what the sferics said to Mondaugen

[Andrew Dinn]

Paul Murphy writes:

> Now, in the context of V., the sferics message is rather baleful; if the
> world is everything that is the case, then the world can in principle not
> be changed, since possibility has been evicted from the world by reason. In
> other words, the genocide and debauchery upon which K. Mondaugen gazes is
> the case, it has and will be the case, regardless of any intervention of
> conscience or will or what have you.

Interesting theory but I think you misread LW on facts. The point
about logical atomism is that it's `facts' are logically independent.
When LW says that the world is all that is the case he not only means
it can be described as a conjunction of atomic facts or their
negatives

    a_1 ^ not a_2 ^ a_3 ^ ...

he also intends that every atomic fact which is true could just as
easily not be the case without anything else needing to be changed. So
it is quite feasible that the world could have been constituted as

    a_1 ^ not a_2 ^ not a_3 ^ ...

or any other variation on the above. Statements such as `the cat has
four legs' are too coarse to allow such arbitrary change e.g. to `the
cat has five legs' but analysis would reveal that the use of the term
cat implies that the referent of the sentence has to be constituted as
a four legged creature hence the five-legged variant of the statement
above reduces to a contradiction i.e. something of the form

    a_1 ^ not a_2 ^ ... ^ (a_n ^ not a_n) ^ ...

So, actually LW is attempting to sort out necessity from contingency
not by claiming directly that everything in the world is contingent
but rather by arguing that where we think we see necessity in the
world what we are actually seeing is lack of any formal contradiction,
either because we misrepresent a contingent truth which we mistakenly
believe cannot be otherwise or because we are grasping at a vacuous
truth, a pseudo-description which reduces to something of the form

    (a_1 v not a_1) ^ (a_2 v not a_2) ^ ...

i.e. something which says nothing about the world since it does not
divide any sheep from any goats, any truths asserted from any truths
denied.

Note that this implies a contradiction cannot exist in the world. The
only thing which can be contradictory is a description of the world
which asserts both a positive and negative.

When LW says that the only necessity is logical necessity what he
means is that the only necessity is in the *form* of the world - that
it is a conjunction of contingent atomic truths i.e. that it can only
be described by terms of the form

    A_1 ^ A_2 ^ A_3 ^ ...

where A_i is either `a_i', `not a_i' or `(ai v not a_i)' and at least
one term in the conjunction is of the first or second form.

And of course catch 22 is that on analysis the statement that logical
necessity reduces to such a formal property is a vacuous truth. If we
think that 2 + 2 = 4 is informative then that is merely a misfortune
of human psychology and any use we make of such formulae is merely
heuristic. In his notebooks LW dabbled with some sort of mystical
resolution of this horrifying conlcusion and the results of this
dabling are still visible in the enigmatic statements about
transcendence in section 6 of the Tractatus.

Now, to get back onto topic I'd say that the interest in the LW quote
is i) it (and the mention of family resemblance in V) confirms that
TRP knows at least some LW which gives room to speculate that the
later stuff and the work on science and maths has informed his
thinking in GR ii) the sheep and goats stuff - the notion that
meaningful communication requires - no damn it, consists of the
assertion or denial of arbitrary truths makes judge, jury and
executioner of us all with every utterance we make iii) the pun on the
word Fall as in fallen - our world is an integral of presences or
absences whose actual disposition is contingent upon the particulars
of the original fall and the way that fall continues to work out the
trajectory of its descent, arbitrarily flipping contingent truths to
falsehoods and back again. Of course the descent must be betrayed to
gravity, a free fall, some kind of non-causal, Russian roulette, since
there can be no causality at play in a world of isolated, independent
atomic facts.

Oh and iv) all those ^ and v signs look remarkably like A(ngel)s and
V(irgin)s.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.