Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It?

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, currently speaking to you from Bear Lake, Michigan.

0:19 Seth: This is Seth Paskin. I'm in Austin, Texas.

0:21 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan from Boston, Massachusetts.

0:24 Mark: Our question for episode number number seven is what can we meaningfully talk about with a focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus? We have recommended that if you're following along, you read from the beginning up through about section 4.12, then skim the middle, then read from 6.3 to the end. You can find an online version of that and a link to the actual reading@partiallyexaminedlife.com as well as lots of other great things. The ground rules for the discussion, number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this.

Number two, following from number one, no gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. If we have a point to make, just make it. You can't say, you know, you'll understand what I mean if you go read Miguel de Unamuno's Uno, Dos, Tres by Lamos Ena for Josefia. And three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining. And actually, just for this one, I've added number four. No referring to living philosophers who could potentially listen to this podcast as.

That means you, Wes. Although I actually, I edited that out from the last discussion.

1:32 Wes: Wait, which, what, what is it now?

1:35 Mark: I think it was when you called Dan Dennett an asshole, but I, I, I, I got rid of his.

1:39 Wes: Why is that up? Dennett is an asshole. You think we're gonna run into Dennett?

1:44 Mark: Yes.

1:45 Wes: I'll beat his fucking ass. Hey, we gotta, you know, make this.

1:54 Seth: The controversy sells drinks.

1:57 Wes: Yeah, there you go. What would be we'd be saying over drinks, then?

2:02 Mark: Let's do Nietzsche's Antichrist next. We'll get plenty of that.

2:06 Wes: Well, we jumped right into the Tractatus, so, I mean, that's pretty hardcore.

2:10 Mark: Okay. Nobody could possibly actually be offended by the Tractatus because anyone who would be offended wouldn't understand what he's saying.

2:18 Wes: Oh, I see what you. Yeah, no, I didn't mean in the sense of offensive, but, yeah, okay, just in the sense of intimidating. And I had jumped free associating.

2:28 Mark: So you found this reading intimidating.

2:31 Wes: Well, I always remember. You remember that edition? I don't know what edition you guys have, but I have it on my Kindle now, actually. But the edition and the red book with the German on one side and

2:41 Mark: English on the other, that's the Ogden translation. That's the standard.

2:45 Wes: I just remember looking at that, thinking, this is sort of like Heidegger and certain other philosophers. This is something so beyond me, and one day I will be worthy of it and opening it up and seeing these short little propositions and the world is everything that is the case and all that stuff.

3:02 Mark: I'm just glad that as a beginning German learner, I can have some of my first words. Be Gegenstände.

3:16 Wes: What is gegen? Standing? Representation.

3:20 Seth: Gegenstand.

3:22 Wes: Gegenstand. There we go.

3:24 Seth: That's what you're having.

3:26 Mark: Gegenstände.

3:27 Wes: Yeah.

3:28 Seth: Gegenstand are things or objects.

3:31 Mark: There you go.

3:35 Wes: It really is a philosophical language, isn't it?

3:37 Seth: Well, this is the thing.

3:38 Wes: They're standing. They're just standing there.

3:40 Seth: Well, they made a big deal out of, like, how they all, you know, these English guys argued about how you should translate sachen, you know, and these sorts of things. It's like, should we call it an object or a thing? But his German, this is. I mean, it's pretty straightforward.

3:55 Wes: Yeah, he was an engineer. He's not.

3:58 Mark: Well, it shows that having the German on the left and the English on the right doesn't work. Because when you ask me what word that randomly, when I picked, corresponded to, I couldn't figure it out, at least right away. And that's actually after taking a few years of German. I have also.

4:17 Wes: Let's just play some techno music or electronica. Maybe Kraftwerk. I don't know if you've ever listened to Kraftwerk.

4:24 Mark: Oh, yes, dude.

4:25 Wes: And then just read Wittgenstein in the German.

4:29 Seth: I love how Wes is pulling out these references that are just killer. Like, in addition to all the postings on Facebook, give me links to, like, interesting articles. I would never have read Kate Bush. Or did you do it? Was that a Wuthering Heights reference? And I called out Kate Bush, but now Kraftwerk, you know, I was going through.

4:47 Unknown speaker: I know.

4:47 Wes: You're a Kraftwerk fan.

4:49 Seth: Oh, yeah, totally. I had this memory of seeing Devo on Saturday Night Live, like, back in the 80s, where they did the show, they did their. Their songs, and they were on, like, treadmills and it turned. Yeah, yeah. It was this very choreographed thing where they were on these treadmills but it turns out it was actually on a show called Fridays, which was a competitor, so to speak, to Saturday Night Live for a very brief period of time. And there's one, like, one recording out there that somebody transferred from vhs. And it's really crappy, unfortunately.

But Kraftwerk falls right in that same vein. Which reminds me, I was talking to my sister yesterday. My mom called her and said, you know, honey, did you have a friend named Gary Numan because he's written all this poetry to you? My sister said, well, why don't you read one of those poems to me, Mom? And she says, here in my car, I feel safest of all. Oh, God. It was hysterical. Sorry. Anyway, on the Kraftwerk Devo, Gary Numan theme, early 80s synthesized.

6:02 Mark: Speaking of. So I have a little. I don't want to give the plot outline, but let me just give. I thought of an easy way to introduce it. In fact, I sort of picked a way to introduce it. Because this is kind of about everything, right? It's metaphysics. Epistemology. But I said, what question are we trying to answer? And so I said it was, what can we meaningfully talk about? So I looked at this as one of the ways of summing up what he's doing here is there are three kinds of statements that we can make when we're trying to do philosophy or something.

One's about the world, which can ultimately be analyzed into concrete statements about particular things, which are the kinds of things that we could potentially experience. So objects, whatever. Number two, one's about the language itself, which basically just explain how the various words or sign in the language are related. And then, number three, statements that might seem to make sense, but which really aren't saying anything, which are anything that do not fall into the first two categories. Does that seem fairly accurate?

7:02 Wes: Yeah.

7:03 Seth: Okay. Yeah, we can go with that.

7:05 Wes: Statements about the world are meaningful. The statements about language are what he calls senseless. Because they're about logic and the limits of expression. And then there are the broader philosophic statements, which are nonsense.

7:18 Mark: Exactly. And. And.

7:20 Wes: But not nonsense necessarily in a bad sense. You know, that's not. That's. Can't. Prejudice.

7:25 Mark: Well, I think

7:28 Unknown speaker: what's confusing about that

7:29 Mark: is that the senseless ones, because he's actually, in that case, I think, using the word sense in the sense that Gottlieb Frege uses it, which is. It's kind of the meaning of a word. Right. The distinct meaning of it.

7:46 Wes: Well, it's its description. Right. I mean, to go to the Frege reference is that there's the whole problem of identity, the morning star and the evening star.

7:55 Mark: So when Frege lays out this distinction between sense and reference, which is the referent actually points at the object, whatever it is, even if you don't know anything about the object, whoever fills this condition, that's who it just points at. So if you say the morning star, you mean that body or. Whereas if you say the evening star, you might not know that's actually the same thing as the morning star, planet Venus. So even though those have the same reference, they have different senses. And he wanted to say that even the word sense, even though that sounds psychological, like, which property do you have in mind when you're saying it?

He thought, no, that's sort of a logical feature of the language as well. Frege was against the psychologists. So that's the background of this word sense here. And Wittgenstein. Well, this is such an uninteresting point. But Wittgenstein seems to be evolving the point that he really wants to use sense as reference. Right.

8:48 Wes: Well, which is sort of. Yeah. And there's a reason to do that, which is that the idea is that any statement, any proposition about the world. Well, first, any. Anything that we think of as an object on a macroscopic level can be reduced to, or any statements involving it can be reduced to. So if you say the bed is in my room, you can reduce that to propositions that are subdivisions of that proposition about bed. The bed is a complex object, and you want to reduce it to a description. So the thing with four legs that. Blah, blah, blah. And this, of course, is related to Russell theory of definite descriptions. And we can discuss what motivates all that. Does it make sense?

9:29 Mark: Seth, do you know what this is about? I had a lot of trouble with really, what these. So he wants to say there are atomic facts which are these basic facts which are. But then I tried to come up with an example, and none of them seem to work very well.

9:43 Wes: Well, there's no example of atomic facts. It's like Leibnizian monads. The objects that make up atomic facts are not objects in our typical sense.

9:58 Seth: Yes. Yeah, that's, I think, the key point, Wes. So my reading of it and kind of some of the commentary that I look through, they're kind of saying that the turn that he makes that's significant is that he says. When he says the world is the totality of facts and not of things, he's moving away from a worldview that says that all of these objects and the Totality of objects and things and what we consider the physical or temporal space is what makes up the world. And he's saying, in fact, it's facts which are somehow related to those objects or things that make up the world.

10:37 Mark: They're relations of those objects.

10:40 Wes: Yeah.

10:40 Seth: Yes.

10:41 Wes: So we're getting at where a fact is represented by something like X is Y or A is F, where F is a property. The dog is Harry. So the idea is that the ultimate constituents of the world are not going to be something like dog, they're going to be something like dog is hairy. Except much simpler, right?

11:03 Seth: Yes, I think so.

11:07 Unknown speaker: Part of the.

11:07 Mark: But simpler. I mean, because he does give examples like Socrates is wise, which makes it sound like components of atomic facts are supposed to be names. Right. They actually can't be reduced to a description. They're just supposed to be demonstrative. They're supposed to pick out the things. And it sounded like something like. Socrates might be a fine candidate for that because he uses it as his example. You don't think that's the case?

