Malcolm asked:

This is a great service, I could end up monopolising this site!

Could you clarify and answer some things for me:

1. In the Tractatus,does Wittgenstein hold the view that the logical structure of our language is
misunderstood? And does he change this in the later Philosophical Investigations? Also in the
TractatusI would like to know why the picture theory of meaning is an improvement on the theories of
his predecessors.

2. What is the point Nagel is making in "What's Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

3. In the preface of Human all too Human,Nietzsche refers to the problem of hierarchy, but what is it?

4. Would it be correct to say Descartes' dualism is a type of substance dualism? I was once told this
was an unfair classification.

5. Where is it argued, and by whom, that man understands practicality before actuality, and not the
other way around? I mean this as an existential question.

6. Does Ayer's, Language, Truth and Logic have or assume an ontology, even though it claims that
metaphysics (ontology as well, perhaps) is meaningless? I ask this because I wonder if there is a link
between meaning and existence? Surely anything that is meaningless does not exist, and
accordingly, everything that has meaning must exist (that is not to say physically). Even if it is a lump
of dirt or a rock, these things, even though perhaps insignificant and for many people not worth
considering, still have meaning for us. That is when we see them, we see meaning with them
simultaneously.

7. Could I also ask if anyone knows what this title is in English, Von den ersten und letzten dingenby
Peter Heller?

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1. Yes, he explicitly says so in the introduction and this is what the Tractatusis about. Wittgenstein
was influenced by Frege and Russell.

Frege invented predicate calculus or formal logic which he thought this was hidden in the grammar of
language. Russell also worked in symbolic logic but differed from Frege in his analysis of the logical
structure underlying sentences. One reason for this was that he wanted to account for talk of
non-existents to stay in line with a two-valued logic. I am not a logician and cannot give you the
details, but as I understand it, Wittgenstein found formal logic empty and general. Formal logic and
truth functions, for Wittgenstein, didn't tell us anything about the nature of concepts and objects.

Logic is concerned with the truth and the truth is about facts in the world we think about and Russell
and Frege had failed to show how logic plays a role in our thoughts about the world. Wittgenstein
thought that generalised propositions of formal logic showed the structure of an argument rather than
mapping the way language is related to the world unless more is said about the mind as
representational. A proposition in formal logic can be made to relate to the world by replacing the
symbols for words in our language but unless we translate such propositions into an understanding of
the world as a whole, each proposition is atomistic or self-contained. You couldn't understand 'The
wall is red' without knowing more things and being related to the world. So for Wittgenstein, the world
is a totally of facts and propositions are not self-contained, but internally related. You could not
understand a formal proposition translated into a statement about the world on its own without
understanding the symbols for concepts and objects and how these relate to other symbols.

Or so I understand it.

As such, I think that Wittgenstein's picture theory tied the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of
language tightly together and placed them in relation to the world and it is the world which makes
statements and thoughts true and false. Frege was mainly concerned with logic and its relation to
mathematics, as was Russell, and he held that a proposition which is true refers to the "true".
Wittgenstein was more realistic than this and said that there is no object which is "the truth".

There isn't agreement about how much Wittgenstein changed his views. The Tractatusis concerned
with the conditions of a logically perfect language but ordinary language is not logically perfect and is
extremely vague. Also a lot of our talk is not about facts at all as Wittgenstein points out in the
Tractatus. In the Philosophical InvestigationsWittgenstein is not talking about logically perfect
languages but ordinary languages.

2. Nagel is arguing that a reductive theory of the mind-body leaves no place for a theory of
consciousness, since it is logically compatible with theories that reduce the mental to the functional or
causal that there may be no consciousness.

So the point he is making is that consciousness, as the subjective character of experience is a fact
but it cannot be represented. We believe that the bat has conscious experience but could not imagine
what this is like without actually being a bat. Consciousness in general could never be captured in a
theory because it essentially involves a point of view. Nagel says that phenomenological facts about
humans form a common type and we can imagine the subjective experience of other humans but this
cannot lead to psycho-physical reduction because the more a theory leads away from the human
viewpoint, or subjective experience, the further away from capturing the mental a theory will be. You
cannot capture the reality of the mental because the point of view, or the way things appear to a
subject is just what consciousness is like.

3. Well, Nietzsche calls the problem of hierarchy 'our' problem referring to those who, like Nietzsche,
have been able to separate themselves from common values and are masters of themselves. They
have risen 'upwards' internally. Not a widespread problem. I agree that it reads as if it is more
horizontal, like a personal history.

4. Well, Descartes claimed that he was a "thinking thing" and so he was distinct from his body which
was essentially extended. If a thinking thing is not extended it need not be a substance but it is
questionable exactly what it is. It looks like some strange ethereal sort of thing. But would the ethereal
be a thing? A spiritual essence isn't what we understand by substance because it lacks physical
spatial extension. For sure, Descartes can't be a property dualist because a property is not a thing but
a quality of a thing. The decisive point is whether the thinking thing can exist/ persist/ subsist or
whatever without physical substance. Then it is separate, but whether is it a "substance" or not is
doubtful if we understand spatial extension by substance.

