BACKGROUND TO THE TRACTATUS (unedited notes)

BACKGROUND TO THE TRACTATUS
I. THE LINGUISTIC TURN: LOGICISM
1. KANT: Mathematics and the Synthetic A Priori

2. FREGE:Logicism and the foundations of Mathematics
a. The context principle
a. "How, then, are the numbers to be given to us, if we cannot have any ideas or
intuitions of them? Since it is only in the context of a sentence that words have
any meaning, our problem becomes this: To explain the sense of a sentence in
which a number word occurs." ((Frege, 1953), §62)
b. "...never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a
sentence." (p. x)
c. "It is enough if the sentence taken as a whole has sense; it is this that confers on
its parts also their content." (§60)
d. "We next laid down the fundamental principle that we must never try to explain
the meaning of a word in isolation, but only as it is used in the context of a
sentence." (§106)

The Context Principle in MT:
CP:
CP is used by Frege to defend two interrelated claims (Frege's theory of numbers)
FN:
   (i) numbers are objects
   (ii) numerals are genuine proper names
CP is used in anticipation of the following objection to FN:
OF:
 (i) when we try to understand what a numeral names, we can form no idea/image of the meaning of numerals (self-evident thought experiment)
 (ii) Therefore, numerals cannot really be names
Frege charges that OF is mistaken, because in order to understand the meaning of a numeral we do not need to be able to understand the meaning of a numeral in isolation from its role in propositions. CP says something stronger: it says, in its strongest form, words ONLY have meaning in the context of a proposition; and in a weaker "meta-semantic" form, to explain the meaning of a word requires understanding its role in propositions. There are issues with cohering these readings to Frege's formulations; also, issues with squaring it with Frege's further principle of compositionality. However, at any rate, for our purpose it is clear that in either reading it is suited to respond to OF: numerals can be understood in their propositional context, even if there are difficulties understanding their meanings in isolation.
[fill in the rest of Frege's strategy: how does the need to understand numerals within propositional context support or enable his definition of numerals in terms of equinumerous sets? Is the goal to 'recarve' numeral in terms that involves no reference to numbers or identity, since such definitions would be circular? How does Frege's concern with = lead to SR?
Potter in NL sees Frege's CP as an attack on psychologism, which presumably was a part of what resisted numerals as names claim:

"The moment Frege took the linguistic turn--the moment, indeed, when it was born--occurren in the Grundlagen when, having stated teh context principle, that 'only in the context of a proposition do words mean anything', he then used the principle to tranform the Kantian question, 'How are numbers given to us?' into the linguistic question, 'How are number words used?' Frege explicitly advertised one of the purposes of the context principle as being to resist psychologism. If we ignore this principle, he sia, we are 'almost forced to take as the meanings of words mental pictures or acts of the individual mind', and hence, he thought, to descend into psychologism." 65
Potter also claims that while for Frege the linguistic turn meant looking to language to approach thought, for Wittgenstein it was a symbolic turn which mean, looking to our symbols to approach the world.