11:33 Wes: No. Socrates is reducible to a description. It's the same Leibnizian idea. You want to keep subdividing the world until you get to those most basic objects and facts that can no longer be analyzed. So the fact that Socrates is analyzable means it's not going to be anything. Any proposition involving him won't be an atomic fact.

11:56 Seth: An atomic fact has to have a truth value. So one of the key features here is that when you talk about the world as a collection of objects, there's no truth or falsity implied in that, which is how you get caught up in the question of existence. Does this exist? Is this. Is this real? Is this not real? Can I sense it? Can I not? And what he's basically saying is that you have all these objects that combine to create states of affairs. And a fact is somehow. And we'll get to this, but it's somehow a representation of a state of affairs. And that that fact can either accurately or not accurately reflect the state of affairs. And so it can be true or false belief. The world, what we consider the world, is that collection of facts, the true ones and the false ones, and not the collection of objects that in essence give rise to facts.

12:59 Wes: Just to get at the motivation for that, a lot of this is coming from Russell's definite descriptions, which is something I think we should describe because.

13:09 Mark: Go ahead.

13:10 Wes: There's a classic problem of meaning where you take a sentence like the. The present king of France is bald. There is no present king of France. So the question is, is that sentence true, false, or something else meaningless? The solution to that for Russell is the, what he calls definite descriptions, where you phrase everything first of all in terms of. So every proposition like that is first of all an assertion of the existence of the object. So there exists an X such that X is the king of France and X is bald. So you introduce this idea of the variable X which Wittgenstein will talk a lot about, and therefore the proposition becomes false. And then you move on to the. You can create all sorts of problems at the level of a complex object because the kinds of statements we make in natural language aren't very fine grained.

14:11 Mark: I thought he explicitly and I've been flipping through trying to find this quote denied. So one of the things that we didn't talk about in Leibniz last time was the identity of indiscernibles, which is to say, like you've been saying, that if two things have all the same properties, they are in fact the same thing. But Wittgenstein specifically says in here that some things are only different in that they are different. It's that definite description does not work. So giving all the descriptive elements of something does not give you, does not determine the referent. The referent simply points at what it refers to. And there's no way through language that you can clarify what that is. I mean, you really just have to. It's a basic, demonstrative, unanalyzable relationship.

14:59 Wes: I'm not sure about the whole identity of indiscernibles because I remember reading that and not knowing exactly what that meant. But there's this whole idea that. Well, I don't know. Seth, what are your thoughts on that?

15:12 Seth: Well, I thought for a second Mark was kind of driving at the point about Wittgenstein says basically that a thing, and I'm not talking about a fact here, but an object in the world basically contains kind of internally all of its possibilities, all of its possible states of affairs, you know, all the different combinations it could be, whether it's actually in those combinations ever has been, ever will be, it contains them within. And so to kind of restate the identity of indiscernibles question in that context, you would say, you know, an object that has exactly and only the same possibilities of joining in combination with other objects as this other one is identical to it, but that's a hydrogen atom

15:57 Mark: and another hydrogen atom.

15:58 Seth: I mean, well, but you could always distinguish them somehow spatially. Or temporally. Right. I mean, there's. He's basically putting off the question and saying, yes, you can make a claim that these things contain all their possibilities and all that, but that's like a logical claim. And it's one of the statements that comes out of the Tractatus that you'll ultimately have to throw away and get rid of, because. So it's. In that sense, it is senseless, such as you defined it at the beginning of the podcast. In other words, saying that two things are identical if they contain exactly and only the same possibilities is trivially true, because it's really a definition.

And that's all that the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is. But in actual practice, in terms of looking at facts and states of affairs and all that, you'll never really run into this problem because you're always going to be making statements that are true or false about specific states of affairs and they will contain the objects they contain. And to say that it could be otherwise, it doesn't really have a lot of meaning to it.

17:07 Mark: Now, do you think that he. Let's just recap the overall picture, because I don't want us to get lost in some of the details here, that he thinks that the entirety of. Of the world can be described in terms of these basic atomic facts. And when it can be described, that doesn't mean you right now can list them. That is not feasible. But in theory could be described by this basic set of atomic facts which have no logical relationship. They are logically independent of each other. That making one of them true or making one of them that's true false would not change the truth value of any of the others. It would not make those true ones false. Those false ones true. Exactly. He does not.

17:54 Wes: I love the parallels here.

17:57 Mark: And most of the facts that we concern ourselves with are then conjunctions of these basic atomic facts. And when we're doing analysis, we could try to. When we're doing the analysis of the logical relationship between statements, we try to see if one is reducible to the other. Or really we try to reduce them to their truth grounds, which is to say we figure out exactly how the truth values of the individual components will affect the truth of the entire thing. And he does with these truth tables that anybody who studied symbolic logic is familiar with, apparently he kind of invented them in their modern form in this text.

And so if you want to see, does this statement imply this other statement, or does this proposition imply this other proposition? You look at the truth grounds, right? And if the truth grounds of one cover all the cases of the other, okay, then that one implies the other. And that's logic for you. That's the picture. So we're stepping back then. We're trying to determine what are these atomic facts? Are these atomic facts things that themselves could be stated as propositions? Or do all the propositions that we could conceivably state amount to being compound facts, molecular facts?

So you're saying. It seems like you were both saying, that we don't actually ever say atomic facts ourselves or say, statements that express propositions that mirror these atomic facts.

19:30 Unknown speaker: I don't know.

19:31 Wes: And I know. I just happen to remember from school that there's a lot of controversy about this in the. In the literature. There's a lot of disagreement about which of those is the case, whether there are statable atomic facts or whether they're sort of just.

19:45 Seth: Well, if I. I think he actually, in some of the later works, he talks about names only having meaning in context and that this is somehow a reversal. So we can, you know, if we wanted to, we could infer that. Well, you can't say an atomic fact because a fact is a state of fact. It represents a state of affairs that has a, you know, that can be pictured and has a.

20:08 Mark: The fact is the state of affairs. Make this clear. The fact is the state of affairs. It's the proposition. It's the thought. The thought represents the state, affairs or the fact.

20:17 Seth: I suppose you could say the word dog. It wouldn't mean. It wouldn't have any meaning because you're not saying anything about it. You're just saying dog. But what you might be implying is there's a dog in front of me which would represent a state of affairs. So whether or not you can actually speak, you can't say a proposition about an atomic fact or there's no such thing as an atomic fact.

20:40 Unknown speaker: Sorry.

20:40 Seth: You can't just make a proposition about an object, a simple object in the world. And if you think you're doing it, you're wrong. But whether or not you. Whether or not you can or can't, you wouldn't be saying anything meaningful.

20:52 Wes: The atomic facts are like relationships between those objects linked together like parts of a chain, right?

20:59 Seth: Yeah. A fact has to be. Has to be a compound. There have to be multiple things or objects.

21:04 Wes: You take a relationship between two objects.

21:06 Seth: Exactly.

21:08 Wes: And the objects only obtain meaning by virtue of being in that relation, being in that fact.

21:16 Mark: Well, in other words, the objects are logical consequence. We have to posit their existence Just because of this theory. But the facts, the atomic facts are real. That there's no doubt about them, that the individual objects are kind of, you know, fictions of the theory, you might say. But the atomic facts themselves are real, which leads me to think, surely you must be able to express them, since he says elsewhere in here, one of the things jumping ahead kind of radically, the field of our potential experience is all that we can talk about.

21:45 Wes: So that includes everyday experience, but ultimately it'll be reducible to sort of scientific statements.

21:52 Mark: Right. So it would be.

21:53 Seth: I don't know what you were trying to get at there, Mark.

21:56 Mark: It would be a little peculiar if the domain of things that he thinks that we can talk about, that these particulars are going to pick out and that atomic facts are going to pick out is confined to our experience, but yet have atomic facts themselves be things that are outside the scope of our experience because they're too minute. That we only ever talk about molecular facts, and we can never, as a matter of practice, analyze these down into the atomic facts. I have to think that given this commitment toward this empiricism, that atomic facts have to be something that we could actually state and understand.

22:33 Seth: Okay, when you get. When you say atomic fact, what are you thinking? What does that mean to you?

22:39 Mark: What I took to be the paradigm examples of this kind of thing would be you point to something and you say something about it. So I point to a spot in front of me and I say, that is red. That's supposed to be drawing a relationship between to that point in space.

22:55 Wes: And it's got to be a pixel.

22:57 Mark: Yeah. Okay, make it space is problematic for him, but.

23:00 Wes: Right, so no, no, I'm saying it's got to be a pixel in the sense of smallest unit of the computer screen, so to speak.

23:07 Unknown speaker: Sure.

23:08 Wes: And that has a color and there's your atomic fact.

23:10 Mark: And right there, whenever I take it, pick out an example like that, it seems problematic to me. In fact, it sounds almost like he'd like us to treat the paradigm cases as that pixel is right next to that other pixel. Because at least that's okay. That's two things that have a relationship between them. But as soon as I say that pixel is red, well, what is this red? That sounds like a universal, but he explicitly doesn't want to talk about universals.

23:37 Wes: Yeah.

23:38 Mark: So it's not a relationship between that point and the universal red. It has to be say something about. It's a relationship between that point and its color. And then maybe I can

23:52 Wes: at the scientific Level, though. It's this idea that all properties will be reducible to those relations between objects, like the one pixel being next to the other. That color will be reducible to something like that.

24:06 Mark: So. So the fact that it reflects a certain kind of wavelength, and that's a physical property, but even that, I mean, reflecting of a certain kind of wavelength isn't that. If that's an adjective, then it's a universal. Right. He certainly doesn't want to seem to be able to conceive of. Like, he doesn't talk about universals at all here in that sense, other than. Let's see. So he says a lot of times we can say things like for all green objects and then say something about them. So in other words, you can use universals to pick out objects. And when you do that, you're really.

