Friday, December 27, 2013

Transcendental Logic and Description

Kant and Husserl each draw a distinction between the Logic of Thought and the Logic of Propositions--for the former, it is expressed in the contrast of the 'Table of Categories' and the 'Table of Judgments', respectively, to which correspond designations used by Husserl, 'Transcendental Logic' and 'Formal Logic'.  Now, while Wittgenstein never explicitly distinguishes the two, the contrast is implicit in his statement, from #4.0031 of the Tractatus: "Russell's merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form."  For, he is alluding to Russell's theory of 'Descriptions', which is based on the distinction between 'S is P' and 'There is an x, such that x is S and x is P", with the latter the "real" version.  Now, as Kant characterizes it, a bare 'x' is the 'Transcendental Object".  So, in the absence of an alternative derivation of the 'there is an x' locution, e. g. from an advocacy of the Existentialist principle 'Existence precedes Essence', the Logic of the Tractatus, and of Russell's Logicism, is fundamentally that of Thought, not of Propositions.

No comments:

Post a Comment