But as long as we all agree to call a tree green and a sunset red, we are able to communicate with each other and construct the language of science.. Wittgenstein was dissatisfied with t
Trang 1look at a tree they see what I see when I look at a sunset But as long as we all agree to call a tree green and a sunset red, we are able to communicate with each other and construct the language of science
Wittgenstein was dissatisfied with this solution, and strove to give an account of meaning that would not present a threat of solipsism He distanced himself from the Vienna Circle and returned permanently to Cambridge Having submitted the Tractatus as a Ph.D dissertation he became
a Fellow of Trinity College The Circle continued its anti-metaphysical programme, notably in a journal, Erkenntnis, edited by Schlick in conjunc-tion with Hans Reichenbach of Berlin Its ideas were given wide currency in Britain by the publication in 1936 of A J Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic Later
in the same year, however, Schlick was shot dead by a disgruntled student; and by 1939 the Circle ceased to exist, with some of its most prominent members forced into exile The Circle’s most distinguished legacy to posterity was its publication, in 1935, of The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper, who was never a fully paid-up member of the group
Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy
In the 1930s Wittgenstein became the most influential teacher of philoso-phy in Britain During this period he turned epistemology and philosophiloso-phy
of mind upside down Previous philosophers, from Descartes to Schlick, had striven to show how knowledge of the external public world— whether scientific or commonsensical—could be built up from the ulti-mate, immediate, private data of intuition or experience Wittgenstein, in these years, showed that private experience, far from being the bedrock on which knowledge and belief is founded, was something that itself presup-posed a shared public world Even the words that we use to frame our most secret and inward thoughts derive the only sense they have from their use
in our common external discourse The problem of philosophy is not to construct the public from the private, but to do justice to the private in the context of the social
After his return to philosophy Wittgenstein abandoned many of the theses of the Tractatus He ceased to believe in logical atoms, and ceased to look for a logically articulate language cloaked in common speech A defining doctrine of logical atomism had been that every elementary proposition is
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