24:39 Wes: Is that a problem?

24:42 Mark: I'm not. Well, the way he talks about it, he just wants to use it as a classificatory way of picking out individual things. In other words, he's going to say, yeah, normally with an atomic fact, you just want to say something about one thing. Well, here's a molecular fact that groups a lot of atomic things, and it's going to make a whole lot of statements because it's going to make an individual statement about every single green thing. So if I say every green thing weighs more than £2, so that's reducible. Of course, that's obviously false, but that's beside the point.

It's reducible to a bunch of individual statements. That green thing weighs more than two pounds. That green thing weighs more than two pounds. So that doesn't seem to be a problem in terms of. You're not referring to a universal as this abstract Platonic entity that all the green things try to imitate or something. You're just saying this is a way of picking things out. But then how do you explain what all those things that you're picking out have in common? I guess that this must be another kind of thing. Well, they're all green. It's an un.

That. Just like they have.

25:42 Wes: What they have in common is a certain set of ways that they're used in propositions, right? Or the certain. All the possibilities of their linkages. Does that make sense?

25:52 Mark: Well, he does talk about that relationship of colors to each other. So you could say, you know, this gray is darker than that gray. And so likewise, all colors have certain relationships to each other in terms of. If you just vary the wavelength, it'll go through the spectrum in a systematic way. So yeah, that could be. What defines green is that its relationship to the other colors in the spectrum.

26:16 Wes: Green is defined simply by the set of all those things of which you can.

26:20 Mark: Exactly. So it's a basic, unanalyzable, demonstrative relationship. Or did I just misinterpret what you were saying?

26:27 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure, but I'm trying

26:31 Unknown speaker: to think in terms of his idea

26:32 Wes: of form and all the different ways that that predicate green is going to be used. So instead of saying that there's some, I guess, form or essence in virtue of which. I don't know. I don't know. I'm in over my head.

26:54 Mark: And this is supposed to be the basic thing that starts off the whole damn thing. This is what is infuriating about this text.

27:01 Seth: There's a lot of things that are infuriating about it. Well, no, seriously. Seriously. So did you guys. Did you guys formally study this at all when you were. When we were in school? I think somebody taught at Wittgenstein class while we were there.

27:14 Mark: I did. I took it.

27:15 Wes: You forced them.

27:16 Mark: I took it. We walked through it line by line, discussing everything in as much detail as possible.

27:23 Wes: Did you go through it with a lair?

27:24 Mark: Yes.

27:25 Seth: Okay, me, too.

27:26 Wes: We might have been in that class.

27:27 Mark: I think we were in that same class.

27:29 Seth: Yeah. Okay. I definitely was not in that class. The only time I read Wittgenstein in grad school formally was class on, like, Meaning Representational Arts. So we read all the sections about Picture Theory of the World and then read, like, Nelson Goodman, Ways of World Making and some other stuff. Have you ever read that? That's a great book, by the way.

27:48 Mark: I did. I don't remember much about it.

27:50 Wes: Yeah, I haven't read it.

27:52 Mark: It might be a good one for us to talk about later.

27:54 Seth: Yeah, Goodman's very interesting. But anyway, what's really frustrating about Wittgenstein is that it sounds like he's saying, like, you can present this in such a way where you're like, was this guy, like, an elementary school kid? And why did everybody flip out about him? Right. He's basically saying, like, this is. You can represent this. The world kind of is what it is. And we form pictures of the way the world is in our head, and then we have ways of describing those pictures. And insofar as the words and the ways that we describe those pictures correspond to what's actually out there, we have meaning.

28:36 Wes: Well, I think there is a radical idea there, though.

28:39 Seth: No, I'd say that's, like, one end of the spectrum. Right. And then the other end is in

28:43 Wes: elementary school

28:46 Seth: minutes of our conversation.

28:48 Mark: Can I revise one of the statements you just made in summing that up, though? It's not that we represent the facts in our head, because when he uses the word thoughts, which are the things that represent the facts, and we can tell that it represents the facts because it has the same structure as the facts. Thoughts is used in the Fregean sense, again, which is not a psychological thought that anybody is having. It's a feature of logic, logical entity. Yes, yes. That points at these things, which makes the whole thing very hard to understand, of course.

29:19 Wes: And just a note to listeners, when you see the word proposition in modern analytical text, that they're sort of using that in the same way, it's a hedging of bets. It's a way to just avoid the whole mind versus world problem altogether. But I think there is a radical insight in this idea of picturing, which I guess we should go more into, because it's not the typical idea of representation. It's this idea, that isomorphism of logical structure. And you take, for instance, the afb. It's not that AFB describes the relationship between A and B. It's that you can see that the structure of that the language is like a picture.

And you can see that in the structure of the AFB there's a reflection of a similar structure in the world. It tries to go beyond that classical problem of representation where you say there's this radically different mental representation and how could it possibly relate to the mind independent world. And Wittgenstein is getting at this idea that there's a form which they actually share. There's this logical form which is just as much in the thought, or let's just say that's just as much in the picture as it is in what's being pictured.

30:47 Seth: Yeah, Wes, actually, I just pulled up. I found that section. The proposition that says what you just said is what is the. It's 3.1432. So this particular line item in the text says instead of the complex sign quote arb, unquote. And let me just say for listeners who it's kind of, who may not be familiar with the notation, the ARB is small A, capital R small B. And that's typically used to say A stands in a certain relation to B. So, for example, Mark is taller than Seth. If Mark was A and Seth was B, the relation of B is taller than. So ARB would mean Mark is taller than. Than Seth. And what he's Saying is this as a sign, this complex sign quote Arb unquote says that A stands to be in the relation. R. He said, instead of saying that, what we should say is that quote A stands to quote B in a certain relation says that Arb.

31:59 Wes: Yeah,

32:03 Seth: the state of affairs. Say it like you just said it, Wes. Sorry.

32:06 Wes: That sort of pictorial relationship. So if you had a picture, you know, real picture, where you can see

32:12 Unknown speaker: it in the sense that, you know,

32:13 Wes: if you, if you had a picture of you and Mark and there's Mark next to you. Well, take something even. Take something even more obvious like Mark is standing next to Seth. And then you look at the picture, you look at an actual painting and there's Mark and he's next to Seth. And then you can look at that sign Arb and you see that there's an actual, there's an isomorphism. There's the same structure in the actual sign. The sign itself has that left and right. So that in a way, of course that's usually not going to hold, but that's the most basic way of thinking about that, that there's somehow a structure there in the representation which is shared with the world.

Now that sort of spatial structure that I just described is usually not going to be the case. So it's going to have to be something logical. So in most sentences you're not going to see that the structure of what the sentence is describing is there in the sentence, so. And so is the. John is the father of Joe. You know, there's no, there's nothing in the structure of the sentence that looks like fatherhood, but something logically, something in the logic there, it's going to be shared. If you were to analyze the logic of the sentence, it's going to be shared that really will be shared with the world.

33:34 Mark: Anyway, let me just read a couple of lines from here about this picture hood because I think it might help clear up the earlier thing about simples. So this is 2.1. And then I'm going to read a little bit of that and then skip ahead. Just later in two we make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture presents the facts in logical space. The existence and non existence of atomic facts. The picture is a model of reality to the objects correspond in the picture. The elements of the picture. The elements of the picture stand in the picture for the objects. The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with each other in a definite way. Then skipping ahead, what are you reading here? This is the beginning of two.

34:18 Wes: Okay.

34:19 Mark: And then skipping ahead to 2.16. In order for a picture to be a fact. Sorry, in order to be a picture, a fact must have something in common with what it pictures in the picture. In the picture there must be something identical in order that one can be a picture of the other at all. What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner, rightly or falsely, is the form of representation. Skipping down to 2.19. The logical picture can depict the world. The picture has the logical form representation in common with what it pictures.

The picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of the existence and non existence of atomic facts. The picture presents a possible state of affairs in logical space. The picture agrees with reality or not. It is right or wrong, true or false. Okay, so which says to me, if you're going to say we make pictures and these represent the existence and non existence of atomic facts, I guess that implies to me that again, these atomic facts must themselves be something that is thinkable. Not that the only actual thoughts we have are complex molecular facts which then maybe you could eventually break down.

But again, putting that point aside. So that's how he sees this representation. So we've got these thoughts, which are not things in your head that are in the way you've described, have one to one correspondence between the different objects in the thoughts, the subject and predicate, say to objects, the simples in the world. That is, if you have a thought that expresses an atomic fact. And then on top of that to add speech. The next part is about propositions and to say propositions can express thoughts. And of course there are lots of different propositions that can express the same thought.

If you're just saying one thing in German and the other in English, there are two different sentences, two different propositions. Or actually that's not even a good example because propositions is still an abstract thing, as opposed to actual words that people say. So we have, I think, four levels here. Statements are about propositions, propositions are about thoughts, and two different propositions could express the same thought. So we already had that example from Frege of the morning star is in the sky, the evening star is in the sky. Those are actually the same thought, according to Wittgenstein, because the individual elements, the morning star and the evening star, both refer to the same thing.

Venus and then in the sky refers to the same thing, the sky, sorry, the sky refers to the sky in both cases. And then you've got the relationship.

36:56 Wes: They're not the same thought in Wittgenstein are they. They're not the same thought in Frege.

37:00 Mark: Right. They're not the same thought in Frege, but I think they are the same thought in Wittgenstein. They are.

37:04 Wes: I don't think so.

