Wittgenstein's States of Affairs

[Wyman]

Justification (and validation for truth conditions) for claims comes from empirical evidence... e.g. "it is raining" is justified when raining is observed...

-Imp

Right, this is easy to state, but hard to defend, which I think is what Wittgenstein was trying to do.

Hume defended it effectively

-Imp

How did Hume defend it? And don't give a link to Hume's Treatise or some commentary. This is a discussion. I could counter with - 'yeah, but then Kant came along' and give a link to his Critique. We were actually discussing Wittgenstein, if you remember.

Putting all that aside, Hume seems not to have defended the idea as to how we make true statements about experience (how propositions relate to experience to produce truth or falsehood). The way I read him (and I concede I'm no expert), is he starts with the assumption that experience 'gives us' true statements, or allows us to make true statements through observation. Hence, he starts by stating that experience is made up of impressions and ideas. They differ in degree of clarity. By 'impression,' he seems to imply that we are able to passively receive information from the world. And since some of these impressions are so clear (unlike ideas), they are true. But he does not explain or explore this idea. When you read the Treatise, 'impression' is left frustratingly ill-defined.

I think, to a great extent, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists attempted to take up from where Hume left off, by actually defining and analyzing experience (Hume's 'Impressions'), rather than relying on his assumptions. Of course, they found it very difficult and perhaps impossible. Which is the part of the story I am taking up, since I think it is what Wittgenstein was doing in the Tractatus.

So starting at the beginning: You have the world and you have language (because we are in search of how a proposition may be 'true' of the world). How do you relate language to the world to create a 'true' statement about the world? One possibility could be to break it down into a foundational language - perhaps the language of particle physics - in which there is a one to one correspondence between the elements of the language and the objects represented. Is this even theoretically possible?

[Impenitent]

Justification (and validation for truth conditions) for claims comes from empirical evidence... e.g. "it is raining" is justified when raining is observed...

-Imp

Right, this is easy to state, but hard to defend, which I think is what Wittgenstein was trying to do.

Hume defended it effectively

-Imp

How did Hume defend it? And don't give a link to Hume's Treatise or some commentary. This is a discussion. I could counter with - 'yeah, but then Kant came along' and give a link to his Critique. We were actually discussing Wittgenstein, if you remember.

Putting all that aside, Hume seems not to have defended the idea as to how we make true statements about experience (how propositions relate to experience to produce truth or falsehood). The way I read him (and I concede I'm no expert), is he starts with the assumption that experience 'gives us' true statements, or allows us to make true statements through observation. Hence, he starts by stating that experience is made up of impressions and ideas. They differ in degree of clarity. By 'impression,' he seems to imply that we are able to passively receive information from the world. And since some of these impressions are so clear (unlike ideas), they are true. But he does not explain or explore this idea. When you read the Treatise, 'impression' is left frustratingly ill-defined.

Perception (meaning any mental content) is made up of impressions and ideas. Impressions include sensations as well as desires, passions, and emotions. Ideas are the faint images of these impressions in thinking and reasoning. Impressions are the base of his Copy principle: " All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent."




I think, to a great extent, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists attempted to take up from where Hume left off, by actually defining and analyzing experience (Hume's 'Impressions'), rather than relying on his assumptions. Of course, they found it very difficult and perhaps impossible. Which is the part of the story I am taking up, since I think it is what Wittgenstein was doing in the Tractatus.

no, I'd say that Ludwig was putting the cart before the horse (the idea before the impression.)

1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.




So starting at the beginning: You have the world and you have language (because we are in search of how a proposition may be 'true' of the world). How do you relate language to the world to create a 'true' statement about the world? One possibility could be to break it down into a foundational language - perhaps the language of particle physics - in which there is a one to one correspondence between the elements of the language and the objects represented. Is this even theoretically possible?

I think the aforementioned copy principle handles this relation adequately...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#CopPri

ultimately, one has to understand that the copy, the linguistic representation, is never that which is represented - and in the end, even LW understood this and denied his original thesis in the Tractatus...

the universal tension between the idealists and empiricists continues....

-Imp

[Wyman]

Aren't Hume's ideas true of impressions (as copies of them), rather than true of the world? What is the relationship between impressions and the world?

[Impenitent]

Aren't Hume's ideas true of impressions (as copies of them), rather than true of the world? What is the relationship between impressions and the world?

all we "have" are impressions...

impressions - sensory relations registering "external" things

the impressions are the impressions - impressions are not the thing (in itself) being perceived...

we still could be brains in vats ...(I choose not to accept the BIV arguments but they cannot be logically refuted, then again I have as much use for logic as Hume had - which is very little)

-Imp