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Wittgensteins Tractatus Lecture 1 Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was largely composed while its author served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. He had studied engineering at Manchester before becoming interested in the foundations of mathematics and thence in more general philosophical issues. He visited Frege upon whose advice he came to study with Russell in Cambridge from 1911 to 1913. The book itself may be considered, in part, as a contribution to a variety of debates with those philosophers. Prominent among these was a dispute between Russell and Frege concerning names. Frege had a two-step view of the relationship between names and their referents. For him, a name had a sense that acted as a cognitive intermediary between the name and the world. This, he thought, was shown by the fact that Hesperus [i.e. the Evening Star] is Phosphorus [i.e. the Morning Star] expresses a genuine item of knowledge, whereas Hesperus is Hesperus does not. If there were nothing more to the meaning of the names Hesperus and Phosphorus than the planet they denote, then the two sentences would have identical content and hence express the same piece of knowledge. Frege was thus driven to say that associated with the name Hesperus is a sense, that is, a mode of presentation of the object it denotes (the planet Venus). It is a mistake to think, as Kripke did (though see Naming and Necessity n4), that this sense is identical with some particular definite description (The brightest celestial body apart from the sun & moon, or something) or cluster of definite descriptions. That would controvert the twostep picture, relegating the sense entirely to the realm of language; whereas sense is meant to supply a connection between names and the things that they name. Furthermore Frege gave an argument in The Thought to show that senses are neither denizens of the physical world nor of the purely mental realm of ideas, emotions and so on. They could not be the former because they did not exist at any particular spatiotemporal location. And they could not be the latter because they were in principle accessible to anybody. Only I, Frege thought, can feel my pain; whereas both you and I can mean the same thing by Hesperus, that is, grasp the same sense. Frege expressed this by saying that senses occupied a third realm of completely objective but also nonphysical items. Russell held a contrary one-step view of denoting: names had unmediated reference to things. That Hesperus is Phosphorus has a different cognitive value from Hesperus is Hesperus shows only that Hesperus and Phosphorus arent genuine names. The fact that they apparently function as names in English shows only that English stands in need of a philosophical analysis that reveals the true names. The analysis will replace English names with definite descriptions, and the latter can be eliminated in Russells way (see On Denoting). Wittgenstein agreed with Russell on this (Tractatus 3.2-3.221). For him, as for Russell, genuine names do not have a sense. This view raises two difficulties. The first, which is Freges argument concerning Hesperus and Phosphorus (s2), could be finessed by denying that those are genuine names. The second difficulty is the occurrence of names in modal contexts. We can meaningfully say that Socrates might not have existed; but on Russells view, if A is a

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genuine name, then we cannot say truly that A might not have existed. In that case it would make sense to say A does not exist. This sentence describes a situation in which A has no reference, and hence, for Russell, no meaning. But in describing such a situation by saying A does not exist, we are clearly presupposing that A does have meaning, for we are using that expression. (This was plainly not a problem for Frege. For him, a names lacking a referent would not deprive it of meaning. It would still have a sense). 7. So on the Russell/Wittgenstein view, what is named by a genuine name cannot be said to exist contingently. This raises a problem regarding the nature of what is named by genuine names, that is, a problem concerning the fundamental objects of the universe. Whatever they are, they must be utterly unlike the things that are named by the apparent names of English, things like Socrates or Paris. It is clear that these things might not have been existed; the same is true of any (physical) object you can think of. Russells answer to this was his identification, in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, of genuine objects with sense-data. He thought that if you have a name for an occurrent sense-datum (the red patch in the top left hand corner of the visual field), the name must refer; it plainly makes no sense to say, of an occurrent sense-datum, that it does not exist (The green dots present in my line of sight dont exist). A properly analysed language would be one in which all I could do would be to specify my sense-data. And it wouldnt make sense to deny, of any such sense-datum, that it existed, nor to affirm, of any non-occurrent sense datum, that it might have existed. For Russell, therefore, necessity and possibility (when understood non-epistemically) drop out of language altogether. He held that it is wrong to ascribe necessity or possibility to closed sentences. And all you mean, when you say x is mortal is possibly true is that for some x, x is mortal is true (See Philosophy of Logical Atomism in his Collected Papers vol. 8, ed. Slater, pp. 222f). Russell, then, argued from his analysis of objects into sense data to the conclusion that there is no sense in which true statements might have been false or in which false ones might have been true. Wittgenstein does not dispute the validity of this argument. But in interpreting him we seem forced to suppose that he would have contraposed it. He believed that for a sentence to say anything, it must say something contingent (2.2-2.225, 4.462). That is because what makes it true that a sentence picks out a particular situation is that it must pick it out from among other possible situations. Otherwise, there is nothing in virtue of which the sentence picks out just that possible situation. So that in a language in which no truths were contingent, we could not point to any fact in virtue of which a true sentence S picked out a particular fact different from that picked out by any other true sentence S. It follows that the genuine names of a language cannot denote sense-data as Russell thought they did. The general direction of Wittgensteins philosophy is the opposite of that of Russells. Whereas the latter argued from what he took to be the nature of the world, to conclusions about language, Wittgenstein moved rather from the possibility of language to the nature of the world. If language says anything, it must contain, at some reachable level of analysis, genuine names. And these names must barely denote objects, the basic constituents of the world. As far as the Tractatus is concerned, the precise nature of these objects is a distinct and quite open question.

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