37:05 Mark: Well, yes, because he explicitly says, and this is a point we haven't talked about yet, but it's very important that he thinks a lot of the confusion that comes in philosophy is because our natural language, the way propositions are expressed, does not make the reference of these propositions clear. And of course, a lot of that is we just don't know. So, like, if you don't know Clark Kent is Superman, or you don't know the morning star is the evening star, then you could make a statement about. You could believe one statement, I believe something about Clark Kent and not believe that same thing about Superman.

But in what I think he's talking about in this whole thing is not natural language. He says explicitly, natural language really makes us all very obscure. Is an ideal language, a logical language. And that language would express very clearly the structure of these atomic facts. And the main way that they would do that is all the reference, all the individual terms would be referentially transparent, that there would just be no synonyms in it at all.

38:05 Wes: Right. But there would be no complexes either.

38:07 Seth: Can I. I'm sorry, can I. Can I take a stab at something here? Just to. Okay, we have this, what you might call the actual world or the real world, that's made up of all these objects in relation to each other, all these states of affairs. And then, Mark, as you just described, pictures, the logical picture of a state of affair. There's this space, this logical space, where you have pictorial form that either accurately or inaccurately represent the states of affairs. So this is how you expand. You start with kind of the world that's limited to what actually is logical space, where you have these pictures that represent the world or represent the possibilities that are inherent in the world, creates the much broader space of everything that is and everything that could be.

So there's sort of like actual things, and then there's a much broader category of this logical space where you have pictorial representations of things and all the possibilities that are inherent in those things.

39:11 Mark: Right. Thoughts are facts that could be. Thoughts correspond to facts which may exist or may not.

39:19 Seth: Right. And those logical pictures. I'm using the term picture on purpose here instead of the word thought, even though I think, translation wise, that we're talking about the same thing. A picture has sense inherent in its. The content of A picture has meaning, and the truth of a picture can be determined by comparing it to the world. Is that correct?

39:43 Mark: Yes.

39:43 Wes: Comparing its structure.

39:46 Seth: Well, it has content and structure. It has logical structure in that it represents something and then it has content because you have to be able to.

39:54 Mark: It has a reference.

39:55 Seth: It has.

39:56 Mark: The content is the reference.

39:58 Seth: The content is the reference points at a thing and to the relations of those things. The whole complaint. Bless you.

40:07 Wes: Correct the picture, though. I think when we get to the. Again, we have to go to decompose it to the atomic.

40:17 Seth: Well, I'm going somewhere with this. I'm just trying to see if you guys agree. So you have sort of.

40:23 Mark: Go ahead. We'll stop nitpicking.

40:24 Seth: No, no, no, no, no, no.

40:25 Wes: I'm saying because. I'm saying I don't think the picturing relationship has anything to do with content the way we think of it, but go ahead.

40:36 Seth: Oh, okay. Well, he does say at one point, just in the section that Mark was just reading, that pictures, they do have sense. In other words, they do have meaning. You know, the picture. A picture in logical space of the world is a meaningful picture by definition because it represents. It has reference to objects and their relations to each other. So it pictures the world somehow. It is representational. Pictures in logical space are not abstract. They are representational. Whether they represent something that actually is and so are true, or whether they don't, they represent something that isn't and in such are false is irrelevant. The fact is they represent something. Is that correct?

41:25 Wes: Mm, yeah.

41:26 Seth: Okay. All right. So we have sort of layer one is the world of actual things, states of Affairs. Layer 2 is this pictorial space where you have all these what is and what isn't. And then you have. Language is kind of on top of that. And this is kind of what I heard Mark saying is that he talks about signs. Language is essentially a complex of signs that we use to try and articulate these pictures, these propositions. And I think that's where he says we get screwed up. What he's basically saying is all thought or all pictorial representation. All of this logical space, it's all representational.

We are always representing something that's either true or possible, but we never represent anything that's impossible. And what happens is when we try to put signs and get this yet another layer on top of the pictorial, that we get confused because our signs start to confuse us. The reference of those signs starts to confuse us. The way those signs represent the pictorial and logical form of the world confuse us. And he says as Mark was saying, an ideal language would really just mirror in signage exactly what happens in this pictorial, propositional, logical space, which is a very impoverished way of looking at what language does and the human experience.

But I think that's kind of where he's going with this. Yes. No, yeah, yeah.

43:01 Mark: And actually, in what I was saying before, I think I was making it a little more complicated than it is that I was saying that there's the level of the thoughts or pictures and. And then on top of that, the propositions represent that, and on top of that, the statements represent the propositions. I think actually he's using these pictures, thoughts and propositions all interchangeably.

43:21 Seth: I think you're right.

43:23 Mark: You could introduce that distinction when you're talking about natural language, that saying the morning star is in the sky and the evening star are in the sky are different natural language propositions. Sure. But for Wittgenstein, in this ideal language, because the reference would be constant, they're going to be the same.

43:42 Wes: Say just the last phrase again, because the referents are what?

43:46 Mark: Right now we have to think that, okay, in a sense, the morning stars in the sky and the evening star in the sky are saying the same thing because they have the same referent. Right. But in another sense, the natural language, they're of course saying something different. And the way Frege analyzes that is to say, oh, they're different thoughts, but they have the same truth value. Is that how he talks about. I'm sorry, they have a different sense, but they have the same reference. I don't actually remember how he uses the word thought.

44:11 Seth: Yes, I think that's a more accurate way of saying it.

44:14 Mark: But. Okay, well, we were saying the names have the same sense of a different reference. But what about the whole phrase? What about the whole proposition? Is he saying those are different propositions, but they're the same thought? We didn't read any Frege for this week, so I shouldn't. Maybe we should consider that. Who cares about what Frege thinks about this? I guess my point is that.

44:36 Seth: So Frega's point was if you say Cicero is Tully, that has more and different meaning than saying Cicero is Cicero, even though the reference of that sentence is the same.

44:50 Wes: Yep. You're giving a different. You're looking at different properties of that referent, and you may not realize that the referent is the same.

44:58 Mark: And again, Wittgenstein's advance over this is to say, no, those are actually the same thought. You might call them different propositions because epistemically we Approach them in different ways, but in all the important ways. And as would be affected in the logical language, they're the same thought. In fact, because they're identity statements, they're ultimately senseless. You're pointing at a thing and saying that thing is that thing, and however you pick it out with.

45:28 Wes: But I don't think that's an identity statement in the logical sense.

45:33 Mark: I think it is if it's a demonstrative, ultimately if all referential.

45:38 Wes: But it's not a real demonstrative, though it has to be reduced to. There's hidden propositional content in there. That's the whole. So what Frege is doing with sense just becomes decompositioned into atomic states of affairs. If you take the concept of Tully and Cicero and decompose them, you would have things about Tully that in your concept didn't apply to Cicero. Now, the thing itself in the world, of course, it's the same thing. I don't know how to. How to express all of this, but

46:10 Unknown speaker: I'm trying to get at the sense

46:11 Wes: of object because I think the object is just the variable X. That's the way I view it. That's why I don't think of pictures as having this form and content correlation in the way that a typical representationalist might see it. I think what Wittgenstein is getting at is you're going to get rid of that. You're going to take everything that's in that picture and you're going to reduce it to. So you're going to say there exists an X such that X is this property and X is that property. And, you know, let's say you did it for a, you know, point in space with color.

There exists an X such that X is this Y coordinate of X of X, as this X coordinate, X is this has this color, and so on and so forth. So the object by itself is meaningless. It has no content. All content comes from factuality. So what a predicate is. It's this system of possible combination. So F will go with certain things and it won't go with other things. And so what F means is just the things it'll go with and things that it won't. The meaning of green is just, okay, it goes with broccoli, it goes with green beans. To be tautological, it goes with certain other things and it doesn't go with other things.

And that is the form that ultimately gives us green.

47:32 Seth: Yeah, Wes, I was just thinking when you were saying that. I think he uses this sense where he says that Objects have names. We name an object, but that name essentially is sinnlos. I almost said senseless.

47:48 Wes: It's X.

47:48 Seth: It's a variable because it only really takes on any kind of sense or meaning when you start to put it in a propositional context. So Aristotle doesn't mean anything until you start saying Aristotle was a philosopher Greek, who lived in this time and wrote De Anima and did this and did that. Then it begins to have meaning. But the ability to make meaningful statements about Aristotle does not require you to enumerate every single possible proposition that the name Aristotle could be involved in, so to speak. This tie directly to the world. And this ability to picture facts or to create these pictorial facts allows you to, on the one hand, use names that themselves have no meaning, but not go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and have to enumerate all of the potential propositional relationships for that name in order to say that you can make meaningful statements or refer to that particular name, which was

48:50 Wes: Russell's theory of definitely not that you have to be able to enumerate all those things to use them, but your use of them, the meaning of them still implies all those, or it still depends on all those. It's not that you personally have to be able to go through and decompose all those.

49:09 Seth: No, no, absolutely.

49:11 Wes: But it's still that when you mean something or when something has a meaning, it still has a meaning only insofar as it has all those decompositions and then possibilities and all those things.

49:28 Mark: 2.0123. If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts. Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object. A new possibility cannot subsequently be found.

49:43 Seth: Right? And when I read that.

49:44 Mark: So that's very weird. Either we just don't know objects, then we don't, or we do know all the possibilities of how things. In other words, if I talk about something in particular, I know that I'm talking about something that exists in space. So it has all these spatial possibilities. Of course I can't list them, but I know the types. I know that it will have some color or other. I know that it can be all these other relationships. It can be owned by something, it can be whatever the presumably finite, though large number of potential relationship with other things. And that's what it is. To understand what that particular is, I'm

50:23 Wes: going to throw this out there. I don't think we know objects. I think objects are Wittgenstein's version of substance. I think this is a metaphysic.

50:30 Seth: I'm inclined to agree. I definitely don't think that we know objects.