5. Well, Piaget thought children interact with objects before they objectify them as actualities and
most child psychologists and psychoanalysts would take the same view. But Piaget wasn't an
existentialist. Sartre, one of the main existentialists, saw consciousness as an activity which is a
practicality, but then so did Kant who was not an existentialist. Actually, I don't understand this
question. We don't "understand" practicality before actuality. Understanding comes with
communication or language use. Only if you can express something behaviourally (not necessarily
linguistically, but you will be communicating) or say what do you mean can you really be said to
understand.

6. Well, Ayer was a verificationist rather than a realist. The realist assumes an actual ontology of
things external to the mind, but for the verificationist you can only know what you can ascertain to be
certain, such as sense data. But this is experience-dependent and can't be said to exist as a real
ontology. Ayer thought you could have meaning regardless of the nature of ontology/ existence.
Value statements were held by him to have "emotive meaning". In the Tractatus,Wittgenstein held
that we cannot speak truly of that which is other than factual or possible fact. Values don't have truth
conditions, and emotive meaning would have to refer to the subject rather than truth conditions in the
world.

I don't see, and never have done, why truth conditions have to be something external to the mind in
an ontology. There are different types of meaning. There are emotional value assessments which are
true for us and aesthetic evaluations which we assert. There is a mind-world relation where meanings
are in part determined by what is external to us but for other terms truth might be defined as correct
use. The term 'true' is defined in many ways, and I don't see why meanings only have to relate to the
physical world either.

But the mind has a part to play in creating meanings and what we are prepared to say exists. A 'lump
of dirt' is the way we look at it. It is difficult to see it as a lot of individual grains. It isn't a matter of
agreement or correct use for 'lump of dirt' but a result of the way we just do perceive things due to the
nature of our brains.

7. This translates as 'Of the first and last things' which is metaphysics. Thanks to the bi-lingual
Hubertus Fremerey for this!

Rachel Browne

1) I'll let someone who likes W deal with this one. I admire him, but I don't like most of his stuff.

2) Generally, that we have only first-person access to phenomenal consciousness. We don't know
whether a bat senses sounds the way we do colors, for example. We can say a lot about what it's like
to be a bat, in some ways... but not in that way. Does a bat havea mind? If so, does it, when it hears
some particular frequency, have the same experience we have when we see, just to take an
example, the color red? Nagel's point is that we don't know.

3) I don't know.

4) "Unfair"? An odd description. Given that Descartes attempts to preserve free will by arguing for a
"soul", which surely is a mental substance, since it's not subject to physical laws (otherwise how could
it bypass them?), and which is separate from the "body" (connected through the pineal gland,
according to him)... substance dualism seems right on the mark to me. What else? Property dualism?
So what is the common substance and how could it have such disparate properties?

5) Sounds like Heidegger to me... but you might go back to Aristotle for this one, I believe. Sorry for
the lack of refs.

6) I don't know enough Ayer to answer your first question... but I can play with it. Yes I'd say he had to
have an ontology, and also that he could not claim that he does not (which you do not seem to know).
Given the normal stance of the functionalists, you still have to assume that there are objects which
you can manipulate, even if you can only know about them through your manipulations.

But as for a link between meaning and existence, you reallyshould read Heidegger on that one. In
Being and Timehe is, if I am understanding him correctly, quite definitely claiming such a link. I do
not agree. Just because when we seesomething we assign meaning to it (and I do agree with that)
does not as far as I am concerned imply anything one way or another about its existence. Think about
robots, for example... they manipulate the world, so in a sense the world they manipulate existsfor
them... at least functionally. But they have no minds... so there is no meaning for them. One might
also use the same argument for plants. Does the world exist for a plant? Surely it does, in some
sense... plants are utterly dependent on an external world, and manipulate it continuously. But they
are not awareof that world, and so it has no meaningfor them. Now, wecould say that the world had
meaning for a plant... but that's ourmeaning, not the plant's.

7) "Of [or about] the first and last things". Really, you might think about using a dictionary. They can
be very helpful in looking up meanings.

Steven Ravett Brown

I can see why you are threatening us with the intention to monopolise the service! To answer all this
(and we don't want to be flippant, do we?) is going to require a team. Still, there are some questions
here that can be answered reasonably quickly, No. 2 and (I think) No. 7, and so I'll give you answers
to those, hoping that one or the other of my colleagues will tackle the others.

Q2 (Nagel) can best be answered by rephrasing the title. There is a considerable literature on this
little essay, but ultimately it all boils down to this: 'If a lion could speak, he would not be speaking
lion-speak'. Speaking, in short, entails a human-type consciousness and is grounded in the type of
expressive faculties we possess. So a lion could not, in fact, speak like a human, even if the animal
possessed a vocabulary. There would be an unresolvable conflict between its experience of the world
and the manner of communicating it. The lion could not speak it, and we would not understand, try as
we might. Likewise, we cannot experience the world as a bat does. Instruments may do (e.g.) echo
location for us, but we have no access to what it feels liketo see with one's ears. In a word, each
creature or species is subject to the specificity of its own evolutionary patterns and experiences, and
these are not willy-nilly portable from one to another.

About Q7: I don't know the book or if there is an English translation, but I assume it could only bear a
verbatim title, thus: 'Of the first and last things', meaning 'of ultimate questions'. Unless intended
sarcastically, the title would therefore reflect that the text is about life and death.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney