Logicism in the eyes of the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (and of Philosophical Remarks).

Along his philosophical development, Wittgenstein struggled in different ways to reconcile two guiding principles: (i) letting psychological investigations aside when asking for the nature of meaning, truth, and number; (ii) not going beyond what was in each time regarded as “the limits of language”, i.e., not speaking nonsense. As he inherited principle (i) from Frege and Russell, his continuous critique to logicism can come in aid of an evaluation of whether principle (ii)’s being launched against that doctrine was or wasn’t in conflict with (i). In this paper, I argue that even though psychological investigations played no role in Wittgenstein’s early account of propositional content, propositional content was construed by him on traditional assumptions about how meaningful thought can be conveyed by us through the intentional use of symbols. These assumptions about how thoughts get their meaningfulness are the grounds for principle (ii). Since Frege’s and Russell’s theses about the reduction of arithmetic to Logic made appeal to no such assumptions, I conclude that Wittgenstein’s critique of logicism fails to cope with (i) by virtue of stronger, psychologistic committment with (ii).

Authors

• Pedro Noguez

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