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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
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Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
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Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
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Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
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Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
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Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Jeremy Butterfield
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
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Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
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Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
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Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
U.T.Place
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
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Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
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N. David Mermin
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Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
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Robert Sapolsky
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Aaron Schurger
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Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
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Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
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Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
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Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's Picture Theory of Language
For Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, G.H. von Wright wrote a biographical sketch recalling Wittgenstein's inspiration for his idea about language, that a proposition is a picture or model or mirror of reality.
Later he became engrossed in a new problem. It was the question of the nature of the significant proposition. There is a story of how the idea of language as a picture of reality occurred to Wittgenstein. It was in the autumn of 1914 on the Eastern Front, Wittgenstein was reading, in a magazine about a lawsuit in Paris concerning an automobile accident. At the trial a miniature model of the accident was presented before the court. The model here served as a proposition, that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It has this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the model (the miniature-houses, -cars, -people) and things (houses, cars, people) in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a model or picture, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined – the structure of the proposition – depicts a possible combination oi elements in reality, a possible state of affairs.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus may be called a synthesis of the theory of truth-functions and the idea that language is a picture of reality.

In his Notebooks entry for September 30, 1914, he wrote

The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the co-ordination of proposition and situation: The solution to all my questions must be extremely simple.

In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.1) [Cf. 4.031.]

This must yield the nature of truth straight away (if I were not blind).

Let us think of hieroglyphic writing in which each word is a representation of what it stands for. Let us think also of the fact that actual pictures of situations can be right and wrong. [Cf. 4.016.]

We can compare W's picture-writing Bilderschrift to Frege's concept-writing Begriffsschrift
" " : If the right-hand figure in this picture represents the man A, and the left-hand one stands for the man B, then the whole might assert, e.g.: "A is fencing with B". The proposition in picture-writing can be true and false. It has a sense independent of its truth or falsehood. It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case.

It can be said that, while we are not certain of being able to turn all situations into pictures on paper, still we are certain that we can portray all logical properties of situations in a two-dimensional script.

This is still very much on the surface, but we are on good ground.

30.9.14.

It can be said that in our picture the right-hand figure is a representation of something and also the left-hand one, but even if this were not the case, their relative position could be a representation of something. (Namely a relation.)

2.10.14.

Wittgenstein's was not the first claim that a set of true propositions can contain knowledge of the physical world, that words can describe objects, but his Tractatus was surely the boldest:

Here Wittgenstein imagines a "model" theory, but language does not have a subset of the information in an object
4.01 The proposition is a picture of reality.
        The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.

4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science
        (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences)

Although language is an excellent tool for human communication, its arbitrary and ambiguous nature makes it ill-suited to represent the world directly. What Wittgenstein saw in the miniature model of the accident at the Paris trial was a dynamic information structure that was partially isomorphic with the information structure of the original accident. Such a model is completely language independent!

It is sad that Wittgenstein proposed a picture theory of language, of language as a mirror of nature. As an excellent aeronautical engineer and architect, he knew that a working model is much more than a picture. He was very impressed by Heinrich Hertz's classic textbook The Principles of Mechanics, in which dynamical models played a large part.

Wittgenstein might have anticipated our information philosophy, which is a model theory of information structures. Today our best models are interactive dynamic computational models visualizable as 3-dimensional animations of physical objects and living beings.

Here Wittgenstein sees that the model must have the same "mathematical multiplicity" or complexity as the state of affairs,
viz., similar information
4.04 In the proposition there must be exactly as many things distinguishable as there are in the state of affairs, which it represents.

They must both possess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity (cf. Hertz's Mechanics, on Dynamic Models).

But there is no mapping, no isomorphism of information between words (propositions) and objects (states of affairs). The extraordinarily sophisticated connection between a word and object is made in human minds, mediated by the experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) in the mind/brain. Words stimulate some neurons to start firing and to play back relevant experiences including the object. By contrast, a dynamic information model of a part of the world is presented immediately to the mind as a look-alike and act-alike simulation.

Without relevant experience recorded in the mind's ERR, words are mere noise.

