in a proof by reductio ad absurdum that there is no greatest prime number. The proof consists of deriving a contradiction from the sentence Let x be the greatest prime number, which contains a description, the greatest prime number, that by hypothesis does not refer. If the description is treated as a Fregean singular term, however, then it is not clear what sense it could have, since sense, according to Frege, is the mode of presentation of a referent.
Russell’s brilliant solution is to see such descriptions as in effect quantificational. Let x be the greatest prime number is analyzed as Let x be prime and such that no number greater than x is prime. Similarly, Russell’s celebrated example The present king of France is bald is analyzed as There is an x such that: (i) x is now king of France, (ii) for any y, if y is now king of France, then y = x, and (iii) x is bald. In other words, there is one and only one king of France, and that individual is bald. This sentence is false but not nonsensical. Crucially, since the present King of France does not function as a singular term in the analysis, no referent for it is required to make the description or the sentence meaningful. The analysis works not by asking what the present king of France refers to but by accounting for the meanings of sentences in which the present king of France occurs; the Fregean priority of sentence meaning over word meaning is thus maintained. In this paper Russell took himself to be inaugurating a program of analysis that would similarly show how many other kinds of philosophically puzzling entities are actually “logical fictions.”
Frege and Russell initiated what is often called the “linguistic turn” in Anglo-American philosophy (see analytic philosophy). Until that time, of course, language had provided certain topics of philosophical speculation—such as meaning, understanding, reference, and truth—but these topics had been treated as largely independent of others that were unrelated (or not directly related) to language—such as knowledge, mind, substance, and time. Frege, however, showed that fundamental advances in mathematics could be made by studying the language used to express mathematical thought. The idea rapidly generalized: henceforward, instead of studying, say, the nature of substance as a metaphysical issue, philosophers would investigate the language in which claims about substance are expressed, and so on for other topics. The philosophy of language soon achieved a foundational position, leading to a “golden age” of logical analysis in the first three decades of the 20th century. For the practitioners of the new philosophy, modern logic provided a tool for exhaustively categorizing the linguistic forms in which information could be expressed and for identifying the determinate logical implications associated with each form. Analysis would uncover philosophically troublesome logical fictions in sentences whose logical forms are unclear on the surface, and it would ultimately reveal the nature of the reality to which language is connected. This vision was stated with utmost severity and rigour in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), by Russell’s brilliant Austrian pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
In the Tractatus, sentences are treated as “pictures” of states of affairs. As in Frege’s system, the basic elements consist of referring expressions, or “logically proper” names, which pick out the simplest parts of states of affairs. The simplest propositions, called “elementary” or “atomic,” are complexes whose structure or logical form is the same as that of the state of affairs they represent. Atomic sentences stand in no logical relation to one another, since logic applies only to complex sentences built up from atomic sentences through simple logical operations, such as conjunction and negation (see connective). Logic itself is trivial, in the sense that it is merely a means of making explicit what is already there. It is “true” only in the way that a tautology is true—by definition and not because it accurately represents features of an independently existing reality.
According to Wittgenstein, sentences of ordinary language that cannot be constructed by logical operations on atomic sentences are, strictly speaking, senseless, though they may have some function other than representing the world. Thus, sentences containing ethical terms, as well as those purporting to refer to the will, to the self, or to God, are meaningless. Notoriously, however, Wittgenstein pronounced the same verdict on the sentences of the Tractatus itself—thus suggesting, to some philosophers, that he had cut off the branch on which he was sitting. Wittgenstein’s own metaphorical injunction, that the reader must throw away the ladder once he has climbed it, does not seem to resolve the difficulty, since it implies that the reader’s climb up the ladder actually gets him somewhere. How could this be—what could the reader have learned—if the sentences of the Tractatus are senseless? Wittgenstein denied the predicament, asserting that in his treatise the logical form of language is “shown” but not “said.” This contrast, however, remains notoriously unclear, and few philosophers have been brave enough to claim that they fully understand it.
Despite these difficulties, in the 1920s and ’30s Russell’s program, and the Tractatus itself, exerted enormous influence on a philosophical discussion group known as the Vienna Circle and on the movement it originated, logical positivism. Flamboyantly introduced to the English-speaking world by the Oxford philosopher Sir A.J. Ayer (1910–89), logical positivism combined the search for logical form with ideas inherited from the tradition of British empiricism, according to which words have meaning only insofar as they bear some satisfactory connection to experience. The Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–76), for example, held that words are the signs of ideas in the mind, and ideas are either direct copies of perceptual experiences or complexes of such ideas. The Fregean shift toward sentences as the basic unit of meaning entailed that such an account—based on individual words and ideas and based on a simple sensory model of the mind—needed revision, but its basic empirical orientation remained.
