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 algorithm, 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 contextualist 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.

     Further, in the contextual approach, things are described according to their qualities and textures.  The quality of a thing or event considers its degree of spread (how much it affects or interpenetrates its environment of causal web); its change (how much it remains constant over space or time); and its degrees of fusion (how distinguishable it is from its environment or from other things or events).  The texture of a thing or event defines its "strands" of how it affects and is affected by other things or events.  The "strands" are those features that are distinguishable, and thus measurable or identifiable, over space or time.  Texture also defines the context of a thing or event (the conditions in which it exists and continues), and its references (how it is distinguished from the background).

     By defining the quality and texture of a thing or event, one can determine its change or novelty and thus form the basis for comparing observations among different times, spaces, and observers.  This contextualist approach is a radical deviation from that of the logical positivist camp, in that form and condition are seen to be ever-changing rather than absolute and determinate.

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 discovering 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

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