CAT

By comparison, a photograph or a moving picture with sound can be seen and mostly understood by any human being, independent of their native tongue. The core elements of our information philosophy, models of information structures, go far beyond logic and language as a representation of the fundamental nature of reality.

Computer simulations must of course incorporate all the laws of nature, from the differential equations of quantum physics to the myriad processes of biophysics. At their best, simulations are not only our most accurate knowledge of the world, they are the best teaching tools ever devised. We must use them to transfer that knowledge to the next generation and to most of the world's population via the Internet and our ubiquitous smartphones.

What is knowledge? A subset of the information in information structures.

How do we know it? Information is stored in our minds when our life experiences are recorded by the ERR.

Where is the best knowledge? It used to be in books and the minds of our best teachers. Now it is being spread around the world, accessible from any computer or smartphone. The I-Phi website is a modest contribution.

David Marans' Logic Gallery
See more philosopher profiles at the Logic Gallery by David Marans

For decades, Anglo-American analytic philosophers and ordinary language philosophers have thought that the major problems of philosophy are problems of language and logic, that complete understanding of the natural world could be obtained through a complete set of logical propositions.
The aging Bertand Russell, worried about the failure of his Principia Mathematica project to derive mathematics from logic, saw in Wittgenstein the young, bright, scientifically-trained mind that might be able to establish a logical foundation, not only for mathematics but for all science as well.

Over an agonizing seven-year period that included his military service in World War I, Wittgenstein wrote his brief Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung, named Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by G. E. Moore. In it Wittgenstein claimed to have solved all the problems of philosophy (at least all that could be shown in logic).

Wittgenstein also claimed that such problems could not be said or thought (only shown), and so everything written in the Tractatus was strictly speaking nonsense (unsinnung). Everything that had not been said in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claimed was his truly important work on ethics and the meaning of life.

Despite the negative result for logic, Russell used some of Wittgenstein's work to rewrite Principia Mathematica. It was published as revised by Russell and Whitehead, but shortly thereafter Whitehead disavowed the changes, all actually made by Russell alone. To add to Russell's difficulties, Wittgenstein accused him of misunderstanding the Tractatus and misusing it.

Nevertheless, there grew up around Wittgenstein and Russell (now not talking to one another) a school of philosophy that attracted a diverse group of European science-minded philosophers like Moritz Schlick and his Vienna Circle.

Although Wittgenstein saw his logical philosophy as a failure and turned his interest to the therapeutic use of language – language as a game, this school of logical positivism (based on Wittgenstein's logical atoms) and logical empiricism (based on verification of atomic facts) grew to dominate Anglo-American Analytic philosophy for several decades.

Wittgenstein and Free Will

Ludwig Wittgenstein may have done more to inhibit discussion of free will than any other 20th-century philosopher. He declared the problem of free will and the mind-body problem to be "pseudo-problems," which were to be "dis-solved" by careful attention to actual language use.

In section 5 of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes a number of statements that purport to describe the world, its future, and freedom of the will, all of them the consequence of propositions and what we can deduce or infer from them.

5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

5.1 Truth functions can be arranged in series.
      That is the foundation of the theory of probability.

5.12 In particular, the truth of a proposition 'p' follows from the truth of another proposition 'q' if all the truth-grounds of the latter are truth-grounds of the former.

5.123 If a god creates a world in which certain propositions are true, then by that very act he also creates a world in which all the propositions that follow from them come true. And similarly he could not create a world in which the proposition 'p' was true without creating all its objects.

5.13 When the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others, we can see this from the structure of the propositions.

5.131 If the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others, this finds expression in relations in which the forms of the propositions stand to one another: nor is it necessary for us to set up these relations between them, by combining them with one another in a single proposition; on the contrary, the relations are internal, and their existence is an immediate result of the existence of the propositions.

5.132 If p follows from q, I can make an inference from q to p, deduce p from q.
          The nature of the inference can be gathered only from the two propositions.
          They themselves are the only possible justification of the inference.
          'Laws of inference', which are supposed to justify inferences, as in the works of Frege and Russell, have no sense, and would be superfluous.

