Philosophy Program Presents
Wittgenstein's Exceptional Logic
Laurence Goldstein
University of Kent UK
Wittgenstein’s early writings on logic, though of great historical interest, are, for the most part, only of historical interest. He was not much of a formal logician (though he did bequeath us the truth-table method) and, in the philosophy of logic, though he made telling, sometimes devastating, criticisms of distinguished contemporaries, there is no theory of his that continues to animate modern debate in the way that (say) Frege’s theory of sense and reference or Russell’s theory of definite descriptions do. What I wish to argue here is that there is at least one theory proposed by Wittgenstein in the philosophy of logic that ought to be as highly regarded and influential as any contribution made to the field by Frege or Russell. The theory to which I refer concerns the nature of logical so-called propositions. It makes its first appearance in the 1913 Notes on Logic and is further elaborated in the Tractatus, where tautologies and contradictions are accorded a ‘unique status’ (T 6.112).
What Wittgenstein claims is that logical propositions are without content; they lack any truth-value and are not propositions (any more than rocking horses are real horses). In this paper, I shall say something about how Wittgenstein arrived at this claim and shall try to show that, contrary to first appearances, it is highly plausible. I’ll go on briefly to explore what a logic that makes exceptions of tautologies and contradictions (hence: an exceptional logic) looks like, and finally, I shall show how powerful this logico-philosophical apparatus is by demonstrating its capacity to solve some long-standing paradoxes.
Professor Laurence Goldstein (University of Kent, UK) spends most of his waking hours, and many of his dreams, thinking about paradoxes. He has published extensively on the subject and is currently writing a book, *The Liar, the Bald Man and the Hangman*. He is also a specialist on Wittgenstein about whom he has written a book, *Clear and Queer Thinking: The Development of Wittgenstein's Thought and its Relevance to Modern Philosophy* and also a play re-creating Wittgenstein's Ph.D. defense (he fails). He is the editor of a Monist volume on the philosophy of humor. Most recently, Laurence has edited a collection of essays called Brevity, so expect his presentation to be concise and to the point.
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