THE ANNOTATED ANTI-WITTGENSTEIN
Principal Axioms of a Contextual Logic
Bruce G. Marcot
Updated: 1 October 1989
INTRODUCTION
The Positivist Pursuit
The pursuit of the philosophical ideal has
rarely been more focused or promising than during the third and fourth
decades of the twentieth century. During that period, Technological
idealism was on the rise as never before. Thinkers sought for concepts
that would link the increasing alienation of technology to the traditional
comfort of philosophy. Science and technology were becoming fragmented
into specialty areas, and knowledge in these realms was burgeoning with
new theories, paradigms, and world views. The philosophical community
saw it was time for unification.
In the late 1920's, a new guild of thinkers
was formed, mostly in rebellion to the traditional nineteenth-century world
views. This new, so-called "Vienna Circle" was formed in part by
Moritz Schlick, whose background was in relativistic physics under Max
Planck. Schlick, along with other scientists and philosophers such
as Wittgenstein, Reichenback, and Hempel, shared a discontent with traditional
Viennese philosophy and German idealism that had dominated philosophical
thinking. The traditional Germanic ways of Hegel, Shelline, and the
neo-Kantians were seen to focus on speculative, ethical, and esthetical
considerations. Schlick and his colleagues saw all this as undesirable
and unnecessary.
They named their camp "logical positivism"
and set out to define the territorial boundaries. The central goal
of the Vienna Circle positivists was no less than the unification of all
science. They perceived that to attain this goal meant revising the
philosophies of their day along three fundamental principles.
First, philosophy should be scientific, that
is, it should consist of clear and rigorous statements and arguments, and
contain no "whys" or metaphysical speculations of ultimate being or reality
(ontology). This led to Carnap's project to reduce language itself
to a basic algorith, a set of elementary concepts and rules that would
describe how language is built from relationships of those elements.
His "logical analysis of language" concluded by rejecting metaphysics in
toto. All is needed is a set of building blocks and rules to pile
the bricks.
Second, philosophy should follow an empiricist
tradition, as derived from the English heritage of Hume, Russell, and Whitehead.
In this tradition, statements about the world generally fall into two categories:
meaningful and emotive. "Meaningful" (or "cognitive") statements,
as they were defined, can be validated with real-world experience a posteriori.
"Meaningless" (or "emotive") statements are essentially unverifiable, and
include much of the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and ontology (the study
of being). One objective of the Vienna Circle was to build a self-consistent
and externally complete philosophy from meaningful statements only, and
to eliminate all emotive statements. This became the central efforts
of Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein.
Third, philosophy should be based explicitly
on Russell and Whitehead's logical framework and analyses in their tome
Principia Mathematica. This volume was an attempt to devise a completely
general, formal system of symbolic logic and explicit rules for manipulating
the symbols and logical operators. Also, Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus was used by Carnap to derive a linguistic base
of positivism.
Carnap's thesis was that language is a logical, syntactical system
that consists of universally true rules and elementary, atomic statements
that are not dependent on contexts of semantics. Syntax and definition
alone would build the complexities of language. In this endeavor,
Carnap explicitly excluded "emotive" type statements.
Problems with the Positivist Position
Eventually, five basic problems with the logical
positivist approach became evident. One problem was how to verify
"atomic" statements, universals, laws, and theories. The idea of
atomic statements -- so central to Carnap's linguistic model and to Russell
and Whitehead's universal logic -- was originally devised to escape the
subjectivity and context-dependency of emotive statements that would not
yield to strict logical analysis. However, it became clear, at least
to critics of the positivist movement, that atomic statements are themselves
unverifiable assumptions of the positivist approach and do not represent
real-world phenomena per se. For example, in the statement "the tree
is 30 meters tall," the empirical observation of "tree" would seem to be
indisputable. Critics argued, in effect, that the "atomic" statement
"tree" is itself subject to many equivocal connotations and shades of meanings.
The positivists themselves were using unverifiable, emotive concepts to
postulate their most basic terms!
Similarly, the positivist project viewed particular
statements about logic and mathematics as universal laws and theories.