5.133 All deductions are made a priori.

5.134 One elementary proposition cannot be deduced from another.

5.135 There is no possible way of making an inference from the existence of one situation to the existence of another, entirely different situation.

5.136 There is no causal nexus to justify such an inference.

5.1361 We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present.             Superstition is nothing but belief in the causal nexus.

5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference. The connexion between knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity.
             ('A knows that p is the case', has no sense if p is a tautology.)

Wittgenstein asserts that truth-functions in a series are the basis of probability.
5.15 If Tr is the number of the truth-grounds of a proposition 'r', and if Trs is the number of the truth-grounds of a proposition 's' that are at the same time truth-grounds of 'r', then we call the ratio Trs : Tr the degree of probability that the proposition 'r' gives to the proposition s.

5.1511 There is no special object peculiar to probability propositions.

5.152 When propositions have no truth-arguments in common with one another, we call them independent of one another.
           Two elementary propositions give one another the probability 1/2.
           If p follows from q, then the proposition 'q' gives to the proposition p' the probability 1. The certainty of logical inference is a limiting case of probability.
           (Application of this to tautology and contradiction.)

5.153 In itself, a proposition is neither probable nor improbable. Either an event occurs or it does not: there is no middle way.

5.154 Suppose that an urn contains black and white balls in equal numbers (and none of any other kind). I draw one ball after another, putting them back into the urn. By this experiment I can establish that the number of black balls drawn and the number of white balls drawn approximate to one another as the draw continues.

           So this is not a mathematical truth.

           Now, if I say, 'The probability of my drawing a white ball is equal to the probability of my drawing a black one', this means that all the circumstances that I know of (including the laws of nature assumed as hypotheses) give no more probability to the occurrence of the one event than to that of the other. That is to say, they give each the probability 1/2, as can easily be gathered from the above 2 definitions.            What I confirm by the experiment is that the occurrence of the two events is independent of the circumstances of which I have no more detailed knowledge.

Wittgenstein On Identity
5.53 Identity of the object I express by identity of the sign and not by means of a sign of identity. Difference of the objects by difference of the signs.

5.5301 That identity is not a relation between objects is obvious. This becomes very clear if, for example, one considers the proposition "(x) : fx . HOOK . x=a". What this proposition says is simply that only a satisfies the function f, and not that only such things satisfy the function f which have a certain relation to a.

One could of course say that in fact only a has this relation to a, but in order to express this we should need the sign of identity itself.

5.5302 Russell's definition of "=" won't do; because according to it one cannot say that two objects have all their properties in common. (Even if this proposition is never true, it is nevertheless significant.)

5.5303 Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

5.532 And analogously: not "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) . x=y", but "( EXISTS x) . f(x, x)"; and not
"( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) . ~x=y", but "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y)".

Therefore instead of Russell's "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y)" : "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) .v. ( EXISTS x) . f(x, x)".)

5.533 The identity sign is therefore not an essential constituent of logical notation.

5.534 And we see that the apparent propositions like: "a=a", "a=b . b=c . HOOK a=c", "(x) . x=x". "( EXISTS x) . x=a", etc. cannot be written in a correct logical notation at all.

5.535 So all problems disappear which are connected with such pseudo-propositions.

This is the place to solve all the problems with arise through Russell's "Axiom of Infinity".

What the axiom of infinity is meant to say would be expressed in language by the fact that there is an infinite number of names with different meanings.


Hypertext edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in English and German (C.K. Ogden translation, with Russell introduction)

See also our growing bilingual translation of the Tractatus with annotations.

Wittgenstein On the Good
"What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics", Monk, p.278)
Information philosophy has discovered the cosmic creation process, which is the "divine providence" mistakenly and childishly attributed to a supernatural being. For those who like to anthropomorphize, we call it the Ergod, but it is a purely natural, if supremely benevolent, process

But Wittgenstein is quite correct. That "divine" process is the source of all that is good in the universe.

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