Reacting to Hume, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) complained that the British empiricists—Locke in particular—had “sensualized the conceptions of the understanding.” Kant recognized that applying a concept involves more than just attaching a word to a kind of mental picture; it also involves deploying a rule. Subsequent empiricists responded by insisting that there must be some satisfactory contact with experience for such deployment to be possible. In the view of the logical positivists, this contact consists of the method by which a meaningful sentence can be empirically verified. A non-tautological sentence is meaningful, according to their slogan, just in case it is possible (at least in principle) to verify it empirically; indeed, the meaning of such a sentence just is its method of verification (see verifiability principle). Thus, the positivist analysis of a science—or any other body of knowledge—distinguished between a base of bare “protocol sentences,” or descriptions of experience, and a superstructure of theoretical sentences that serve to systematize and predict the patterns such experience may take. The semantic content of theoretical sentences is thus entirely determined by the sentences’ logical connections to patterns of experience. Therefore, whatever unobservable theoretical entities they may refer to—such as the elementary subatomic particles—are merely “logical constructions” from these patterns.
The wide appeal of logical positivism stemmed in part from its iconoclastic contention that sentences that are empirically unverifiable are meaningless. The ostensibly unverifiable sentences of metaphysics and religion were exuberantly consigned to the dustbin, and logic itself escaped only because it was regarded as tautologous. Like Wittgenstein, the logical positivists held that ethics is not a domain of knowledge or representation at all—though some logical positivists (Ayer included) spared ethical sentences from pure meaninglessness by according them an “emotive” or “expressive” function.
In the early 1930s, as logical positivism flourished, the logical investigation of language achieved its greatest triumph in work by Kurt Gödel (1906–78), the brilliant Austrian mathematician, on the nature of proof in languages within which mathematical reasoning has been formalized. Gödel showed that no such language can formalize proofs of all true mathematical propositions. He also showed that no such system can prove its own consistency: a stronger set of logical assumptions is needed to prove the consistency of a weaker set (a result of profound importance in the theory of computing). Gödel’s work required delicate handling of the idea of using one language (a metalanguage) to talk about another (an object language). This idea in turn enabled the Polish logician Alfred Tarski (1902–83) to address problems that had been largely neglected by the Tractatus and the logical positivists, in particular the elucidation of semantic notions such as truth and reference.
In the study of formal languages, logicians need pay little attention to semantic relations, since they can simply decree a particular interpretation of terms and then go on to consider the logical structure generated by that decree. But the nature of the decree itself is not a topic of study within logic. Similarly, the Tractatus did not elucidate the semantic relations between logically proper names and simple parts of states of affairs. But a philosophy as universal in its intent as logical positivism needs to say something about truth and reference. Some logical positivists, indeed, held that no such account was possible, since giving one would require “stepping out of one’s own skin”—somehow obtaining an independent perspective on both language and the world while all the time trapped inside a language and having no linguistically uncontaminated access to the world. Tarski’s work offered a more scientific solution. The basic idea is that one can specify what the truth of a particular sentence consists of by saying what the sentence means. A definition of is true for a particular object language is adequate if it enables one to construct, for every sentence of that language, a sentence of the form ‘X’ is true if and only if p, where X is a sentence in the object language, p is a sentence in the metalanguage one uses to talk about the object language, and X has the same meaning as p. Thus, a definition of is true for German, using English as a metalanguage, would entail that Es schneit is true if and only if it is snowing, Die welt ist rund is true if and only if the world is round, and so on. One understands all there is to understand about truth in German when one knows the totality of such sentences—there is nothing else to know. The moral of the exercise, philosophically, is that there is nothing general to say about truth. Tarski himself seemed to regard his theory as a logically sophisticated version of the intuitive idea of truth as “correspondence to the facts.” As such, the theory eliminates traditional objections concerning the obscure nature of facts and the mysterious relation of correspondence by avoiding even the appearance of a general account.
Tarski’s work on truth is one of the few enduring legacies of logical positivism. Much of the rest of the program, in contrast, soon encountered very serious problems. It is not really plausible to suppose, for example, that one’s understanding of the historical past is adequately captured in one’s experiences of “verifying” facts about it. Indeed, the very notion of such verifying experiences is extremely elusive, if only because it is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to draw a coherent boundary between the way an experience is conceived or characterized and the theory an experience is supposed to confirm. But other problems, too, lurked in the wings.