Such universal laws were seen to be essential statements of logical and
scientific conditions. They were also thought in some sense to exist
beyond any particular context, to be immutable through space and time.
Again, later critics found such universals to be problematic, especially
as the context-dependent paradigm of relativistic physics pervaded the
scientific world.
A second major problem with the positivist
project was that at no time throughout history have knowledge and method
of both science and philosophy been unified. Indeed, all historical
accounts suggested that inherent contradictions have always existed between
scientific and philosophic knowledge and method. This suggested a
very fundamental difference in ways of thinking, not simply that there
has been a lack of notions to unify the two.
A third problem was that the positivist approach
did not take into consideration how science changes and grows; it considered
scientific understanding, once created, as absolute and immutable.
Again, historic facts stand in contradistinction. As a corollary,
the positivist project did not consider the origins of scientific hypotheses
as problematic. Much of this so-called "problem of discovery" -- that is,
the problem of identifying and explaining how hypotheses are created in
the mind of the scientist -- eventually formed one of the foci for later,
anti-positivist philosophies (such as the work founded by Hanson during
the 1960's).
The fourth problem was that the positivist
tradition rendered knowledge gained from non-scientific endeavors ("common
sense," sensu Walter Kaufmann) meaningless. The positivist doctrine
demoted knowledge gained from emotive, poetic, metaphysic, or religious
means to a class lower than that gained through strictly scientific means.
Also, certain fields in science, such as systematics, psychology, and sociology,
which had traditionally been seen as rigorous, were now seen as "meaningless,"
or at best, non-science.
Finally, one central and perennial problem
with the positivist approach was that of the so-called problem of induction,
expounded by David Hume and "solved" in the positivist framework by Hempel.
The problem of induction was, how to logically justify our faith and belief
in inductive inference? For example, because the stone falls earthward
from the hand when released, and has always fallen in similar fashion,
is no strict logical proof or basis for concluding beyond any doubt that
it will always continue to behave in this manner. In a sense, from
a set of empirical observations, such as of the stone falling earthward,
we amplify contexts and conditions and infer some more universal laws of
behavior under some future or unknown contexts. Thus, this problem
has also been referred to as the problem of the "ampliative nature of inductive
inference."
Hempel's hypothetico-deductive (H-D) "solution"
to the problem of inductive inference shifted the focus of the problem
from how to induce general principles from lower-level observations to
how to deduce behaviors from higher-level theories or hypotheses.
In the H-D system, repeated observations that match expected behavior are
grounds for, in some sense, "confirming" the validity of the higher-order
theory or hypothesis from which the behavior was deduced. Still,
the H-D system ignored the origins of the higher-order theories and hypotheses.
It still relied on amplifying those observations that are consistent with
the theory to a higher level of confidence. The problem of induction
still remained, albeit clothed in different garb.
In general, then, the positivist tradition
suffered from several important restrictions. It restricted the domains
of valid knowledge by eliminating metaphysics and other sources of "emotive"
knowledge. It also failed to solve the problem of induction and the
problem of elementary or atomic statements and universals. Overall,
it led to a static view of science.
A New Wave of Anti-Positivists
From the 1960's to the present, a New Wave
of philosophers of science has emerged. This new crest has been united
by their mutual dissent of the Vienna Circle positivist tradition.
Such New Wave philosophers have included Hanson, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Toulmin,
Grene, Polanyi, Brown, and Rorty. The New Wave sees no need to reject
metaphysics in toto to argue against the subjectivity of German Idealism.
In contrast to the positivist approach, it places emphasis on the contexts
of scientific statements. Moreover, the New Wave is concerned with
other than strictly empirical aspects of science. It considers important
such "fringe" problems as those in systematics, sociology, and psychology,
which the positivist tradition dismissed as nonscientific.
The New Wave has come to consist of the following
characteristics, as contrasted with the positivist tradition. The
New Wave is essentially a reaction against the Viennese tradition.