50:35 Wes: The object is the persistent substrate of change. But this is logical change of all the variations.

50:45 Mark: Let me return to a theory I was going to put forward earlier to ask you. So do you think that there is, even though we can't know this and we can't list it, one particular list of atomic facts that then exist? You think that there's one list that we could, in theory, come up with of all the atomic facts, and these would let us derive all the compound facts. Only one arrangement of atomic facts is what I'm saying.

51:14 Seth: I'm struggling with the language again.

51:16 Mark: He says atomic facts make up the world.

51:18 Seth: Which proposition?

51:19 Mark: Atomic facts.

51:20 Seth: Which proposition is that right from the

51:22 Mark: beginning he's saying that.

51:24 Seth: Right.

51:24 Mark: You know, number one?

51:27 Seth: Well, he doesn't say atomic. That's the thing. You're confusing me with that. Because he talks about composites later on.

51:33 Mark: Okay, it's sometime later. It's sometime later in the text where he says that's the point of atomic facts, is that if you list them all and they're logically independent of one another, and then you've said everything there is to say about the world.

51:48 Seth: Yes. Okay.

51:50 Mark: Okay. And then he says some things later about different potential arrangements. When he's talking about science, we can talk this about more specifically later, but he's talking about a scientific theory, a very general one, like causality or something, as being an attempt to imply from certain small number of general principles all the atomic facts. So that makes it sound to me like. And he specifically says there are different possible theories that you could put over the world to try to derive all the atomic facts from them. And the question for me, then that makes it sound like.

It sounds very Kantian. It sounds very much like we can come up with a different list. If the point is you just need some list of atomic facts, and together they will imply the world. Well, then aren't there a lot of possible arrangements of things? You could, in other words, break the atomic facts down in different ways.

52:45 Wes: But the possibilities are. Those are the possibilities, not the actualities.

52:49 Mark: No, I'm talking about the actual atomic facts, the ones that are true in our world. That I don't know that there's one definitive list of those. I think that there are many potential definitive lists of them. It's just that depending on how you break things down, you know, if you change one atomic fact. So it sort of covers a different way of picking out the world, you would get always. He does seem to think. I guess, first of all, do you think there are an infinite list of. Are there an infinite number of atomic facts?

53:18 Wes: I don't know. See, I think he thinks that there are not.

53:25 Mark: That there are not. I mean, first of all, okay, according to a system, you can't even ask the question because you can't ask how many objects are there because the word object by itself doesn't make any sense. You have to be talking about.

53:37 Wes: You can't do everything that's in. So everything that's in the Tractatus is either senseless or nonsense by Wittgenstein's own definition, which is why he gives that

53:47 Unknown speaker: comment about kicking away the ladder.

53:49 Wes: Yeah, yeah, he knows that. But that's, you know, again, I don't think nonsense is a pejorative term. But anyway. Sorry.

53:57 Seth: No, no, I just. So, Mark, I guess I'm kind of questioning what you're driving at, because there's essentially an infinite number of possibilities for objects to be in combination with each other or in relation to each other. Both actual. If you had to enumerate. Just look in your room. Let's do a little phenomenological exercise here. If you just picked like one object in your room that you're sitting in right now and you said, okay, I'm going to describe how this one object stands in relation to every other object that's in my field of vision right now, you never. You'd never get to the end of it. And we're just.

54:36 Wes: But it'd still be finite. It would just be very large.

54:39 Mark: Right. Well, and let me. Let's. Let's look at this. Because a lot of those descriptive points would entail each other. So even if I'm just talking about spatial relations and I look at this computer mouse and I say, this computer mouse is on top of the table. Well, there are all sorts of other things that are. That are under the table. So therefore, by saying it's on top of the table, I've already covered all the other spatial relationships that are of the things that are below the table.

55:06 Seth: Right.

55:06 Mark: So there's a difference. Something else out in the world that has to do with the table's relationship to the floor. For instance.

55:12 Seth: Okay.

55:13 Wes: Atomic facts would be.

55:14 Unknown speaker: Would me to be like the.

55:16 Wes: The atom on the.

55:18 Mark: Okay, yeah, I know.

55:19 Wes: On the bottom of the thing.

55:20 Unknown speaker: Above the tables. Above the atoms.

55:22 Wes: Above the atom.

55:23 Mark: Let's just pretend for. For a minute, though. I'm trying to, because I think we've Stumbled on two fundamentally different interpretations of what he means by objects. And one of them is what you're talking about in terms of, like, you can't actually experience any of them. I want to explore this other one, which I think is what he really means, given the examples that he pulls out. And in fact, Seth, what you described, I think proves my point in terms of. If you think that these basic elements. Okay, hold on. Just let me. Let me finish. If you think that they are macroscopic, then that would mean that there are infinitely many ways that you can pick them out.

Or there are much. There are a large number of ways you could pick them out. Say, you know, if we're saying these objects are just fictions anyway, and we're just talking about, you know, they're positive because you list an atomic fact, and so therefore it must have an object that participates in it. Well, if there are different sets of atomic facts that you. In other words, there are lots of different ways to describe everything in the world. And he says the atomic ones are the ones that are going to imply all the rest of them. And there's. I think he thinks that there are a finite number of these.

Again, maybe I'm completely wrong about that. But then I think it's clear from that that you could pick out relations in the world in different ways to get a different set of basic atomic facts that will then imply the rest. And that's what kind of science is doing. Science is trying to come up with a general theory or something that will then help us pick out a lot of specific atomic facts that will then imply everything else. But obviously there are lots of ways you can do that. Lots of different. So that's why he says, actually, ultimately, scientific things, basic things like the theory of causality, and he gives some other examples we can look at.

That section are not descriptions of the world at all. They're ways of organizing signs in the language. And that's what really got me on this, is that the symbology of the world is arbitrary. He says, and what that means to say, if you say the symbology of the world is arbitrary, the concepts that we use to describe things are arbitrary. That means, and again, you follow this representational theory that the concepts are going to reflect the states of affairs, right? The actual facts. That means how we divide the world up into facts is arbitrary.

There is not one basic list of atomic facts. There are many, many, many possible ones.

57:47 Wes: Why not combine all those lists and say it's one list?

57:50 Mark: Well, because it would be redundant if you combine all the different lists of atomic facts. What I'm saying, if you trim out

57:57 Wes: the redundant ones and then you have the list.

58:00 Mark: I guess when I say I guess, I don't understand what you're saying. When you say combine all the lists, then I was talking about different lists of atomic facts, each list of which implies all the rest. So each, any one of these lists is in itself a complete description of the world. So there's no question about combining multiple lists, because one list, I've already said this is the way I'm defining it. The way he defines it describes everything in the world. The question is, are there multiple lists or is there just one list? And it's just a matter of how we. How we figure it out. If you say there are multiple possible lists, that's a very Kantian interpretation. I think that's, that's the charitable way to take him on this.

58:40 Wes: I don't see the many lists.

58:42 Unknown speaker: But also, I didn't think it was

58:44 Wes: uncontroversial that objects are simples. You know, starting with the 2.02 objects are simple and then 2.021 objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite. When he says they can't be composite, he means that objects aren't things, that they're not objects in their typical sense because they're not composite.

59:06 Unknown speaker: You can't take an object and divide it up.

59:09 Mark: Right. Well, and if you defined it, an object with a description, then anything you can define with a description seems like you could break it down into pieces. You're right. So if I'm pointing at a rock and we want to say, what is that object that I'm referring to? Well, I'm referring to a rock. Of course, the rock has lots of different properties. It's not logically basic. So the rock, the macroscopic rock in that sense, of course, can't be the object. That's. That's what you're talking about.

59:32 Wes: There's no description. But if I'm saying that the only

59:36 Mark: way that you can define a simple is through demonstrative. In other words, pointing and saying that thing. I'm not giving a description, I'm just giving it a name. That thing, I'll call it a stands in certain relations, then why can't that be a basic. So in other words, that thing is related to a bunch of properties. For instance, it's related to the properties of rocks. It's related to the properties of having spatial relations to other things.

1:00:03 Wes: I get your point, but even if you're using A as demonstrative to refer to rocks, so you have a simple. In that sense, your statement about A is still a truth function of a bunch of other statements. And when you come to atomic facts, it can't be a truth function of any other statements. Does that make sense?

1:00:21 Mark: Why would you. Why would you say that it's a truth function of a lot of other. So in other words, you. If I point out at a rock and I say, I just say rock. So in other words, I'm really saying that is a rock. So making a relationship between what I'm positing is a simple statement of existence

1:00:35 Wes: is not a proposition for Wittgenstein.

1:00:38 Mark: No, no, no, I'm not saying. I'm not making. I'm identifying it. And if he wants to say that the world is really the field of our potential and of course, actual experience, then that seems to be the way that you would get at the basics. Is, in my experience right now, I'm pointing at something. And that is one way that I can pick out a simple. And then I can say a lot of things about it. I can say it is a rock, which can break it down into a lot of things. It is a solid. It is a, you know, give all the things the potential colors of a rock.

1:01:12 Wes: Whatever spatiality still has to be a true function of.

1:01:17 Seth: What are you gonna, you know, this

1:01:18 Wes: thing is hard and this thing has this certain atomic structure and blah, blah,

1:01:22 Seth: blah, what are you going to do?

1:01:23 Mark: Right? So those are all the basic atomic facts. So saying it is a rock is

1:01:26 Wes: a complete rejection of demonstrative.

1:01:28 Unknown speaker: Also.

1:01:28 Mark: Also, why do you. Why are you hierarchically saying that it is a rock is the molecular thing that has to be implied by simpler things? Like it is hard. Maybe. In fact, and I definitely read this in here, he's saying it's just as valid to say it is a rock is the basic thing and it saying this is a rock implies a bunch of other things. It's not that it is hard and it is thing implies together those make up the statement it is a rock. It's. No, it's that it is a rock is the basic. And that you can translate the word, the property rock into a lot of different equivalent phrases.

