SIGNIFICATION AND KNOWLEDGE: A SEMIOTICAL PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF WITTGENSTEIN'S WORK.
Paolo Teobaldelli
The aim of this paper is to analyse through a new perspective within philosophy (i.e. a semiotical philosophical view) the work of Wittgenstein. This new perspective, outlined by Petöfi (1988), is a new approach toward a so called semiotical philosophical Theory of human Communication, which tries to integrate into a wide framework the multidisciplinary results of human science in the analysis of human communication. This process of integration would require of course a great effort by the side of philosophy and especially of the theory of knowledge. The basic problem, as a matter of fact, is represented by meaning and its relation with human daily praxis, i.e. culture. The new perspective I mentioned above assumes that signification is a complex process which involves not only logic features but rather a whole of other elements usually not considered within philosophical inquiry. This means to recognise that communication is not a mere logic-linguistic process, but rather a physical semiotical process which involves then the construction and reconstruction of cultural products multimedially constituted, where this multimediality is to be considered as the co-operation of many factors (cognitive models and schema, social cultural knowledge, ability to use such and such textual types etc.) within signification.
Since the new perspective arises from what, we think, could be seen as an epistemological changing, the foundation of this new philosophical setting requires a deep philosophical background analysis, centred mostly on those aspects of western philosophy which regard the knowledge/signification relation.
The analysis of Wittgenstein's work here outlined is to be seen as a contribute in this direction.
Wittgenstein: from mirror-like to tool-like language.
Wittgenstein's first work is centred on the assumption that thinking would mirror the world, i.e. that to any object of the world would correspond analogous objects of thinking and that the combination of such objects constitutes 'state of affairs' or 'facts' which constitute the world. According to this view then, there exists no gap between thinking and reality since thinking is nothing but 'a representation of facts' which constitute the world, and the same possibility of existence of the language is seen in the identity between the 'form of reality' and the 'logical form' of representation:.
"2.1.We picture facts to ourselves.
2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space[...]
2.12 A picture is a model of reality.[...]
2.18 What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it - correct or incorrectly - in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality.
2.181 A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.[...]
2.19 Logical pictures can depict the world.
2.2. A picture has logico-pictorial form in common with what it depicts.[...]
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought. (Wittgenstein: 1921)"
Thus language is the medium through which the facts of world projected as facts in the logical space become perceptible:
"3-001 ‘A state of affairs is thinkable’: what this means is that we can picture it to ourselves.[...]
3.1. In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses. (Ibidem)"
Logical space offers itself as perceptible within expression. And since we want to assure our semiotical perspective we then have to ask ourselves: which is according to the Wittgenstein of Tractatus the meaning of that expression? To this goal we are then forced to analyse deeply the following definitions:
"3.11 We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation.
The method of projection is to think of the sense of proposition.
3.12 I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign. - And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world. (Ibidem)"
Proposition is (we could also say 'mental picturing') 'projection' of a state of affairs, and such projection comes to an existence thanks to the act of thinking the 'sense' of the proposition, i.e. about the object which, in the propositional sign, it refers to. According to this view is then the meaning of a sign nothing but the object itself, thought, ‘photocomposed’ by the subject in his logical space and then expressed within the sign.
This view, which I think to be definable with what phenomenological psychology defines ' ingenue realism', anyway presents from the goals of our analysis some interesting feature, which yet emerge among words and deal with the concept of 'form and logical space. Write then Wittgenstein:
"3.13 A proposition includes all that the projection includes, but not what is projected.
Therefore, though what is projected is not itself included, its possibility is.
A proposition, therefore, does not actually contains its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it.
(‘The content of a proposition’ means the content of a proposition that has sense.)
A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense.(Ibidem)"
There arises clearly from such further definitions the Wittgenstein's intention to think about the proposition as an 'object' of a special dimension, a cognitive one in some way, although such object would be the form of sense (i.e. the physical object, being the form its projection within the logical space) and not the sense itself. Apart from the global intention of the Tractatus, it seems to me not to be hazardous to do a similitudo with the husserlian analysis of perception and of eidos, which we have already treated. Both try, as a matter of fact, to establish an essential relation between the physical object and the perceived, finding it for what concerns Husserl in the apriori-form of perception which resists to the transcendental reduction, and for what concerns Wittgenstein in the logical form which constitutes the mirroring of the object within the logical space. Both try to isolate a 'form', a dimension other than the empirical or phenomenic data which fulfils this space.