It adduces a world view (Weltanschauungen) approach, in which context and
relation are centrally important for meaning. The world view approach
contrasts with the positivists' assertion that there exist atomic and universally
true statements. Rather, science is seen in the New Wave as a human
and personal enterprise, by dint of a context-contingent philosophy of
knowledge. Scientists are guided as much by culture, theory, training,
and personal experience as they are by empirical observations. Indeed,
in the New Wave philosophy of science, all observations are "laden" with
the theories and conceptual and cultural frameworks of the observer.
What one knows filters or determines what and how one sees.
Also, the New Wave's interests focus on discovery
and the arational facets of science, such as the origin of theory, rather
than on justification (the problem of induction). It also recognizes
that historical descriptions of science should be addressed, and that the
paradigms of science -- those highest-level, general world views and guiding
theories -- do indeed change over time.
Another implication of the New Wave, over
and against the Vienna Circle positivist tradition, is that the problem
of induction is an artifact of the limited positivist framework.
That is, once allowing for other sources and kinds of knowledge, we need
not be concerned with induction as problematic. The problem of discovery
-- the origins of hypotheses and conjectures -- is more interesting and
pertinent than is the problem of induction. Also, science need not
view any statements as atomic or universal, since the "truth-content" of
facts depends on contexts of theories, paradigms, personal histories, cultures,
and world views. Lastly, science is dynamic, and central paradigms
are (and should be) ever open to change and fresh interpretation.
What has emerged from the New Wave trend are
elements of a context-contingent philosophy of science and knowledge.
Such a contextualist approach lies at the heart of the Weltanschauungen
philosophies.
Pepper (1970) described the early tenets of
a contextualist philosophy. The essence of contextualism is the "historic
event," defined as the event alive now, undergoing new interpretations
and assimilations into other concepts and events. Events are acts
in and with their settings, acts in context. "The contexutalist finds
that everything in the world consists of such incidents" (Pepper 1970,
p. 233). In this view, truth is not simply the verification of an
event over various points in space or time. Rather, truth is:
a relation between a hypothesis and its eventuality. It entails a wager of success on the part of a hypothesis. It involves a texture of symbols with references toward a definite total satisfaction. If the satisfaction is achieved, the symbolic texture is true. (Pepper 1970, p. 273)Pepper noted that two central characteristics of events in a contextual knowledge are change and novelty. Events are inextricably bound in the contexts of their environment. Thus, they are, in part, defined and distinguished somewhat arbitrarily from their background matrix of all the things that contribute to their occurrence.
Wittgenstein's Treatise on Philosophical Symbolism
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
first appeared in 1921. During the 1920's and 1930's it became
central to much of the Viennese positivist tradition. The reason
is that it developed an apparently self-consistent and externally complete
framework of logic. In effect, it was a rationale for applying logical
structure for all philosophical and scientific endeavors.
The present essay was inspired by the New
Wave anti-traditionalists. The essay especially focuses on the dependence
of universal laws and statements to the contexts of theories and world
views. This essay is essentially a re-write of Wittgenstein's philosophy
in the New Wave tradition. The main thesis is that the contexts of
knowledge and the relation of knower to the known, to borrow from Marjorie
Grene, is central to understanding and to doing science. In this
perspective, science is not the simple process of making observations and
discoving facts and general laws which are true under all contexts and
circumstances.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
was written in a declarative style, using a numbered hierarchy of short
statements. The highest levels of the hierarchy were the most universal
and general of the statements, and at successively lower levels were more
specific statements following the theme of the higher levels.
The volume may be read focusing only on those statements at the topmost
levels of the hierarchy. Alternatively, it may be read from back
to front, or from the lowest levels up to the
highest.
I have followed Wittgenstein's format, but
have in some sense translated his statements into a contextualist philosophy
of science. The numbers in my hierarchy of statements are intentionally
parallel to his down to the second level, thus allowing the reader to cross-reference
both volumes. Further, where appropriate, I have annotated the New
Wave statements with references or further discussion to help explain the
contrast that appears with the positivist tradition. My fondest hope
is that what has emerged from this effort is a self-consistent and fuller
explanation of a context-contingent logic and philosophy of science.
- Bruce G. Marcot
28 July 1985
Portland, Oregon