GREAT PHILOSOPHERS: WITTGENSTEIN
PHIL 310, Sec. 1001: MW 11:30am-12:45pm in GUA 2002
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Fall 2021
Professor: James Woodbridge
email address:
Course Webpage: http://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/unlv/Phil310F21.htm
Office Hours: T 12:30pm-2pm, W 2:30pm-4pm, and by appointment
Office: CDC 426
Office Phone: 895-4051
Dept. Phone: 895-3433
FIRST PAPER
Pick one of following topics and write a 6-8 page/1800-2400 word paper fulfilling the tasks assigned. Be sure to incorporate citations to relevant passages from Tractaus Logico-Philosophicus (by remark number) as you address the issues indicated in the paper topics.
Do not use any outside sources: just the course readings and discussion, and your own thinking.
Your paper is due via WebCampus, through the Turnitin.com program linked to the Assignment listing there, by midnight on Monday 10/18. The file that you submit to Turnitin should have the following format for its filename: yourstudentnumber.PHIL310F21.paper1.docx. So that I can grade "blind", your name should not appear anywhere on your paper. Finally, you must submit a .docx (or .doc or .docm) file so that I can use Word to make comments on it. If you do not use Word, you must convert your file to this format before submitting it.
Topics:
1. Explain Wittgenstein's understanding of picturing in general, being sure to cover the "make up" of pictures, the way that pictures "connect" with reality, what specifically it is that pictures represent, and what a picture has in common with what it represents (in virtue of which it represents specifically what it represents). How does this account make it possible for a picture successfully to represent something that amounts to an incorrect depiction of reality? When we apply this account in an analysis of language, by understanding propositions as pictures, what important feature of propositions will this aspect of picturing accommodate? Another important aspect of pictures in general on Wittgenstein's account is that the way picturing works involves an inherent limit on what a picture can represent--specifically, that a picture cannot represent what it has in common with what it represents. Explain why it is that a picture cannot represent this, but instead can only display or "show" it. When we return to analyzing language and understanding propositions as pictures, this feature of pictures generates a distinction between what any proposition can say and what it can only show. What specific aspect of a proposition is only shown and cannot be said? Explain briefly why this has important consequences for how we should view logic in particular as a field of inquiry. (When organizing this material, it probably makes most sense to lay out everything you need to explain about picturing in general first, then move to the particular applications to language, then conclude with the further implications for logic.)
2. One of Wittgenstein's stated goals in Tractaus Logico-Philosophicus is to determine the limits of what can be thought, by determining the limits of language, as we might say, "from the inside". Explain what this is supposed to mean, and why he thinks this is the only way one could determine the limits of language and thought (that is, contrast it with the kind of approach he rejects and explain why the latter could not work). To accomplish this task, Wittgenstein sets out to determine the general form of the proposition. Informally speaking, what does he mean by this idea, and how would determining it allow him to mark the limits of language--to distinguish propositions with sense from propositional signs that amount to nonsense--"from the inside"? Turning to some of the details, begin with the idea that elementary propositions have sense (that is, take it as a given that none of them are nonsense), then, taking into account what elementary propositions represent and what more complex propositions represent (we've been calling them "situations"), explain Wittgenstein's view that all sensical propositions are "logical combinations" of specific elementary propositions (exactly which logical combination of which elementary propositions a given proposition is being something revealed in its complete analysis). Given Wittgenstein's thesis that all logical operations are reducible to the application (and re-application) of a single "truth-functional" operation (the 'N-operator'), explain (informally) how identifying this truth-operation as the essence of the general form of the proposition underwrites his view that determining the general form of the proposition will mark the limits of language, specifically, how it determines the limits of sense and thus the boundary between sense and nonsense. In explaining this, be sure to relate the notion of the sense of a proposition to what the general form of the proposition generates.
Be sure to look at my Paper Requirements and Policies and check this Numbered Writing Comments Sheet to be aware of various writing infelicities that you should avoid.
Keep your paper within the page limit!