The Wittgensteinian analysis however dwells upon, in virtue of the identity- assumption between world and logical space, the spatial aspect of this dimension related to the spatial aspect of the world in it projected. He believes as a matter of fact that the logical space depicts the external objectual situation keeping those that I would define its substantial pictorial elements. In such sense it is understandable the remark made by Wittgenstein about the relation between the projected state of affair and the concrete signs of its expression, , the written ones (which refers, it seems to me clearly, to verbal language):
"3.143 Although a propositional sign is a fact, this is obscured by the usual form of expression in writing or print.
For in a printed proposition, for example, no essential difference is apparent between a propositional sign and a word.[...]
3.1431 The essence of a propositional sign is very clearly seen if we imagine one composed of spatial objects (such as tables, chairs, and books) instead of written signs.
Then the spatial arrangement of these things will express the sense of proposition (Ibidem)"
The theme is covered again and developed in the 4.01 and following definitions:
"4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality.
A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.
4.011 At first sight a proposition - one set out on the printed page, for example - does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech.
And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent.(Ibidem)"
Then the own logical space of thinking which projects the state of affairs of the external world is expressed with perceptible signs, which yet hides its form and the link between them and this latter. Anyway they keep the whole of elements and of relations among them which are proper of the state of affair. Here is that signs show state of affair:
"4.016 In order to understand the essential nature of a proposition, we should consider hieroglyphic script, which depicts the facts that it describes.
And alphabetic script developed out of it without loosing what was essential to depiction.
4.02 We can see this from the fact that we understand the sense of a propositional sign without its having been explained to us.
4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation that it represents. And I understand the proposition without having had its sense explained to me.
4.022 A proposition shows its sense.
A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.(Ibidem)"
The referring to hieroglyphic script explains thus the wittgensteinian view of 'signification': the subject 'thinks' the object, projects it in its own logical space 'mirroring its 'form', (but not the content i.e. the physical external object) and then expresses it with the help of physical signs which 'show' (although in a different way) such form; and thus the relation between sign and his meaning is to be set as following:
"4.124 The existence of an internal property of a possible situation is not expressed by means of a proposition: rather, it expresses itself in the proposition representing the situations, by means of an internal property of that proposition [...].
4.125 The existence of an internal relation between possible situations expresses itself in language by means of an internal relation between the propositions representing them."
In this further reasoning seems us to see a distinction from the conception that sign vehicles a meaning, it rather expresses a situation (a state of affair) by making it visible, and sign isn't, as a consequence, form of a content, it is rather the same representational possibility of thinking to be logical form of reality, which is at the same time its content.
The metaphysical assumption which grounds the Tractatus is right this identity between the logical form and world, and in such sense it is a logical consequence the escaping from any sort of Cartesian psychologism, according to which there is a reality of consciousness separated from a physical reality (or that it becomes physical), which is given to the external world with the mean of a vehicle, of a medium. It could be said that, according to Wittgenstein, language dresses thinking, and nude thinking isn't expressible, then to express it is to dress it:
"4.002 [...]Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes[...] (Ibidem)"
But what is dressed is nothing but the mirroring of reality. The problem is bound then to the relation of necessity with the objectual physical reality, i.e. if propositions expresses state of affair how can we explain fiction? Which is the state of affair, the sense projected in a novel or depicted in a cartoon, or shown on a theatre scene?
The attempt to solve the relation subject-object through the identity world-logical space make the representation of the latter totally depending from the direct perception of the world, and excluding for example all that representational activity which is to relate to the creative productive work of imaginative fantasy. Here are visible, in my opinion, the limits of an approach grounded on the gnoseologic relation man/world, because trying to explain the complex ideal (symbolic representative) activity of man in terms of knowledge - so that such activity would depend steady and in a causative way from its engagement with physical objects, from the direct knowledge of such objects - implies the excluding of all that is not directly related to knowing, and thus would be impossible to explain either mythology neither any cosmogony or any other religious representation of the world, neither the so called artistic expressions, since for most of those representations no object is given to perception.