Corollaries:
What follows from the claim that the smallest meaningful unit of language is the sentence? Nothing is said before the level of a sentence. This seems suited for a view of language that sees its essence in asserting truths: if the meaning of a linguistic entities is its relation to truth, then sentences are meaningful as such, while any part of a sentence is only meaningful insofar as it contributes to the truth conditions of the sentence.
   This has prima facie appeal, but also is unintuitive. Let's consider the following: On the one had, in a dictionary, a words meaning is explicated by more words and phrases, sometimes simply synonyms. One the other, a good dictionary also shows the word in a sentence. At any rate, any dictionary will classify the word by its part of speech which determines the possibilities and impossibilities of the word's formal contribution to a sentence. Clearly, synonymy is not all that we are asking for when we ask for the meaning of a word. It is rather as though a dictionary gives the form and the content of a word - the content being given by more familiar words (something roughly like a possibility of substitution), the form being its part of speech - possiblity of meaningful combination. What makes it clear that even a dictionary is committed to some thing like the context principle is that by classifying a word by its part of speech is saying that its definition is incomplete without understanding what its part of speech is and moreover to understand parts of speech is essentially to understand something in terms of its ability to be part of a sentence. So in a minimal way, even a dictionary definition which seems to define a word in isolation still essentially involves seeing the isolated word as an abstraction from its possible combinations.
Still, there seems to be a difference between saying that one can't understand what an adverb without understanding a whole host of other parts of speech, not least of which is the sentence, and, on the other hand, saying that one can't understand what an adverb is outside of its actual occurrence in a sentence. I think what we need to posit is an ambiguity in Frege that amounts to a misleading interpretation of CP. To say, in the stronger reading of CP, "only in the context of a sentence does a word have any meaning" means: words do not have meaning until they actually occur in a sentence. This has the unintuitive conclusion that coming across a word on its own is meaningless. Certainly seeing the word "seashell" on a piece of paper is more meaningful than seeing the letters "seashe". In the same way something holistic occurs when a string of words becomes a sentence, so too something holistic emerges when a string of letters/phonemes amounts to a word.
On a weaker, more charitable reading, all Frege is saying by "context of a sentence" is something like: in its possible legitimate combinations; in its potential contribution to a whole sentence. Then the claim that words aren't meaningful on their own amounts to the claim that in order to understand any given isolated word, one must first understand it as an essentially incomplete entity - one which bears an essential but incomplete relation to truth (this is its meaning) but must combine with others to do anything properly meaningful.
It becomes important to posit something like a spectrum, on one end of which are names which refer to concrete observable objects; on the other, names that refer to abstract 'entities'. The former are paradigmatic names - things like "Ludwig Wittenstein" or "flour" on a jar. These names seem to be exhausted by brute correlation. Of course, this is not the case: the name sewn into a pair of coveralls is not the name of the coveralls, but the normal wearer, the "flour" on the jar refers to what is normally in the jar, even when its empty; however it is by trying unsuccessfully to imagine the abstract entities in terms of the paradigmatic cases that OF gets off the ground. However it quickly becomes clear that the very idea of a meaningful brute correlation between a word and an object is a fiction - it is impossible to understand "Flour" as a meaningful label without seeing it as shorthand for, or indicative of, certain claims of facts: ie., propositions (in this case, this jar is where the flour is kept; the intended wearer of these coveralls is called "Ludwid" etc.)
It turns out then that the CP amounts to a repudiation of the claim that language bottoms out in ostension: that, whether as a gesture or some simple, pointing relation between a label and its object, ostension is insufficient to account for the meaning of any bit of language. CP, then, is mustered to show that numerals can be understood as names, and the only reason this seems dubious is because we have something like an ostensive account of how names are meaningful, that the relation between a name and an objects is that the former simply stands for the latter, and nothing else. Here I will quote at length from MT:
"Since 'a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence', there must be a great deal more to fixing the meaning of a term than the bare assignment of referent. On the contrary, its 'logical grammar' must also be fixed - it must be determined how it will fit together with other expressions to form a significant sentence, what what basic principles of inference will govern the result, and so on. It is just not intelligible that all of this could be conveyed in a simple ostensive definition, or by any sort of pre-linguistic presentation of a referent. On the contrary, understanding an ostensive definition must presuppose considerable linguistic competence, since you will need to know what sort of thing is being pointed out to you, and the criterion of identity for things of that kind" MT 16
How does the rejection of the primacy of ostensive definition and the adoption of the context principle entail something like the "linguistic turn"? [This conclusion belongs to Carruthers, likely not to Frege]
A. In the weaker way, it is by retreating from claims about numbers to claims about statements about numbers, Frege pioneers a strategy, one that supposedly moves onto a more tractable terrain.
B. In the stronger way which results from the rejection of primacy of ostensive meaning; this seems to entail something like: we cannot settle what kinds of things there are in the world and how they are by some kind of pre-linguistic looking and seeing. The result is a kind of kantian-esque linguistic idealism: we cannot come to the world to inspect without presupposition what it contains, because in order to identify an object we must already understand it as classified and identifiable in such and such a way. The moral is not necessarily that we impose our grammar onto the structure of the world, but only that what we are really doing when we are going to investigate the world is investigating our own linguistic structure.
LT: Talking about the world (ontology) by Talking about a suitable (ideal or ordinary) language
(1) CP
(2) Therefore, the basic relation of language to the world cannot be one between isolated names and bare objects. (Failure of ostension)
(3) What we are investigating when we investigate the structure of the world is the structure of our language.
Back to MT:
"It is not just over the existence of the numbers, but in metaphyics generally, that Frege adopts this sort of approach. For example, he takes it as established that the entities which constitute the referents of predicative expressions must be in some way 'incomplete' because of his belief that such expressions themselves, and their senses, are essentially incomplete. So what emerges is that the context principle can be seen to underlie a great deal of Frege's approach to philosophy. Given the primacy of the sentence, and the impossibility of conferring meaning on individual terms by any sort of bare presentation of a referent - indeed since there can be no such thing as non-linguistic access to metaphysical truths - he thinks the only way of coming to discern the essential nature of reality is through the study of language"
Of course, this is a contentious characterization of Frege's understanding of his own project.
 [Not saying: words are only meaningful in the context of a sentence (a semantic claim about the reference of words); rather he's saying: in order to explain the meaningfulness of words, they must be examined in the context of the sentences they meaningfully contribute to. His claim is not primarily a semantic one, but meta-semantic, or, one that claims about the proper methodology of semantics. It is difficult to understand formulations (a) and (c) as meta-semantic, however (b) and (c) do seem to be principles for determining referent, not claims about reference. Moreover, context-as-semantic can account for this difference (since context-as-semantic can entail context-as-metasemantic (it can even be explanatory of it)) while context-as-metasemantic cannot. One can claim that Frege's is being imprecise in cases (a) and (c).]
The linguistic turn means there is a distinction to be drawn between linguistics (which studies language qua language) and philosophy of language (which studies the nature of reality via language. What justifies the move from empirical, perhaps universal claims about language to transcendental or ontological claims? How do we make sense of taking ordinary language, with all its compromises based on its purpose of communication, and analysing it into an ideal language? Ideal for what? Not for communication...then for representation? For truth? For philosophy? What sense can we make of a linguistic ideal that is other than the common purpose of every natural language? The only correct answer would be ideal in its capacity to picture the world. However there is more to it than that - for although at work is some kind of assumption that language will reveal the world, or give us substantive non-linguistic answers, there is the contrary assumption that language distorts the world, as evidenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, etc.
The linguistic turn then seems to be much more complex than simply letting language reveal the world: some times language is the indepenent variable and the world the dependent, but other times it is the world that is independent and language must be made to cohere - hence the claims of deep grammar, ideal languages etc. This indicates that it is never innocent language that is guiding the investigation, but always looking to language as a tool while trying to work out other commitments. Otherwise, how could the tractatus give us objects that correlate to names which can hardly be imagined (more like theoretical postulates) and names which are unlike any name anyone has ever used? The linguistic turn seems more about imposing a grammar on language given other theoretical commitments (numerals as names, making sense of empty reference), not about reading off of language what it 'speaks', but of injecting into language what it must be like if it is to be right (wrt one's logical apparatus, one's epistemic commitments etc, ones desire to eliminate philosophical problems in one fell swoop).  In fact, I think it is impossible to divorce the claim of taking our lead from language from the results it had early on in solving philosophical problems; that is, I wish to distinguish between the claim that language reveals reality from the claim that language when properly analysed can dissolve philosophical problems. There are probably no philosophically compelling reasons to believe that the structures of language reveal the independent structures of the world (ie., the linguistic turn will be neutral wrt realism, idealism, skepticism) but there is evidence that logical analysis can dispel conflict. Certainly as much to the claim that language can reveal reality is the claim that language is misleading. What intuitions guide us, tell us, when it is doing which?
Philosophical questions are questions about language. At least it is clear that what is at stake here is also what is at stake when Frege questions whether identity statements are questions about language or their referents? However: Hacker in LT:
"Frege’s primary concern was to demonstrate that arithmetic is derivable from logic. It was tothat end that he invented his function-theoretic logic. He conceived of his logical system as an ideal language for logical and proof theoretic purposes. It was, he suggested, related to natural languages as the microscope to the eye. His philosophical attitude to natural language as a tool for the purposes of the philosophy of logic and mathematics was one of contempt. Natural languages did not evolve for the purposes of logical proofs; for that purpose one needs to invent a logically perfect language – which is what he presented his ‘conceptual notation’ as. This, broadly speaking, was also Russell’s view. He conceived of the Peano-derived symbolism and of the formation rules of Principia as the syntax of a logically ideal language."
Hacker claims that it is inappropriate to label Frege as the founder of the turn, since his ambitions for his language were limited to logical proofs, and since he:
"...had no general view of the sources of, nature of , or methods of solving, philosophical problems. He did not hold that all or even mostphilosophical questions are questions of language (which, according to Rorty, is one aspect of the linguistic turn). Nor did he claim that all or even most philosophical questions are to be answered or resolved by either examining the use of natural language or by inventing an ideal language (which, Rorty held, characterizes the linguistic turn. His concerns were exclusively with the philosophy of mathematics, logic and philosophical logic. And he invented his conceptual notation for purposes of his logicist project – not to solve or resolve the problems of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, etc."
Frege's turn is better described as the logistic turn. It seems that he didn't work out all the implications of the context principle outlined above. "All philosophy is a critique of language" (Tr) This marks the beginning of the linguistic turn (it makes sense that Russell and Moore are still pre-linguistic turn thinkers. Compare Kant's critique of the ontological argument "Existence is not a perfection" versus a linguistic critique of it "existence is not a predicate".
The strongest claim to what language can reveal is not the nature of reality, but the limits of thought, of the thinkable. It seems compelling that if we cannot meaningfully say something then we cannot meaningfully think it.

