Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Solipsism and Objectivity

The Solipsism that emerges in Wittgenstein's exposition of the World, at #5.62 of the Tractatus, has a three-fold origin.  First the equation of "the" world with "my" world echoes the result of the progressive reduction by his Empiricist predecessors--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--of sense-objects to mental data.  Second, as has previously been discussed here, presumed 'objective' states-of-affairs are actually those of a 'third-person', from the perspective of an implicitly present 'I', the recognition of which Wittgenstein articulates at #5.632 as "the subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world", like an eye to its field of vision.  Finally, the negation of  'interpersonal' is 'private', not 'impersonal', contrary to what is taken for granted in the Logicist abstraction of 'Language' from the context of Communication.  Accordingly, these passages expose a profound flaw in Logicism--a concept of Language that is Solipsistic, rather than Objective--one occasional manifestation of which is the blindness of Logicists to their own prejudices.

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