This is the limit of a pure gnoseologic approach at least where under knowingly relation is to be intended merely the relation man/world and not the intersubjective relation and the basic role it played in this relation by the production/enjoying of objects which we can define symbolic ones. And the limit itself of the Tractatus seems to be the falsification of one of its fundamental thesis: that language cannot express a self-reflective view, since such self-reflection of the subject cannot be taken by any view, since seeing always goes out of itself :
"5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this
Eye__
(Ibidem)"
And the late Wittgenstein of Philosophische Untersuchungen keeps steady this belief:
"103. Das Ideal, in unsern Gedanken, sitzt unverrückbar fest. Du kannst nicht aus ihm heraustreten. Du mußt immer wieder zurück. Es gibt gar kein Draußen; draußen fehlt die Lebensluft. - Woher dies? Die idee sitzt gleichsam als Brille auf unsrer Nase, und was wir ansehen, sehen wir durch sie. Wir kommen gar nicht auf den Gedanken, sie abzunehmen (Wittgenstein: 1953, 76)"
The falsification lays, in my humble opinion, in the fact that by our living reality we don't experience only objects and state of affairs belonging to the physical objectual world (among which finds itself also a mess of human artificial rests) but also objects and linguistic (semiotical) state of affairs, which are given and disposable to the self reflective inquiry. It is to be said anyway that is not the mere syntactic and grammatical form to be at disposal in these objects, rather also the particular perspectival view which builds the representations with such objects, i.e. state of affairs. Further the activity of human being, his being-there, is also visible in the works, in the human products, and thus they can be object of the inquiry. Not to consider this Gegebenheit of human operations means to apply to philosophical inquiry a sort of naturalism, according to which the relation subject/object consists in the mere relation human being/natural world, excluding the human instrumental activity which is around us in an objectual way so as the objects of natural world. The empirical inquiry cannot avoid taking into account such basic assumption.
If we maintain the above assumption we could also say that symbolic objects are part of our world and can then be experienced and thought, and then again object of expression. Which would be their meaning?
It is clear that the view of the Tractatus would individualise such objects as significata of logical forms expressed in the related propositions which show them.
But if such objects are already forms of other objects, is then their content a form? It can be said that proposition shows something but not surely things as they are if true. The enlargement now outlined leads then in a surprising way toward a more semiotical questioning of knowingly relation, evoking for example the hiemslevian view of sign, or the Peircian triad and the infinite drift of interpretants.
Anyway in the Philosophische Untersuchungen Wittgenstein re-thinks the problem of meaning in terms of an instrumental perspective of language, in terms of its use. The tool-like language substitutes the view of mirror-like language as in the Tractatus.
"11. Denk an die Werkzeuge in einem Werkzeugkasten: es ist da ein Hammer, eine Zange, eine Säge, ein Schraubenzieher, ein Maßstab, ein Leimtopf, Leim, Nägel und Schrauben. - So verschieden die Funktionen dieser Gegenstände, so verschieden sind die Funktionen der Wörter. (und es gibt Ännlichkeiten hier und dort.)
Freilich, was uns verwirrt ist die Gleichförmigkeit ihrer Erscheinung, wenn die Wörter uns gesproche, oder in der Schrift und im Druck entgegentreten. Denn ihre Verwendung steht nicht so deutlich vor uns. Besonders nicht, wenn wir philosophieren! (Ibidem, 21)"
The conceiving of the relation 'sign-signification' as designating, nominating is set under a hard criticism:
"382. Wie kann ich es rechtfertigen, daß ich mir auf diese Worte hin diese Vorstellung mache?
Hat mir jemand die Vorstellung der blauen Farbe gezeigt, und gesagt, daß sie es sei?
Was bedeuten die Worte <<diese Vorstellung>>? Wie zeigt man auf eine Vorstellung? Wie zeigt man zweimal auf die gleiche Vorstellung? (Ibidem, 185)"
Wittgenstein does this criticism by analysing two interrelated questions: 1) that of the relation between the understanding of sign ang its mental image; and (2) that of the image connected to the proposition and its relation of the representation of the same.