It's that equivalence goes both ways. Equivalence is not hierarchical. He doesn't have. But he's exclusively against. He's against hierarchies. He makes this point in terms of numbers. I guess the people before him wanted to define numbers in terms of. Okay, once you understand 1, 2, 3, and so on, or something. Then you can build up to higher things where he's saying, look, all the concepts of numbers are given to us at the same time. There's no hierarchy within numbers. So that was a big thing. He's not saying that, you know, that there are basic a priori truths about math or about anything about reason that then we go on to derive these more complex things from.

No, no, the complex things and the simple things are really sort of given all at the same time, and they all mean the same thing. This is what this referential transparency thing breaks down into that if you say the morning star is there, the evening star is there, you're saying the same thing. So the same thing. If you make a very, you know, a bunch of simple claims about apparent causality in the world, or a global claim about this massive, you know, those are not hierarchical. It's just if in fact they pick out the same things and make the same claims about them, then they're substitutable for each other.

1:03:22 Wes: There's a definite hierarchy in propositions, which are true functions of other propositions. And to say that objects are simple and that other things are complex implies a hierarchy of the more complex.

1:03:35 Seth: Let me do two things here. One is, let me read some of the text that I think speaks to this.

1:03:43 Wes: It all else fails.

1:03:45 Seth: So if you, Starting on Proposition 2.021, objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite. If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. In other words, substance is the thing that guarantees that you can map a picture, that it represents reality, as opposed to just relying on other pictures. In that case, we could not sketch any picture of the world being true or false. It's obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something, a form, in common with it. Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form. The substance of the world can only determine a form, not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented only by the configuration of objects that they are produced.

1:04:40 Wes: In a manner of speaking.

1:04:41 Seth: Objects, right?

1:04:43 Wes: Like I said, I think of them as the variables, not as anything determined.

1:04:47 Seth: Right? So I could read this one way and say all material properties of objects. And if you just talk about an object without talking about any material properties, you're not really saying anything. You're just talking about pure. So you have to be using, you have to be mentioning material properties and you have to be doing that using propositions, otherwise you're just talking nonsense. I could read this instead.

1:05:11 Mark: Otherwise you're just naming the thing directly.

1:05:13 Seth: Otherwise. Well, he gets down about descriptions there later. Let me just complete this thought about hierarchy. One way to read this is to say, because all propositions are true or false, completely independent of any others, that all the facts stand alone on their own two feet. There is no hierarchy of properties. That would be one way to read this. And in fact, when we first started talking about it, and when I read it originally, I thought any proposition that represents something that's not logical, those things are all independent. And so the idea of implication and causality with respect to propositions that relate to the world doesn't really exist.

And what I mean by that is, Mark. What I thought he was saying originally when I first read this was if you say that the mouse is on the table and the table is on, the mouse is above the table and the table is above the footrest. Let's just say, therefore, the mouse is above the footrest. The fact that the mouse is above the footrest is made true by the actual state of affairs in the world and not by any logical connection between the idea of being on top of or above. Does that make sense? Sure.

1:06:30 Wes: I think.

1:06:31 Mark: I don't. I don't think that contradicts what I was saying.

1:06:33 Seth: I don't. I don't think so either. I'm just saying that's the way I read it.

1:06:35 Wes: But let's just get it. We still need to acknowledge what the hierarchy of truth functionality, which is a big part of this, once you get to the atomic fact, you get to a fact that is no longer a function of any lower level proposition. It can no longer be decomposed.

1:06:53 Seth: Can you give me an example? When you say I'm having a.

1:06:56 Mark: Well, that's the freaking. There are no examples.

1:06:58 Wes: That's the classic. There's thousands and thousands of papers written about this. An object is like Kant's Ding an sich. It's the object equals X. I totally agree with you.

1:07:10 Seth: It is Kant's Ding an sich. Objects are the substance that guarantee that the world is not completely fluid and totally changeable all the time and has some kind of form that we can represent and actually get along with. Right.

1:07:22 Wes: That's a great way of putting it.

1:07:23 Seth: Okay, great. More importantly is the fact that he's like saying, repeat that one more time.

1:07:29 Mark: Repeat that one more time.

1:07:31 Seth: Objects are simply the substance that guarantee that the world has some kind of form or structure, that it's not constantly fluid and changeable and mutable, such that we can represent it and represent it accurately or represented at all.

1:07:50 Mark: Question Are the objects something? Are the objects something, the basic object, something that's actually in the world, or is it something that we impose and therefore we can do it in a lot of different ways?

1:08:03 Seth: Well, remember, I buy.

1:08:04 Mark: So what Wes said about, within a given system of symbology, you're going to have basic atomic facts and then you're going to have the compounds of those. So let's say your atomic factors are represented by P and another atomic fact is represented by Q. Well, of course you have P and Q. Okay, there's a molecular proposition right there. Now, the question is though. So of course, yes, if you establish that there's a set of atomic facts, and again, they're supposed to imply the rest of the facts, there are infinitely many different ways of putting these things together, or at least, if not infinite, very, very large.

So there's the question. Okay, yes, you have a hierarchy once you've established what the basic ones are. But the question is, are what the basic ones are given by the world, or are there different things that one could focus on in coming up with your basic concepts? And then once you come up with those basic concepts and therefore your set of atomic propositions, atomic facts which are represented by atomic propositions, you could get a different way of equally validly symbolizing everything that there is. But you're picking out different elements because nature itself does not imply what those individual elements are going to be.

1:09:12 Wes: But those, those facts are the, are the world. They're not our ways of picking them out.

1:09:18 Seth: Yes, if we go back to the beginning, the world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1:09:25 Mark: So it's just when you think about how, how you would describe a particular situation, there are so many different facts. I mean, it seems to us absolutely there are infinitely many ways of describing a situation. And that to me does not reflect the fact that there are infinite number in any given symbology, that there are an infinite number of atomic facts about this situation. It means there are infinitely many approaches you could use to starting to carve up the world into atomic facts and then the rest of the things that are derived from them.

1:09:54 Seth: Do you guys remember studying definite descriptions? Let me give you an example. So we have, on the one hand, we have the world being the totality of facts. And a fact is like an atomic proposition about the state of relations of two objects in the world. And all of these things are equal. They're all equally true or equal.

1:10:14 Mark: What does that mean though, all the atomic facts? It means because they're logically independent of each other, there's no reason to make any hierarchically arrange them in any way.

1:10:26 Seth: The truth of the statement that Seth is 41 years old and the truth of the statement that there are four books on the floor near this desk. The truth values are equivalent.

1:10:38 Wes: Oh, I see.

1:10:38 Seth: Do you guys have carpet in the rooms that you're in right now?

1:10:41 Mark: Yes.

1:10:42 Seth: Okay. If I take one individual strand and I say okay, here's a fact. This strand is touching this other strand that's right next to it. And this strand is also a millimeter away from the strand that's on the other side of that strand that it's touching and it's a millimeter and a half away from the next strand and. And so on and so forth. I could create a totality of facts just about my carpet that would take me years to enumerate. And those are facts that make up the structure of the world that I have to acknowledge according to Wittgenstein's.

1:11:18 Wes: But they're not atomic.

1:11:19 Seth: Why are they not atomic?

1:11:21 Wes: Because they're reducible to other.

1:11:25 Mark: Well, that's the question.

1:11:27 Seth: I don't think they're. Let's make this only It's a true statement about that the world that

1:11:33 Wes: it's true. But most true statements are reducible to other. They're truth functional. They depend upon the truth of other propositions. I mean, that's what the truth of

1:11:45 Seth: this statement does not depend on anything other than the fact that the state of affairs holds in the world. The fact that these two things stand in that relation to each other is what makes my proposition.

1:11:57 Unknown speaker: I agree.

1:11:58 Mark: I think that's. But it does obviously imply from that

1:12:03 Wes: you have to acknowledge it's true functional. Right. They depend on that there are other. Those aren't windowless. Those have truth functional relationships to other propositions.

1:12:13 Mark: Even the atomic factors.

1:12:15 Wes: Your strand. Listen. Strand of the carpet being to the left or right of another strand or this or that or having a color is truth functionally related to statement about a molecule and many molecules. There are many facts about molecules which if one of those facts about those molecules weren't true or a number of those facts, then you would have a different result for the overall effect. So as truth functional, they cannot be applied.

1:12:41 Seth: Wait a second. Let me see if I understand what you're saying, Wes. So the fact that the strand of the carpet sits to the left of another strand is Dependent upon the fact that a molecule that makes up the first strand stands to the left of a molecule that makes up the.

1:12:59 Wes: Take all the molecules in the strand, molecule A stands to the left, molecule B stands to the left, molecule C stands to the left, plus molecule A

1:13:06 Unknown speaker: is part of it and blah, blah, blah.

1:13:07 Wes: There are many. There are millions and millions of facts that just go into the one strand being to the left. So am I wrong in messing it or.

1:13:16 Seth: No, but I mean the statement. But according to Wittgenstein, the fact that the proposition, the picture, the logical picture is of the strand standing in relation to the other strand and that has truth or falsity, in fact it's true because the state of affairs hold. And I can make that. I can make that.

1:13:34 Mark: I don't need to know anything.

1:13:35 Seth: I don't need to know anything else

1:13:36 Mark: about the molecules to affirm. Exactly. So this is my point of why it is.

1:13:42 Wes: But we're talking about two different things now. We're talking about the relationships between macroscopic facts and then the other facts.

1:13:52 Mark: But that's the question with which the truth is related.