b. The problem of identity (cognitive difference between same reference)

[3.] WITTGENSTEIN: the tractatus

[a.] The context principle

[b.] The problem of identity

II. THE OBJECTIVE TURN: IDEALISM, PSYCHOLOGISM; OBJECTIVITY AND ANALYSIS

1. LOCKE: Meaning as mental


2. BRADLEY: Idealism
a. Internal Relations
b. Partial Knowledge
c. Absolute Idealism and Skepticism

3. MOORE: Against private meaning
a. An equivocation in Bradley: IDEA as universal meaning, as occurent event
a. Proposition, concept, and objectivity

4. FREGE: ANTI-PSYCHOLOGISM
a. Logic: natural and normative laws

III. THE PROBLEM OF THE THINNESS OF OBJECTIVE MEANING

1. The problem of empty reference:
a.  fictional entities (Pegasus), true ascriptions of non-existence (Santa doesn't exist)
b. non-existent entities
c.  Single reference, different names, different cognitive content

2. MEINONG: Subsistence

3. FREGE: SENSE AND REFERENCE

4. RUSSELL: HIDDEN LOGICAL FORM SURFACE/DEPTH

IV. LANGUAGE AND PROPOSITIONAL UNITY: FREGE AND RUSSELL

a. FREGE's TWO STEP SEMANTICS: linguistic entity, sense, and referent
1. Name, mode of presentation and object
2. Predicates, relations, qualities and concept and unsaturated terms (truth functions)
3. Logical Operators and truth functions
4. Propositions and, thought and the True: Saturation and Propositional Unity

b. RUSSELL's ONE STEP SEMANTICS: linguistic entity, object of acquaintance
1. Name and sense data
2. Predicates, relations, qualities and formal acquaintance
3. Logical Operators
4. Proposition and Judgment: Multiple relation theory

V.  WITTGENSTEIN

1. OUTSTANDING PROBLEMS FROM THE TRADITION

1. Simples: Name and object
a. 'necessary existence' and empty reference

2. Propositional unity: proposition and fact

3. Picture Theory of Meaning
a. Predication: correlation versus index
b. fact ontology
c. Truth and sense and nonsense

4. Saying and Showing: form and content
a. Logic and logical form
"The most influential achievement of the book was its clarification of the nature of logical truth. This was done by an investigation of symbolism. It was argued that the ‘peculiar mark of logical propositions [is] that one can recognize that they are true from the symbol alone, and this fact contains in itself the whole philosophy of logic’ (TLP 6.113). Contrary to what both Frege and Russell thought, the propositions of logic are not essentially general (but essentially true), they say nothing at all, but are rather senseless, i.e. limiting cases of propositions with a sense. In particular, they are not descriptions of relations between thoughts as Frege supposed, nor are they descriptions of the most general facts in the universe as Russell had suggested. LT
5. Philosophy
a. Science and natural law
b. Ethics/Aesthetics
c. Solipcism, realism, idealism
d. Metaphysics

6. The Paradox
a. The Traditional Reading
b. The Resolute Reading
c. Another Possibility?

7. MISCELLANEOUS