11 - Deductive inference and aspect perception

Summary

Anyone who wanted to could see many Wittgensteinian doctrines as variations upon a single theme: that we make a certain kind of mistake. We postulate hidden properties to explain manifest relations. But really nothing is hidden: there are only the manifest relations.

Thus: an object's possible combinations with other objects is not explained by but identified with its essential nature or form (TLP 2.011–2.0141). To say what propositional variables occur ‘in’ a proposition is not to indicate properties of that proposition alone: it is to indicate with what others it shares a form (TLP 3.315–16). The future action of the machine is ‘in’ it from the start only in this sense: we have learned to derive a series of other pictures from a picture of it (PI 193). The meaning that we hear ‘in’ a musical theme can only be explained by comparison with another instance of its pattern (PI 527; CV 69–70). What expresses the sense that we ‘hear’ a word as having in a sentence is a transition to other sentences (PI 531–4). The malice we see ‘in’ a smile is not a geometrical feature of it but sometimes consists in an imaginary context (‘smiling on the suffering of an enemy’ – PI 539).

This chapter discusses another such variation: that a sentence does not have a meaning from which we derive the rules governing its deductive connection with others.