1:13:55 Wes: And then we're talking about picturing. Those are two different things. The relationship between the picture and the fact that the pictures. Oftentimes we're making pictures of non atomic facts. That's granted. That doesn't mean that the non atomic facts which are making pictures aren't still non atomic. We're not making pictures of atomic facts

1:14:17 Mark: as human beings, despite the fact that he says we make pictures of atomic facts.

1:14:21 Wes: Where I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, believe me. Okay, where does he say that?

1:14:26 Mark: Let's just clarify one more time what these interpretations are and then move on to something else. Because I think some people are probably really agonized by this point.

1:14:35 Unknown speaker: I know you heard things about it.

1:14:38 Mark: We understand very clearly, Wes, what your position is that these atomic facts are not observable because all the basic things are things below the level of perception. My claim to counter that was that no atomic facts do stand in truth functional relationships to other things. You know, so the. If P is an atomic fact, it stands in a truth functional relationship to P and Q. It's just that P is the basic one. So the question is, is it just an arbitrary matter of how we make signs to represent the world? Which ones are going to be the basic ones and which are not?

I could start a system that is going to describe the world which is based on these thoughts. That is at the level of macroscopic objects. For instance, that carpet Strand, I think the example Seth gave was very intuitively right on what it sounds like he is talking about. And in that system, the basic atomic fact is going to be the things about the individual carpet strands derived from that. We can say some things about the carpet strands like it is composed of molecules composed of. Doesn't mean the smaller things are somehow more basic than the large things that

1:15:44 Wes: they're all truth functional though it's not composition, it's not mereology, it's truth functional. So you can show me how they're not truth functionally related. How cannot be truth functions, which direction

1:15:56 Mark: are they related in is the question I would say it's not that the truths about the individual positions of the molecules then imply a truth about the position of the macroscopic object is the other way around. It's the position of a macroscopic object implies entails a lot of things about the truths of the molecules because we know that it is composed of molecules. So that's a bunch of atomic facts or sorry, a bunch of facts about it. And that because we've already said as an atomic fact it's in this position, then that's going to imply a whole lot of things about those individual molecules. Why. Why say the things about the molecules are the basic ones instead of the macroscopic?

1:16:36 Wes: Because the molecules are.

1:16:37 Mark: It's arbitrary.

1:16:38 Wes: Let's take a set of statements about molecules. Can you say the. The statement about the specific molecule is a function of the statement about the

1:16:48 Mark: fabric, about the atoms. I mean you can keep going about the quarks, about the lepton, it's about the atoms.

1:16:54 Unknown speaker: They're right.

1:16:54 Wes: I'm not, I'm saying the molecules and the. Isn't atomic either. It's just more atomic than Right.

1:16:59 Mark: But there's never going to be. If you're judging based on composition, there's never going to be a level that you have to call basic. So if that's the case, that's a reductio ad absurdum against what you're saying. You have to make the basic somewhere else or else that you could make it anywhere is really the point. All right. I think we've established competing.

1:17:19 Wes: I see a lot of.

1:17:22 Mark: Do you agree, Seth? Do you understand both of our positions here?

1:17:25 Seth: Yes, I do. I still think that in the matter of atomic facts, it's Mark and Seth against Wes. I think Mark and I agreed on this one, Wes.

1:17:35 Wes: I'm sorry, not a democracy.

1:17:42 Unknown speaker: So we had a little break there. We had some technical difficulties and we kind of ran out of time. For the evening. So it's been nine days or so since the first part of our discussion of logical atomism, the term that Wittgenstein never actually uses, and we took the opportunity to do a little research to try to figure out what the proper interpretation of his atomic facts was. Wes, do you want to start?

1:18:08 Wes: Yeah.

1:18:09 Unknown speaker: And I don't think it's proper or not proper. I think this has been a confusing issue for decades now, and there's been a whole cottage industry of trying to figure out what atomic facts are and what Russell meant by it versus what Wittgenstein meant by it.

Why don't we explain who Russell is, since you brought this up? So Bertrand Russell was one of Wittgenstein's teachers.

1:18:30 Mark: Right.

1:18:31 Unknown speaker: Wittgenstein sought him out after working with Gottlieb Frege that we talked a little about last time. And so he. Thanks. Russell says, says near the beginning of the book, how far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers, I will not decide. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty and points of detail, and therefore I will give no sources because indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another. I admire the balls of that. But then he does go on to say, yeah, but it does owe a lot to Frege and Russell.

So it was supposed to be, you know, pretty directly influenced by Russell and responding to some of. I know you talked last time about Russell's definite descriptions and some other parts of Russell's theory and was trying to make corrections to some parts of Russell's theory of mathematics as presented in the Principia Mathematica, a very long and probably very boring book that I have only

read summaries of, full of symbolic logic notation.

Yes, but then Russell was very impressed by the Tractatus, and it seems like it's only his fault that it got published at all. And Russell wrote the introduction, and even though Wittgenstein apparently didn't really like his introduction that much and thought he misunderstood some things, the only way he could get it published was to use that introduction.

So they had an ongoing discussion. And then, of course, Wittgenstein eventually rejected a lot of the things that he put into the Tractatus as well. Right, but to mention the Russellian position.

But yeah, right, but Russell was one of the people that ran with the Tractatus or with the Logical Atomism, which was an idea that he'd already been playing around with before the Tractatus came up. But he liked Wittgenstein's version of it. And so we're going to post a link with this to Russell's Logical Atomism Lectures. It's just a pretty short PDF that some, some lectures he gave in 1918. And the Tractatus is what year he

wrote it in the trenches of World War I.

He wrote it while fighting and then while a prisoner of war.

1:20:29 Wes: Right.

1:20:30 Unknown speaker: That was pretty interesting. And Russell says in this thing that what, what he's proposing in these Logical Atomism lectures owes itself a lot to Wittgenstein. But you shouldn't hold Wittgenstein responsible because, in fact, at that point he didn't know if Wittgenstein was living or dead.

1:20:45 Mark: He says.

1:20:47 Unknown speaker: So in Russell's diaries, there's an account of when he first meets Wittgenstein. And it's just really like, this guy is weird and obnoxious. And then later on when he's changed his opinion, it's a funny contrast. It's like, oh, well, he turned out to be a genius.

So being weird and obnoxious should be a clue that someone is a genius. You should assume that every word.

1:21:08 Wes: Obnoxious. Yes.

1:21:12 Seth: I don't think that logically follows.

1:21:15 Unknown speaker: It's an atomic fact, man.

So we talked about atomic facts and Wittgenstein's idea basically that propositions can be analyzed into more elementary propositions. And those propositions are correspond to facts which can be analyzed into more elementary facts until you get to the end of that analysis, and at the end of that you have an atomic state of affairs or atomic fact, and then an atomic proposition that corresponds to that. These atomic facts are combinations of objects and those objects he calls simple. And one of the characteristics of those facts is that they cannot be logically connected in any way with other atomic facts, of course, with other facts, with other atomic facts.

Right. They cannot be dependent in the sense of one atomic fact following as a logical conclusion from another or contradicting another. They're all completely logically independent of each other. Wittgenstein's idea is that there's no such thing as physical necessity, that everything can be reduced to. To this logical necessity. So that, for instance, this analysis is always a logical analysis, as you pointed out before, Mark, it's not a physical analysis into parts, it's a logical analysis into more and more simple logical elements. Which is not to say that they can't have something to do with each other.

So, for instance, if I name something like a rock part of the idea, and this is Russell's idea, that Wittgenstein goes with the definite descriptions, naming something like a rock, the name can actually just be a substitute for other propositions. So it's a complex which is related to other propositions. Those propositions are logically related. So they're definitional, they're a matter of meaning. You know, when I say rock, what do I mean? So they could be a list of properties. And if you're a scientist, it may have something to do with the constituents.

So it's not that the analysis of meaning of the conceptual analysis is always unrelated to the, let's say physical analysis into constituents. It's just that it doesn't have to be. And ultimately Wittgenstein wants to get you to the point where everything flows out of the logic. It's not a matter of physics anymore. Physics is just a higher up level of these atomic facts and these logic of the world. All right, so one of the interpretations of this is the idea that. Let's quote Russell here in his introduction. This is sort of a good summary. A fact which has no parts that are facts is called by Mr.

Wittgenstein a Sachverhalt. You have to help me, Seth. This is the same thing that he calls an atomic fact. An atomic fact, although it contains no parts that are facts, nevertheless does contain parts. If we may regard Socrates as wise as an atomic fact when he says that, of course it's not really an atomic fact fact, it's just treating it as such for the purposes of argument. If we may regard that as atomic fact, we perceive that it contains the constituent Socrates and wise. If an atomic fact is analyzed as fully as possible, theoretical, not practically possible is meant the constituents finally reach may be called simples or objects.

It is a logical necessity demanded by theory, like an electron. His ground for maintaining that there must be simples is that every complex presupposes a fact. And then you can go on from there.