He believes that when a proposition is understood the fact of having also a concomitant image to such proposition, is not essential, i.e. it would not assure the sense of a proposition. That's why he suggests:
"397. Statt <<Vorstellbarkeit>> kann man hier auch sagen : Darstellbarkeit in einem bestimmten Mittel der Darstellung. [...](Ibidem, 189)"
The goal seems to be that of excluding any psychologism in the conceptualisation of language and of representation, to distinguish then the latter from the concept of mental image:
"367. Das Vorstellungsbild ist das Bild, das beschreiben wird, wenn Einer seine Vorstellung beschreibt.(Ibidem, 181)"
Wittgenstein thinks that it would be better to avoid a superimposing of a theoretical mediation to the immediacy of linguistic awareness. Cognitive activity bound up with the linguistic activity is immediately given in the act of speaking itself. The representation is a snapshot and thanks to this characteristic it seems to escape any definition:
"387. Der tiefe Aspekt entschlüpft leicht. (Ibidem, 187)"
Thus he proposes again, although on another ground, the thesis of the impossibility to grasp the essence of language, the thesis of denying the possibility to set language under questioning with the help of language itself; yet this time his thesis assumes a more subjective feature, by abandoning the logic objective ground of the Tractatus, which anyway granted a role to the cognitive acting in the ambit of the logic of depicting. It is exactly this trust in the logic linguistic mirroring of the world that come to a crisis, so that the questioning of knowingly experience comes again under focussing in its subjective being.
Thus the meditations made in the Philosophische Untersuchungen testify of this suffered problematical tension between the subject and the symbolic mediation he makes of his knowingly experience of the world. It is enough to read the analytical thoughts, which follows one another without a break, on the emotional state of sorrow and on the possibility to express it, to conceptualise it, to think it within the language. Although he questions a gap between to know and its description, his linguistic expression, he takes care not to slide within a Cartesian view of consciousness or to go toward some unrationalism, maintaining thus a pragmatic vision:
"389. <<Die Vorstellung muß ihrem Gegenstand änlicher sein als jedes Bild: Denn wie änlich ich auch das Bild dem mache, was es darstellen soll, es kann immer noch das Bild von etwas anderem sein. Aber die Vorstellung hat es in sich, daß sie die Vorstellung von diesem, und von nichts anderem, ist. Man könnte so dahin kommen, die Vorstellung als ein Über-bildnis anzusehen. (Ibidem, cit, p. 187)"
To the knowingly experience is then given a primacy of truth and objectivity, but being such objective experience subjectively expressed it is then significated through a subjective use of language, and as a consequence only such using can take in account the meaning of the expression:
"Wenn aber jemand beim Vorstellen, oder statt des Vorstellens zeichnete; wenn auch nur mit dem Finger in der Luft. (Man könnte das <<motorische Vorstellung>> nennen.) Da könnte man fragen: <<Wen stellt das vor?>> Und seine Antwort entschiede. - Es ist ganz so, als hätte er eine Beschreibung in Worten gegeben, und diese kann eben auch statt der Vorstellung stehen (Ibidem, 282)"
This could make us think we are in font of a sort of intimist conception of language, to an extreme consciousnessly subjectivism; on the contrary Wittgenstein finds in the rule of use the 'intersubjective validity of linguistic meaning'. He makes the example of some persons each one having a little box with a coleopter inside, and he assumes that nobody can look into the other one's box. The metaphor of box alludes clearly to the consciousness. Well, if all people would learn the use of the word coleopter, this becomes part of a linguistic game, although it can be argued that coleopters in the various boxes could differ one from the other (or also to transform themselves as time goes by, in the long run). According to this yet, adverts Wittgenstein, the object of designation is excluded. Thus in language the pragmatically posed intersubjectivity, created by Wittgenstein, doesn't assure the universality of knowledge, because the proof of the identity of the object is not given.
