Saturday 17th October, 1914: In his private diary, LW notes that he worked a lot yesterday, with some ‘knot’ (or ‘node’) drawing several ideas together, albeit without a solution. In the evening they stayed at Baranov and are now driving further on to Smuzin. [At that time, Baranov, on the eastern side of the Vistula River, about 15km south-west of Tarnobrzeg, was an Austrian border town. Now it’s Baranow, Poland: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baran%C3%B3w_Sandomierski Again, by ‘Smuzin’ LW probably has in mind the Austrian frontier town Szczucin, about midway between Kracau and Sandomierz] ‘Will the redemptive idea come to me, will it come??!!’ He notes that he masturbated again yesterday, and today, and that this evening they arrived in Smuzin, where they are going to stop for the night. He notes that he has done a lot of (philosophical) work: ‘Amassed much material, unable to organize it. But this influx of material, I think, is a good sign. Remember how great the grace of the work is!’ (GT1, SS.43-44). LW notes that if there do exist completely general propositions, it seems as if they would be ‘experimental combinations of “logical constants” (!)’. He then asks himself whether it isn’t possible to describe the entire world completely by means of completely general propositions, without using any sort of names or other denoting signs, and decides that it is indeed possible. In order to get from this to ordinary language, he suggests, one would only have to introduce names, saying after an existential quantification (Ǝx) ‘and this x is A’, etc. In this way it would be possible to devise a picture of the world without saying what is a representation of what. Suppose the world consisted of things A and B and the property F, and that F(A) was the case but not F(B). One could describe this world by means of these propositions: (Ǝx,y).(Ǝφ).x ≠ y.φx.∼φy:φu.φz.⊃.u=z, (Ǝφ).(ψ).ψ = φ, (Ǝx,y).(z).z = x v z = y Here one also needs propositions of the type of the last two only in order to be able to identify the objects. From this, he declares, of course it follows that *there are completely general propositions*! He then considers whether the first proposition ((Ǝx,y).(Ǝφ).x ≠ y.φx.∼φy:φu.φz.⊃.u=z) would be enough, and the difficulty of identification done away with by describing the entire world in a single general proposition beginning ‘(Ǝx,y,z…φ,ψ…R,S…)’ followed by a logical product (NB, pp.13-14).
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 06:00:32 +0000
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