1:24:42 Wes: So one of the interpretations in the introduction to the Tractatus that Russell wrote,

1:24:47 Unknown speaker: so I think Russell plays around with these different ideas. One of them is that these simples or objects are theoretical entities that you can't ever really define. It's ambiguous. Actually, I did some research in his notebooks. He plays around for instance, as did Russell later on, with the idea that these objects could be say a colored point in a visual field, something like that. But he later on rejects this and there are some interesting reasons why that has to be rejected. So Wittgenstein was confused and Russell was confused as well. In fact, they agreed later on they'd worry about what these objects were and what these atomic facts were. Now, Mark, you had another way of looking at this, where the simples may be theoretical entities that can't be identified, but the item of facts, that's why

1:25:33 Mark: he says there may be something like

1:25:36 Unknown speaker: an empirical example, are the minimal unit that we can get down to, that these simples themselves, the objects that are joined together in the atomic facts, don't make any sense by themselves. We can only even understand them in the context of a fact. Which makes more sense to me when you're talking about the X, the substance that is green or whatever, than a property you know previous to is going

1:26:01 Mark: to be, I would say, a pretty

1:26:03 Unknown speaker: basic property relation, like what are you going to analyze that into? So if you include properties as well as the nouns, which it seems at least some of the time Wittgenstein thought you should too, as these symbols, then at least those kind of make sense to me in terms of breaking things down into their basics and yet still being able to understand what the components are. But it is a fact based metaphysics. It's not an object based metaphysics. You don't list all the objects and say that's what there is. That's exactly the kind of metaphysics that he is rejecting.

So that's, I guess, how I wanted us to, you know, once we were a little clearer about what these two views were. So Russell in the Logical Atomism lectures specifically says the particulars he has in mind are little patches of color and sounds, momentary things and also predicates or relations and so on. He really wants to run with this, Russell does, as a metaphysical theory. And since we have to cut off because we ran way long in our discussion of the Tractatus, this seemed like

1:27:03 Mark: a good place to cut it off

1:27:04 Unknown speaker: with this discussion of what if this fact based metaphysics is actually a metaphysical theory, which at least for Russell it was. And if a text is too obscure, find someone who's influenced by that text who is clearer. So that's kind of what, in throwing out this extra Russell reading, is what I had in mind and is what I clearly had in mind when I was raising last time the idea that these were something that we could understand. Although I still think in Wittgenstein it is peculiar that he says stuff like the world is co extensive with my experience of the world, right?

And then yet the basic components of his world, these atomic facts, are things that somehow we can't have any perception of because all, you know, regular facts that we run into are somehow. You can use this analysis to get down to something more basic. So, you know, maybe Wittgenstein is just incoherent about that, or vague at least.

Yeah. His notebooks show that he's of two minds. He doesn't know whether or not atomic facts can be thought of as something that you could give an example of that.

So Russell, in particular, before he met Wittgenstein, even was interested in this logical atomism as metaphysical pluralism. And he was reacting to the Hegelians, like F.H. bradley, who I've only heard of in this context, as somebody Russell was reacting against. Hegelians, Hegelians, Hegelians, Hegelianos.

I'm gonna say German snob. Russell was a Hegelian. Is that the right pronunciation? And had his awakening and went to the other extreme. So Bradley was the English Hegel, according

to this maybe probably very oversimplified version of Hegel, who we'll talk about at some point. Everything, underlyingly is one substance, right? All dualities dissolve upon further reflection. Which sounds very Taoist or Buddhist or something to me.

And just to give some of the motivation for that, one of the things that Bradley was worried about, and Russell will continue to worry about this, is relational properties, where if you say there are two objects and then you say there's this third thing, the relation between them, and you think that there has to be some truth bearer or something in the metaphysics that corresponds to that relation in order to give it truth, then you have to ask, well, what connects the relation entity to each of the things that it relates? There has to be another connection. And then you get this infinite regress and therefore everything.

And we saw that in Leibniz, too.

1:29:33 Mark: Right.

1:29:34 Unknown speaker: Just to name drop again. Well, everything.

Well, he's all about everything,

a microcosmic reflection of everything else. That we are all, in effect, aspects of God.

Right. There's a famous Latin phrase that Leibniz uses a lot. I think it's predicatum in est subjecto. All the predicates are in the subject. That's the logical version of this idea of everything being in the monad. And that includes relational properties, which arguably Wittgenstein is doing some similar.

1:30:05 Seth: Right.

1:30:06 Unknown speaker: Because he says that stuff like, if I understand an object, I understand all the possible relationships it can have.

1:30:11 Wes: Right.

1:30:12 Seth: Which led us to the question of can you ever understand?

1:30:15 Unknown speaker: Well, even. Even that. Yeah, it's unclear to me whether he was talking about the simples there or any object, even if it's ultimately analyzable in terms of more logically basic Objects like if I understand this book in front of me, I understand that is a spatial thing that can sit on other spatial things. There's all these potential facts about its location about, like how, how hot it is about that I understand about it. So I think he was talking about even macroscopic objects with that. And that sure sounds like the potential in the thing itself.

So Russell in particular was reacting against this monism by saying in the world there really are multiple things, like indivisibly multiple things, these atomic facts or whatever. The interpretation that I gave, which I admit is not Wittgenstein's, but is a possible thing you could read out of it, which is, well, why say that there's a particular set of atomic facts? If really there's just reality out there and what these atomic facts are just elements of description, then it seems like you could carve it up in any old way. But that's a very modest view.

And therefore this kind of relativistic, you know, that you could come up with a plurality of analyses of this, which is directly against Russell's view that basically there are multiple things. Let's just close this out by saying if there is anything to say, what do you actually think? Let's start with you, Seth. What do you think about this fact based metaphysics? Does this like have any appeal to you at all, either version?

1:31:40 Seth: Yes, it does have some appeal to me because I like the idea that he's locating the center or the grounding of the metaphysics in the same place where you find meaning. So instead of a kind of hollow talk about what is and what isn't and getting caught up in the question of existence or non existence, he's sort of relocating the focus for the metaphysical discussion. And I'm the kind of person that can just take a simple on faith. I can have a thing, you know, a thing in itself, and I'm okay with that. And you know, given that I'm a Heideggerian in my sympathies, even though I think Heidegger is much more elegant and deep and important than Wittgenstein, there is a kind of phenomenological bent to this approach, even though it got taken in the direction of language and so forth, that allows you to kind of do the same kind of explorations about experience that I find more attractive.

That's the way I would read it in order to enjoy it myself.

1:32:40 Unknown speaker: What do you think, Wes?

I like it. I like it a lot better than I did in graduate school. I remember being bored to tears by Russell and Wittgenstein. And I feel like I understand it so much better, too. It was just baffling to me. And now, for whatever reason, I guess, you know, you go out in the corporate world for a while and you come back to it and it seems a lot clearer. I like it, you know, especially after reading Leibniz, I like some of the similarities there, the sort of logical version of that. And then now I see some of the similarities to Kant as well. This idea of taking language and taking logic and trying to derive these metaphysical implications from it, basically, what must be the nature of the world such that it grounds the way we speak about it in a certain way. So, yeah, it has a lot of appeal to me.

I don't think it's clearer to me. I thought I had a clear understanding of it when I read it the first time in my actual Wittgenstein class. And we went through this very, very carefully. And I like the idea, one of the other translations for Sachverhalt, atomic fact state of affairs. And I like that better that there's just the state of the world. But that doesn't sound like pluralism when I think of it that way. Whereas it's clear, if you read more, that you're supposed to be able to sort of. Even if there's infinitely many atomic facts, there's a lower order of infinity of atomic facts than other kinds of facts.

And just the. The idea of. Unless you're talking about some kind of relativistic system like I was talking about before, or, you know, where you can sort of start with any arbitrary set of these atomic facts and build the rest of the facts, it seems a little artificial to me. It seems just as artificial as, you know, the atoms in a void thing that he was kind of arguing against. So I guess I'm a monist at heart. I like thinking of process as fundamental as opposed to substance.

1:34:35 Mark: Right.

1:34:35 Unknown speaker: Because at least that doesn't deny the reality of change.

1:34:39 Mark: Right.

1:34:39 Unknown speaker: You don't become a Platonist and thinking that you have to have something unchangeable to be perfect. So I have in general a sympathy with this talking about facts instead of talking about things. But I don't find Wittgenstein's particular account of this very illuminating. And I think he didn't mean to be illuminating about it, because, as we will talk about in the next discussion, he was ultimately against metaphysics. And like you're saying that just this basic sort of what he would consider common sense are just the outline of metaphysics that flows from what he really wants to talk about, which is logic and its relation to speech.

Yeah, And I should say I don't think the atomism. I'm not a logical atomist at heart, in the sense that I think that he solves the problems he's trying to solve. In a way, they're trying to dissolve those sorts of problems that lead one to become an idealist or lead one to become a monist. And of course, as usual, it's a failed project, as usual, for any philosophical project. But it does put those problems into a much crisper light, let's put it that way. Let's say a much more atomistic light than one might otherwise have had. And then this idea of reducing the world to logic is pretty crazy, if you think about it. Even physical necessity.

Well, it doesn't reduce. I think we'll talk about science next time. I don't think it reduces. I think he makes a very clear distinction between. It reduces speech to, at least if speech were well formed, to logic, but not the world itself. Right. I mean, that's the whole point that he's making this distinction between our representation.

But, well, the connections between the facts are logical. Now, whatever you want to say of what that means ontologically, that's difficult, but those are still relations between facts, and facts are ontological elements.

So that's about all the time we have for discussing the metaphysics, for discussing this part of the Tractatus. Tune into the next episode, where we will discuss the rest of the Tractatus, and we'll throw in a little Rudolf Carnap, a logical positivist, part of a school that was highly influenced by the part of the Tractatus that said you can't sensibly talk about the kind of things that philosophy talks about. So, unfortunately, we didn't, in this episode, get around to addressing the initial question, what is it that we can legitimately talk about? But we will next time. So thanks much. Enjoy yourself.

All right. What you are to me is a slight pull on my forehead A slight tension in me my chest A pressure on my neck A lengthy but distracted rest. Sa. What you seem to be Is a face that brings out tears Hair that makes me choke A tickle in my ears Some ghost in my imagination Made very, very real Something I can feel vaguely. What you and I should be standing up without support Bound but not today Was still three but not forever but not forever so much in one package so much more to say.

1:39:43 Mark: I love you.