The later Wittgenstein
Frege’s theory of meaning, for all its sophistication, relied on an unsatisfactory account of thoughts as abstract objects. The Tractatus did not have to deal with such a problem, because it treated meaning—and language altogether—independently of the ways in which language is actually used by human beings. Less than 10 years after the work’s completion, however, Wittgenstein came to believe that this dimension of language is of paramount importance. Without some account of it, he now thought, the entire system of the Tractatus would collapse like a house of cards. In writings and teachings from 1930 on, accordingly, he emphasized the connections between words and practical human activities. Words are animated, or given meanings, by such activities—and only by them. In the variety of little stories describing what he calls “language games,” Wittgenstein imagined people counting, calling for tools, giving directions, and so on. Comparing the meaning of a word to the power of a piece in chess, he insisted that it is only in the context of human activity that meaning exists. By conceiving of language apart from its users, therefore, the Tractatus had overlooked its very essence. The slogan accordingly associated with Wittgenstein’s later work is that “Meaning is use,” though he himself never expressed this view in such an unqualified form.
One of Wittgenstein’s principal themes is the open-ended or open-textured nature of linguistic dispositions. Although it may seem, especially to philosophers, that word usage is determined by the application of distinct and definite rules—and thus that knowing the meaning of a word is the same as knowing the corresponding rule—careful examination of actual speech situations shows that in no case can a single rule account for the countless variety of uses to which an individual word may be put. Wittgenstein asks, for example, what rule would explain the great variety of things that may be called a game. When one looks for something that all games have in common, one finds only “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” The different games seem to be united only by a vague “family resemblance.” The usage of the word, therefore, is determined not by a complicated rule or definition—even one applied unconsciously—but only by a fairly relaxed disposition to include some things and to exclude others. If there is any rule involved at all, it is a trivial one: call games only those things that are games. Thus, knowledge of word meaning, and membership in the linguistic community generally, is not a matter of knowing rules but only of sharing dispositions to apply words in something like the way other people do. There is no conceptual foundation for this activity: the concept is generated by the usage, not the usage by the concept.
This means in particular that word usage cannot be founded in Lockean ideas. Wittgenstein’s refutation of this view is one of the most devastating short proofs in philosophy. He first poses the problem of how someone can understand the order to bring a red flower from a meadow: “How is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?” One possibility is that the hearer associates the word red with an idea (a mental image of red) and then looks for a flower matching the image. Wittgenstein says,
But this is not the only way of searching and it isn’t the usual way. We go, look about us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can be of this kind, consider the order “imagine a red patch.” You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine.
The most-celebrated passages in Wittgenstein’s late masterpiece Philosophical Investigations (1953) attempt to unseat the notion of private experience. Their interpretation is endlessly controversial, but the basic idea is that objects of thought cannot include elements that are purely “private” to a single individual—as sensations, for example, are supposed to be. For if there were private objects of thought, then there could be no distinction, in what one says about one’s own thoughts, between being right and merely seeming to be right. Objects of thought, therefore, must be essentially public, checkable items about which one can in principle converse with others.
Not only experience and observation but also reason and logic are transfigured in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. For Frege and Russell, the propositions of logic and mathematics are pristinely independent of sense experience, depending for their truth only on the structures of the abstract world they describe—a world made accessible to human beings through the light of pure reason. This vision was later somewhat compromised by the logical positivists’ assimilation of logic and mathematics to tautology and convention. In the later Wittgenstein, however, the entire distinction between logical and empirical truth becomes unclear. Logic, for example, is a set of practices and therefore a language, perfectly in order as it stands; what counts in logic as a correct application of a term or a permissible inference, therefore, depends only on what logicians do. As with word meanings in more-ordinary contexts, what matters are the settled dispositions of those who use the language in question. Because these dispositions may change, however, meaning is not—at least in principle—fixed and immutable. The rules reflecting common usage, including even fundamental physical principles and the laws of logic themselves, may change, provided enough of the relevant linguistic community begins using old words in new ways. The securest and most certain of truths may be coherently rejected, given that the rules underlying them have changed appropriately. There are no “higher” rules by which to evaluate these changes.
An uncomfortable vision opens up at this point. The very idea of truth seems to presuppose some notion of correctness in the application of words. If one calls a hippopotamus a cow, except metaphorically or analogically, then presumably one has gotten something wrong. But if the rule for applying the word cow is derived entirely from linguistic practice, what would make this case merely a mistake and not a change in the rule—and thus a change in what the word cow means? An adequate answer to this question would seem to require some account of what it is for a rule to be “in force.” Wittgenstein suggests in some passages that there is no substance to this notion: in normal times, everyone dances in step, and that is all there is to it. This suggestion is made with particular force in the discussion of rule following in the Philosophical Investigations. It is clear nevertheless that Wittgenstein believed that the distinction between mistake and innovation could be made.