The linguistic game is thus an extremely pragmatic operational view of the language, the rules of use (meaning) are maintained in the game, and they can also change (make up) in its going along:
"83. [...] Und gibt es nicht auch den Fall, wo wir spielen und -<make up the rules as we go along>? Ja auch den, in welchem wir sie abändern - as we go along (Ibidem, 67)"
According to this is then clear that Wittgenstein doesn't legitimise whatever attempt to build a science which would treat the conditions of possibility of knowledge and as a consequence would accept as possible only a science of language being merely descriptive of the rules of use, of the use of language. The conception of meaning as 'use' turns firstly against the pretension of a formal language which would pretend to reach steady and undoubtful truths within propositions. The turn invests thus the western thinking and its metaphysical pretension of objectivity.
But in comparison to that of Tractatus this view avoids to delimit in a concrete way the joint between cognition/representation of the world and signification. Meaning as a use, as a matter of facts, although avoids to slide within a psychologistical conceiving, lets too fast out of the door the role which the consciousness carries on within signification, although it is socially constituted and conditioned. And the basic point of all that question is maybe just the fact to choose one or the other pole of the subject-object relation by carrying the theoretical and methodological consequences to the extremes. In such sense the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus seems for a while to lead back the philosophy of 900' to a mirrored unproblematic relation, toward a ingenue kantism, and when this illusion falls down and goes, he looses any certainty sliding within a extremely relativistic conception (the use as a matter of fact can be extremely relative to the point of being adopted only by two persons in the world) which takes into account the context and the social determination of significata, but without offering the possibility of whatever analysis to explain its functioning. Also science, in facts, is subjected to the rule of linguistic game and thus any scientific position could be conceived as a new linguistic game with its rules and uses. The intersubjectivity given by taking part in the linguistic game is thus the basis which cannot be set under question.
From language is then impossible to escape, either in the Tractatus and in the Philosophische Untersuchungen; and thus, since science cannot treat meanings, the same idea of science is destroyed and Cartesian solipsism (according to which we arrive to the impossibility of knowing) is substituted by a behavioristic linguistic solipsism. Although we play in a linguistic way, none of us can analyse this linguistic behaviour, or reflects upon it, and as a consequence nobody can build a science of human being. The question of language is then led back to a direct relation between man-world as unquestionable medium of this relation.
But if we look in the folder this extreme outcome seems to be due to a same paradoxical and extreme conception, according to which language as mediation of the man-world relation would be in some ways the tertium non datur, i.e. something which is neither of the two terms but containing both. We could indicate such situation by referring human being with A and the world with B and writing the following proposition ‘A(in some way with)B’. The language of the proposition contains the assumption of the existence of A and B, and states there would exists some relation between them, but it isn't given in the proposition it constitutes. Is it thus a sort of metaphysical tank of reality? Is the knowingly question an extreme paradox according to which reality gives itself only metaphysically?
The basic question is in my opinion, the insertion of language as trait d’union among the two terms human being-world, i.e. a gnoseologic treating of it, following which we can conclude for example that a sign refers to a real object, or stat for it, situating then language in an ethereal, unreal, ideal, metaphysic dimension.
This is the outcome of Wittgenstein's thinking, which has there the merit to bring into relief the paradoxical position of a gnoseologic setting of knowledge, and this represents to the goals of our treating an essential theoretical and methodological indication.
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References.
Apel, K.O.,
1962 Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein und Sinnlosigkeitsverdacht gegen alle Metaphysik, in "Philosophische Rundschau", 75, 1967, 56-94.
1980 Trasformation of Philosophy, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Husserl, E.,
1980 Phantasie, Bildbewußtsein, Erinnerung, The Hague - Boston -London, Martius Nijhoff Publishers.
Petöfi, J.S.,
1988 La lingua come mezzo di comunicazione scritta: il testo, Università di Urbino, Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica, Documenti di lavoro e prepubblicazioni, serie A, n. 173-174-175; english version: Language as a written medium: Text, in "An Encyclopaedia of Language", ed. by N.E.Collinge, London- New York, Routledge, 1990, 207-243.
Wittgenstein, L.,
1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, (1974).
1953 Philosophische Untersuchungen, Baden-Baden, Suhrkamp, (1977).
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