As a result of an attempt to account for the unity of the proposition.
So:
3.14 What constitutes a propositional sign is that in its elements (the words) stand in a determinate relation to one another.
A propositional sign is a fact.
[What's of first importance here is that the essence of a sentence is it's being a fact. This should be differentiated from the fact that the sentence expresses. It can only express a fact about the world because it shows a fact about itself: namely, it is a determinate relation of linguistic elements.
Thus, a proposition is not just a "blend of words" nor a "set of names". In 3.143, Wittgenstein, in a criticism of F & R, explains how one might take a propositional sign as a thing, or as namelike. "in a printed proposition, for example, no essential difference is apparent between a propositional sign and a word." He is saying, perhaps then, that just as words are made up of letters, so one might model the understanding of sentences on words, but now composed of words in turn. What we seem to be left with (as in Frege's case) is a more complex name - a "composite name".
Maybe then W's claim is that this way of going astray leaves one with an account of the sentence, the "propositional sign", that really amounts to little more than a "blend of words" or "set of names". This could also be what led Frege to resort to his assertion quantifier, which made propositions more like 'assumptions' that might, as a matter of fact, have something like assertion tacked on.
He elaborates on this by suggesting we imagine a propositional sign composed of objects rather than letters and words. So while the sentence "Socrates is bald" as a whole may just seem to bear the same relation to its meaning as the parts do, it is harder to make this mistake if we imagine, as W did, the kind of proposition that is asserted by say a courtroom car-accident model: here we are less tempted to see the arrangement of the model of say two autos as some third thing on ontological par with the autos. Rather, the model example shows more clearly that the power of the propositional sign is that it itself is a state of affairs, ie, it itself is a fact: the fact that the two model-autos are thus arranged means that car-a rear ended car b. It is a fact about a propositional sign that expresses a fact about the world.
This is the meaning of 3.1432:
Instead of, [1] 'The complex sign 'aRb' says that a stands to b in the relation R',
we ought to put,
[2] 'That "a" stands to "b" in a certain relation says that aRb.'
Here, [1] is trying to analyze the propositional sign "aRB" in terms of three elements: a, b and relation-R, where the relation of "a" to a and "b" to b is taken to be the same as the relation of "R" to r. Thus we have a set of names.
But in [2] we're trying something different. We're not referring to the relation-R as a referent of R, rather, we're talking about a fact - "a" standing in a certain relation to "b" which does not try to refer to R. Rather, the idea is elucidated by the courtroom model - there is not the two autos AND there relation-R which are elements of the model's ontology. Rather, properly speaking, only modelcar-a, modelcar-b correlate with any things in the world; there relation - which unproblematically has no correlate in the model or indeed anywhere - is a fact that can be seen by looking at them, just as the space and letter "R" establishes a relation between two letters, "a" and "b". This relation may seem to be meaningful in the same way that "a" and "b" are, but it is not. We might say what is meaningful in the proposition "aRb" is the fact that "a" and "b" have an "R" between them (i.e., they are related in a certain way, just as the modelcars were related in a certain way in the model.)
What is confusing is that relation terms superficially look just like names. Plato teaches Aristotle. The courtroom model (which is probably not just a propositional sign analogy but just IS a propositional sign, and is also probably why W speaks of prop signs rather than sentences) shows however that it is by virtue a convention of relating the linguistic elements (which get their meaning correlatively, ie., names or model-cars) in differentiatable way (it need not be through another word, as the example of an exponential function shows).
The question is of course, how do we know which Fact is picked out by the fact that "a" stands in some kind of recognizable way to "b"? Don't we still need to lean on the idea of correlate relations so that the right facts are depicted by the right propositional signs? I'm not sure I understand the solution proposed, but here is Potter:
"What is expressive in not the complex consisting of three signs, but a fact about this complex, namely, that in it the sign 'R' occurs with something to the left of it and something else to the right of it. The sign 'R' functions only as a label to distinguish this relationship between the names 'a' and 'b' from other possible relationships (my emph) (such as the one exemplified in 'aLb', for instance). ...let us call signs used as labels in this fashion indices. The correlation between an index and what it labels is a matter of convention. Indeed, the fact that there is an index at all is conventional. What is required in order to express that aRb is only that the names 'a' and 'b' should stand in a certain relationship. In the present case, of course, the relationship is, as it happens, that of having the index "R" standing between them, but there is nothing essential about this. It would be perfectly possible to have a language in which some relations are expressed not with the aid of indices but rather by other devices such as spatial relations between the signs." 114
I'm just not sure why this "correlation" between arbitrary assignments of symbolic relations and all other expressible relations isn't problematic in the same way that e.g., the relation between names and objects is problematic (look at where it leads R and W) or in the same way all the issues about abstract objects and universals etc are problematic. The courtroom model can unproblematically model the car crash for two reasons: (1) they are both using objects that are related in the same medium - i.e., space; and (2) we possess a scale for translating the space of one to the model space of the other. However the precisely difficult thing about linguistic referent is that it does not for the most part share its differentiating structure with the things its talking about. The sense making of the model would have to be much more difficult than the courtroom case. However, W is not at this stage interested in these kind of 'practical' details, if indeed his claim grounds somethings possibility, the details are not important. OR what is more unsettling is that there is really only one kind of relation between simple objects, viz., spatial, in which case, trying to understand the complex correlations between all the linguistic relations and their extra-linguistic counterparts would be as fruitless, and for the exact same reasons, as trying to understand what a simple objects are like. It only matters that at some, unimaginable level, such objects and such an index is possible.
This contributes to the fact-ontology:
"In order to make judgments about the world, what we must perceive are facts, not complexes; and the symbols that express those judgments, likewise, must be facts, not complexes". 114
So:
3.14 What constitutes a propositional sign is that in its elements (the words) stand in a determinate relation to one another.
