Goddard and Judge on Tractarian Objects

ABSTRACT

I discuss the idea that the objects of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are propertyless bare particulars, an idea defended by Leonard Goddard and Brenda Judge in their monograph, The Metaphysics of the Tractatus. I present the difficulties that Goddard and Judge raise for this construal concerning the idea that Tractarian objects have natures that determine their possibilities of combination, and I assess the solution they propose. I offer an alternative construal of the notion with which these difficulties can be overcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• metaphysics
• objects
• facts
• ontological categories
• bare particulars

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For resolute readings, see Diamond [1991, 2000] and Conant [2000].

2 I defend this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s strategy elsewhere [2015: 1–7]. See Diamond [2018] for an attack on this reading and Zalabardo [2018] for my reply.

3 ‘Sachverhalte’ in the original. ‘Atomic facts’ is Ogden’s translation, which Goddard and Judge use, and I’ll follow them in this here [Wittgenstein 1922]. Pears and McGuinness render it as ‘states of affairs’ [Wittgenstein 1974b].

4 I shall follow Goddard and Judge in writing Object with a capital O when referring to Wittgenstein’s technical notion.

5 For this reading of the Tractatus, see also Skyrms [1981] and McCarty [1991].

6 On the character of Wittgenstein’s commitment to this claim, see note 9.

7 The account that I have offered in this section, of the features of Tractarian Objects that Goddard and Judge fail to accommodate, is close to the excellent account offered by Bradley [1987]. My main qualm about his account is his treatment of the idea that, for Wittgenstein, ‘there is an ontological ground for the logico-syntactical employment of names in propositions’ [ibid.: 52]. On Bradley’s reading, Wittgenstein makes room for ‘propositions without sense’—those whose constituents are combined with one another in ways that are not possible for their referents. These propositions would be expressed by syntactically impermissible sentences. But this picture is at odds with Wittgenstein’s account of how his views differ from Frege’s: ‘Frege says: Every legitimately constructed proposition must have a sense; and I say: Every possible proposition is legitimately constructed’ [5.4733]. For Wittgenstein, names have natures that determine their possibilities of combination, and the possibilities of combination of a name match those of its referent (on this point, see section 6). A proposition, according to the picture theory, is a fact. A proposition without sense would have to be a fact whose constituents are combined with one another in ways in which it’s not possible for them to combine. This is not syntactically impermissible, as Bradley suggests, but impossible.

8 For the nominalist reading, see Griffin [1964]. For the realist reading, see Stenius [1960], Allaire [1966], Hacker [1986], and Hintikka and Hintikka [1986].

9 Even with respect to claim A, above, our final verdict will have to wait until analysis is completed. Analysis might conceivably yield the result that there’s only one kind of Object, and Wittgenstein’s commitment to A has to be treated as a revisable expectation that things won’t turn out like this. On this point, see Ramsey’s remark: ‘We cannot even tell that there are no atomic facts consisting of two terms of the same type’ [1990: 417]. If this possibility isn’t ruled out, then we should also be open to the possibility that analysis reveals that every Object fits into every variable atomic fact, or that any collection of Objects can be combined into an atomic fact. See Johnston [2008] for an insightful discussion of this range of issues. However, I don’t think that these considerations are sufficient for undermining the attribution of claim A to Wittgenstein. If all Objects had the same possibilities of combination, the idea that Objects have natures in which their possibilities of combination lie would be rendered entirely vacuous.

10 On the fine-grained character of form, see Kannisto [1986: 105].

11 See also Wittgenstein [1974a: 205, 1975: 119].

12 See Zalabardo [2015: 166–73].

13 Elsewhere [2015: 128–9] I formulate this as the claim that the ultimate constituents of facts and propositions are maximally specific with respect to form.

14 The difficulties primarily afflict particulars, which seem capable of figuring in facts of different forms. See Zalabardo [2015: 126–9].

15 In the absence of claim D, the following is a non sequitur: ‘If, for example, we suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument, then there would be a proposition ‘F(F(fx))’, and in this the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings; for the inner has the form φ(fx), the outer the form ψ(φ(fx))’ [3.333]. I discuss this point elsewhere [2015: 152–9].

16 As with claim A, Wittgenstein’s commitment to claim D can only be treated as a prediction as to what analysis will discover. However, in light of the crucial role that, on my reading, claim D plays in his views, this foundation is worryingly weak. I think that this is one of the most vulnerable points of his overall position. See Zalabardo [2015: 156].

17 According to Michael Dummett [1981: 485], this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought can also be found in Frege:

Frege held that what stands for an object, a proper name, is itself an object, a complete expression. What stands for something incomplete, a function, is itself incomplete … . There is thus a congruence in logical type between the referents of expressions and the expressions themselves.

18 I am grateful to Stewart Candlish, Colin Johnston, and an anonymous referee for this journal.