Logic and Ideality

This chapter seeks to elucidate the novel account of the status of logic developed by Wittgenstein in his later philosophy, distinct from the alternatives of apriorism, empiricism and conventionalism. ¹ Wittgenstein’s reasons for developing such an account are multiple but connected. Most of all, he becomes disappointed with the limited capacity of his early Fregean-Russellian logico-philosophical method to do work of philosophical clarification, especially when the modes of language use to be clarified are complex and fluid, as characteristic of everyday language. A key reason for this shortcoming, according to Wittgenstein, is the conception of language as an ideal abstract entity assumed by his early method, which he later rejects, emphasizing that language is a spatial and temporal phenomenon. But when one rejects the conception of language as an abstract entity that underlies the multifaceted phenomena of language we know from everyday life, a host of difficulties arise. Above all, it seems that any attempt to understand logic as a study of the actual multiplicity of the forms of language and thought forces one to construe logic as an empirical discipline. For evidently this multiplicity is an empirical phenomenon. Yet, as far as Wittgenstein is concerned, collapse into empiricism would mean logic’s demise. According to him, empiricism makes it impossible to explain logical necessity and the nontemporality of logical statements but also, equally seriously, to account for the rigour of logical descriptions, definitions, and so on. For if actual uses of language are typically vague, fluid and complex, how can the discipline of logic describe them without falsification in exact and simple terms, and thus meet its ideals of rigour and clarity? It is in order to resolve such problems, I argue, that Wittgenstein develops his later conception of the status of logic, and an associated account of idealization in logic.