Compos Mentis

I take Wittgenstein seriously as any student of contemporary philosophy ought to. He did much in the way of clearing out traditional ideas of philosophy that had become stagnant, ideas that people still clung to, often from Plato and Aristotle, but that were ultimately irrational. But this phrase in particular stands out from the rest. It seems to go against the rational, enlightened, scientific project that has shaped and guided the modern world. Often the standard position of scientists is that any project guided by scientific methods (which are often only vaguely realized) can ultimately reach truth. Consider Richard Dawkin's take on religion, for example, or Daniel Dennet's recent claim that there are no factual assertions that religion can claim that are off limits to science. This attitude is directly comparable to the attitude of the enlightenment philosophes who believed that the world was perfectible and would be vastly improved with increased knowledge and a movement away from dogmatism. Their views were put to the test during the French revolution, when a church of reason was established, along with ten day weeks and other, rational changes were made.

This is one extreme. And perhaps, after all, no factual statements are off limits to science. Science at its simplest might be taken as testing the correspondence between a statement and the evidence. But this obviously doesn't guarantee that utilizing science would ever guarantee an improved society. As Karl Popper pointed out, if science is defined by its falsifiability (that is, if a scientific theory is advanced because it more exactly fits the evidence as compared to one that is then considered disproven) then we will never have certainty that our current scientific paradigm is the best, the absolute truth. It is always up in the air whether something will come along and disprove it or a better theory will supplant it. And this of course is just within the realm of knowledge, this has nothing to do with the improvement of people who understand this theory.

This has always been the moment where I see Wittgenstein's point. The views of various parts of society are themselves up as possible content of knowledge, but those views themselves are not necessarily rational and so fall outside the classical enlightenment scientific project. That is, the enlightenment project would not have us understand everything, only everything rational. Fair enough. We certainly have come farther in recognizing the value of vernacular or popular culture as meaningful. Much contemporary philosophy recognizes the value of non-rational experience. But that still leaves us after all with the question: is Wittgenstein right in general? Are there things of which we cannot talk about?

Other philosophers have said yes. Kant, for example, claimed that our minds shaped the reality we live in using constructs of space and time. Philosophers after Kant used this to claim that Euclidean geometry was the only way of constructing geometry as a result; this only a few years before Gauss began recognizing the weakness of the parallel postulate and doing the first work into non-Euclidean geometry. Thus here, existence dominated thought - because the world was one way, we had to think in a certain way. In some cases this might still be true: the old exercise of trying to imagine what a four dimensional object would look like springs to mind. But of course there we seem to have a counter-example. In mathematics we can work with n-dimensional objects for any value of n, even if so many dimensions do not exist in reality.

Other things have been postulated to be ineffable, especially art. There has been much fairly useless arguments in aesthetics and the philosophy of music as to whether music "means" something. "Means", being a useless word in this setting, leads to every possible answer: no, because music does not have syntax like a language; yes, because our cognitive experience is affected by listening to music; yes, because music has structure and patterns; no, because music does not contain propositions, to list the conclusions of the last four books I've read. The book I read before those has, I believe, the answer. Music is not meaningful the way languages are meaningful; it is meaningful, though, because it evokes emotion. Theoretically, one could set up a code whereby a certain musical phrase is equal to because it logically entails a certain result: if phrase A is played, then emotion A' will result. In this way, music is a semiotic system, and therefore similar to language in expression, if not in other capacities. This means, essentially, that what music or painting or poetry (as poetry) says cannot be 'translated' into the rational dream of the enlightenment by means of criticism, or a given philosophy of art, but is meaningful in a given way, nonetheless.


The whole tangled mess relies on one question: is language isomorphic to reality? I encountered this question first during my tutorial on Aristotle, giving an idea about how old the question is. Aristotle, not being particularly curious about the way language works, seemed to take it as a given, and I was told such by my tutor: language is isomorphic to reality. This idea is, roughly, summed up in another statement of Wittgenstein's: the limits of my language are the limits of the world. In mathematics, isomorphism means a one-to-one correspondence between functions, and this generally applies to Aristotle's conception as well.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where he propounds this idea of isomorphism, is the pinnacle of twenty five hundred years of assuming that language is isomorphic to reality. Such an assumption is plausible, simple, and appealing to philosophers aiming to look for the truth. Language is isomorphic to reality? That means truth is when it accurately corresponds. Falsehood is when it does not. This obviously would appeal to those holding to the enlightenment project. Wittgenstein, for better or worse, believed that he had finally solved all the problems of philosophy by using logic to show those aspects of reality that are true. But therein lies the rub. Since language and the world are isomorphic, any attempt to say in logic (i.e., in language) "A" is meaningful but "B" is not, is doomed to fail, since it would mean that logic has gone beyond the limits of the world, and also of itself. Wittgenstein in fact noticed this, but instead of realizing that he had destroyed most of classical philosophy in 80 pages claimed that the Tractatus should be used as a ladder to see the truth which would then be discarded once one had climbed to the top.

Language is not isomorphic to reality. This is the new problem that philosophers have to deal with, and it creates some tricky situations as far as questions regarding truth, meaning, and logic go. But it seems to explain a lot, too: like how language is a social construct and changes along with social pressures; from there we might notice how that integrates individuals, with consciousnesses that are so dependent on language, into a larger whole. It means along with works of literary fiction we can write science fiction and fantasy stories, where we create entire worlds based as loosely upon our own world as we may wish. We can speculate about possible worlds and alternate histories, and can even make scientifically sound thought-experiments that would not be possible given the limitations of the physical world. We can ask people who believe that there are things of which we cannot speak what it is exactly we can't talk about; and if they can come up with something then they've obviously found some language for it. Any possible experience, situation, event, or entity can be expressed.

All of this is not proof, of course, not even Wittgenstein. If there truly is something that is real that we cannot talk about, and language is isomorphic to reality, then that thing is incomprehensible, it cannot be thought of, cannot be imagined. I quoted Wittgenstein in an article I wrote about death: about what happens afterward, we cannot know, so we cannot speak of it in any knowledgeable way. But such things, though perhaps like death inevitable, fall outside our experience and do not effect us as we are now. But proof of anything is hard come by and might only be found in mathematics, a very special branch of knowledge after all.

The difficulty in reconciling the progress made by philosophers of language working under the defunct model with the new one has led to a lot of problems for philosophy: it has led either towards some brands of post-modernism, where language is said to be meaningless because it is non-isomorphic, or towards the excesses of analytic philosophy which relegated philosophy to logical analysis of statements. There are signs that philosophy and intellectuals in general are moving beyond this paralysis. Perhaps the only thing that we need take from this, along with the need for new ideas as to what this all means, is to stay intellectually humble; along with Popper we have to say that as regards science and philosophy we cannot know definitively and certainly anymore. For that price our imaginations can roam free and we can communicate that creative impulse to the people around us. It seems like a fair deal to me.