Philosophy must be useful

[Celerity]

For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative

https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle


Frank Ramsey, pictured in 1925 above Buttermere Lake in England’s Lake District. Photograph by Lettice Ramsey. With thanks to Stephen Burch



Vienna in the 1920s was an exciting place. Politically, it was the time of Red Vienna, when the municipal government experimented with radical democratic reforms in housing, healthcare, education and worker’s rights. There was optimism in the air, despite postwar hyperinflation and rising conservatism. It was also an exciting time intellectually, for one of the most influential movements in the history of philosophy was in full swing: the Vienna Circle.

They were a group of philosophers, mathematicians and physicists who gathered around the German philosopher Moritz Schlick, and included luminaries such as Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Herbert Feigl. The Circle put forward an ambitious programme that would have all knowledge constructed out of an objective foundation of observation and deductive logic. Their ‘verifiability principle’ would assert that a meaningful sentence had to be reducible, via truth-preserving logic, to a basic language of observation statements. Metaphysics, ethics, religion and aesthetics were either to be revised so as to be stated in this scientific language, or else declared meaningless – mere nonsense. These new scientific philosophers were socially progressive, at home in Red Vienna, and they saw themselves as intellectually progressive as well. Unfortunately, others all too readily concurred, such as the fascist student who gunned down Schlick on the steps of the University of Vienna in 1936.

Theirs was an idea whose time had come. A similar group was developing in Berlin, with Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel as its most prominent members. In Cambridge, Bertrand Russell had also been arguing that philosophy must proceed by a logical analysis that bottoms out in simple, metaphysically fundamental existents in the world. But it was Russell’s Viennese student Ludwig Wittgenstein who most intrigued the Circle with his first book, written mostly during the First World War on the perilous Eastern and Italian fronts, where he was ultimately taken as a prisoner of war.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was an extraordinary, and extraordinarily difficult, piece of work – an attempt to specify the exact relationship between language and reality. Language, like a picture, represents objects a certain way: objects ‘correspond’ to ‘elements of the picture’. In order to tell whether a picture is true or false, we have to ‘compare it with reality’, and this is the province of the natural sciences: ‘The totality of true propositions is the total natural science.’ Wittgenstein declared that all that was sayable could be expressed in this primary language, and what could not be expressed in this language was nonsense. He ended the Tractatus with the words: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

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