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Language is no map to reality
Early Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein leaves behind the view that we can come to know the structure of reality by studying the structure of language, and embraces the idea that language tells us more about ourselves than the world outside us.
He came back to assail Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
One of the central topics Wittgenstein changed his mind about was on the question of realism - whether we can know the world as it really is and whether our language can map onto reality.
The Tractatus uses logic as a decoder ring of reality: once correlated, we can read the deep structure of reality from the rules of logic. We get to logic through language since all language must obey logic, or else it would be unintelligible, so if we understand language, we can understand logic, and if we grasp the system of logic, we can project that into the structure of the world.
Logic represents the structures that structure language’s structure–the vocabulary at the base of all vocabularies, the grammar governing all grammars–meaning that it captures the fundamental composition of all that is the case and all that could be.
While languages may be relative to cultures and time periods, like the forms of our mind organizing experience anthropocentrically, they all must share the same logic form, thus revealing the deep nature of reality underlying all varying opinions about it.
Logic liberates thoughts from thinkers so absolutely that not even God can contravene it.
Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein’s later work still pursues the same question—how do we succeed in meaning anything?—but instead of focusing on the inherent logic in all language and the autonomous operations of the crystalline clockwork of meaning, the emphasis is now on the “we” who mean.
rel: Islands
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (4.5): “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.” —– That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
The biggest contrast between the two is that the former has a theory while the latter does not have any theory whatsoever. Wittgenstein said it himself in the preface that the book (Investigations) contained remarks and short paragraphs and can only be such.
language isn’t a reflection of reality; it’s a tool with which we navigate the world.