A propositional sign is a fact.
[What's of first importance here is that the essence of a sentence is it's being a fact. This should be differentiated from the fact that the sentence expresses. It can only express a fact about the world because it shows a fact about itself: namely, it is a determinate relation of linguistic elements.
Thus, a proposition is not just a "blend of words" nor a "set of names". In 3.143, Wittgenstein, in a criticism of F & R, explains how one might take a propositional sign as a thing, or as namelike. "in a printed proposition, for example, no essential difference is apparent between a propositional sign and a word." He is saying, perhaps then, that just as words are made up of letters, so one might model the understanding of sentences on words, but now composed of words in turn. What we seem to be left with (as in Frege's case) is a more complex name - a "composite name".
Maybe then W's claim is that this way of going astray leaves one with an account of the sentence, the "propositional sign", that really amounts to little more than a "blend of words" or "set of names". This could also be what led Frege to resort to his assertion quantifier, which made propositions more like 'assumptions' that might, as a matter of fact, have something like assertion tacked on.
He elaborates on this by suggesting we imagine a propositional sign composed of objects rather than letters and words. So while the sentence "Socrates is bald" as a whole may just seem to bear the same relation to its meaning as the parts do, it is harder to make this mistake if we imagine, as W did, the kind of proposition that is asserted by say a courtroom car-accident model: here we are less tempted to see the arrangement of the model of say two autos as some third thing on ontological par with the autos. Rather, the model example shows more clearly that the power of the propositional sign is that it itself is a state of affairs, ie, it itself is a fact: the fact that the two model-autos are thus arranged means that car-a rear ended car b. It is a fact about a propositional sign that expresses a fact about the world.
This is the meaning of 3.1432:
Instead of, [1] 'The complex sign 'aRb' says that a stands to b in the relation R',
we ought to put,
[2] 'That "a" stands to "b" in a certain relation says that aRb.'
Here, [1] is trying to analyze the propositional sign "aRB" in terms of three elements: a, b and relation-R, where the relation of "a" to a and "b" to b is taken to be the same as the relation of "R" to r. Thus we have a set of names.
But in [2] we're trying something different. We're not referring to the relation-R as a referent of R, rather, we're talking about a fact - "a" standing in a certain relation to "b" which does not try to refer to R. Rather, the idea is elucidated by the courtroom model - there is not the two autos AND there relation-R which are elements of the model's ontology. Rather, properly speaking, only modelcar-a, modelcar-b correlate with any things in the world; there relation - which unproblematically has no correlate in the model or indeed anywhere - is a fact that can be seen by looking at them, just as the space and letter "R" establishes a relation between two letters, "a" and "b". This relation may seem to be meaningful in the same way that "a" and "b" are, but it is not. We might say what is meaningful in the proposition "aRb" is the fact that "a" and "b" have an "R" between them (i.e., they are related in a certain way, just as the modelcars were related in a certain way in the model.)
What is confusing is that relation terms superficially look just like names. Plato teaches Aristotle. The courtroom model (which is probably not just a propositional sign analogy but just IS a propositional sign, and is also probably why W speaks of prop signs rather than sentences) shows however that it is by virtue a convention of relating the linguistic elements (which get their meaning correlatively, ie., names or model-cars) in differentiatable way (it need not be through another word, as the example of an exponential function shows).
The question is of course, how do we know which Fact is picked out by the fact that "a" stands in some kind of recognizable way to "b"? Don't we still need to lean on the idea of correlate relations so that the right facts are depicted by the right propositional signs? I'm not sure I understand the solution proposed, but here is Potter:
"What is expressive in not the complex consisting of three signs, but a fact about this complex, namely, that in it the sign 'R' occurs with something to the left of it and something else to the right of it. The sign 'R' functions only as a label to distinguish this relationship between the names 'a' and 'b' from other possible relationships (my emph) (such as the one exemplified in 'aLb', for instance). ...let us call signs used as labels in this fashion indices. The correlation between an index and what it labels is a matter of convention. Indeed, the fact that there is an index at all is conventional. What is required in order to express that aRb is only that the names 'a' and 'b' should stand in a certain relationship. In the present case, of course, the relationship is, as it happens, that of having the index "R" standing between them, but there is nothing essential about this. It would be perfectly possible to have a language in which some relations are expressed not with the aid of indices but rather by other devices such as spatial relations between the signs." 114
I'm just not sure why this "correlation" between arbitrary assignments of symbolic relations and all other expressible relations isn't problematic in the same way that e.g., the relation between names and objects is problematic (look at where it leads R and W) or in the same way all the issues about abstract objects and universals etc are problematic. The courtroom model can unproblematically model the car crash for two reasons: (1) they are both using objects that are related in the same medium - i.e., space; and (2) we possess a scale for translating the space of one to the model space of the other. However the precisely difficult thing about linguistic referent is that it does not for the most part share its differentiating structure with the things its talking about. The sense making of the model would have to be much more difficult than the courtroom case. However, W is not at this stage interested in these kind of 'practical' details, if indeed his claim grounds somethings possibility, the details are not important. OR what is more unsettling is that there is really only one kind of relation between simple objects, viz., spatial, in which case, trying to understand the complex correlations between all the linguistic relations and their extra-linguistic counterparts would be as fruitless, and for the exact same reasons, as trying to understand what a simple objects are like. It only matters that at some, unimaginable level, such objects and such an index is possible.
This contributes to the fact-ontology:
"In order to make judgments about the world, what we must perceive are facts, not complexes; and the symbols that express those judgments, likewise, must be facts, not complexes". 114
No comments:
Post a Comment