Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Language and Individual

In #46-7 of the Investigations, Wittgenstein criticizes Russell's concept of 'Individual', on the grounds that whereas it entails Indivisibility, all his examples plainly have parts.  Now, implicit in the Tractatus is a converse criticism--that an Individual is not a fundamental element of the World, but merely a component in what are its Atoms, i. e. Facts, which are nexuses of Russell's Individuals.  The latter criticism can also be applied to Social Individualism, i. e. that the fundamental human unit is not necessarily an individual person, but a collective, e. g. a family, a nation, or, perhaps, the entire species.  So, if Language is essentially a collective phenomenon, Russellian Individualism will falsify it by, e. g. conceiving it as extrinsic to an individual person.

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