Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209635 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-24
• Released on: 2006-01-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
While numerous critical studies have traced Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to his study of mathematics and logic under Bertrand Russell, Sterrett, professor of philosophy at Duke, bases this novel intellectual history on the assiduously researched and surprising idea that Wittgenstein's advances in logic and the philosophy of language were related to another early 20th-century invention: the airplane. Weaving together the history of ideas in fin-de-siècle Austria, Germany, England and the United States, Sterrett deftly demonstrates that Wittgenstein drew the inspiration for his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1914) from theories of physics and of music. She traces his influences to physicists like Ludwig Boltzmann and Edgar Buckingham, as well as his own study of the gramophone and the sound waves it produced. Sterrett draws on Wittgenstein's early aeronautical research and experiences building kites, asserting that the philosopher of language used models of wings as a model of language. Much like scale models of propellers or other toys, he said, language represents facts as we perceive and imagine them. Although often mired in dense, labyrinthine prose, Sterrett's compelling history of ideas offers a new glimpse of this perennially difficult philosopher and his intellectual milieu. (Dec.)
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From the Inside Flap
PrefacePreface

Stories about thinkers who have solved problems once thought insoluble string together three key moments. First, there is the private moment in which the thinker glimpses the possibility of a solution. Later, a moment in which the solution is actually worked out, validating that first glimpse. And, finally, a crowning moment, in which the wider world recognizes that the problem once thought insoluble has really been solved. The story of a great accomplishment then turns to its subsequent consequences, and so fans out into numerous threads, the strands of each thread eventually tapering into the fabric of history, becoming part of the background against which later moments in other people's lives are lived.

This book traces threads in the background of the first private moment of just such a story: the moment of insight in which a young aeronautical researcher-turned-philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, glimpsed the "fundamental thought" (or Grundgedanke, in his native German) of his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. At the time he completed the manuscript for his book, he was confident it contained the solution to all the problems of philosophy. It would become one of the most well-known philosophical works of the twentieth century.

Some of the threads in the background of his first private moment of insight were the indirect consequences of the solution to another, completely different kind of problem. That problem, too, dated from ancient times, and its solution had been unsuccessfully attempted so many times that it had been deemed insoluble. That earlier story is the story of the invention of the airplane, culminating in the Wright Brothers' discovery of the solution to the problem of controlling powered human flight. Thus, the solution to the sophisticated technical problem of controlled flight seeded the later solution of a foundational problem in logic and the philosophy of language.

That is the theme of this book: to show the connection between two disparate inventions of the twentieth century. One is an advance in science and technology—the Wright Brothers' invention of the airplane; the other, an advance in the foundations of logic and language—Wittgenstein's account of the world as consisting of "facts, not things," and his account of language on which a proposition is a "model of reality," as first presented in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the story I tell here, the connection between these two stories is not the sort of connection in intellectual history that was necessarily bound to occur, so that if it had not come about in the particular way it had, it would have come about in another. Rather, my story goes, it is something of a fluke that this connection between two disparate disciplines ever occurred at all. It just so happened that one individual physicist with a peculiar mix of interests happened to become interested in the question of the relationship between empirical equations and models at a certain moment in time, and that it was due to the invention of the airplane.

It is also something of a fluke that I came to write this book. Due to a chance set of circumstances, I happened to be referring to a paper on the methodology of scale models, Edgar Buckingham's "On Physically Similar Systems," at the same time I was rereading the Tractatus, and I noticed some striking thematic similarities between the Tractatus and that paper. There were also a few details, peculiar ways of putting things, that the papers had in common, suggesting some cultural commonalities. Could Wittgenstein have read this paper, possibly while in engineering research? After exhaustive searches, I found that no historian or philosopher—nor anyone at all—had ever so much as hinted at any connection between the two thinkers or their work. In fact, I found that Buckingham's paper on similar systems only appeared in 1914 and had not even been written when Wittgenstein was a student in aeronautical research, for he left Manchester for Cambridge in 1911.

After this initial discouragement, I put the question aside as a sort of intellectual misfire. Then I read the memoir of Wittgenstein by his friend G. H. von Wright, according to which Wittgenstein had on numerous occasions explained the importance that thinking about scale models had to his having a crucial moment of insight in 1914:

There is a story of how the idea of language as a picture of reality occurred to Wittgenstein. There exist several somewhat different versions of it. It was in the autumn of 1914, on the eastern front. Wittgenstein was reading in a magazine about a lawsuit in Paris concerning an automobile accident. At the trial a miniature model of the accident was presented before the court. The model here served as a proposition; that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It has this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the model (the miniature-houses, -cars, -people) and things (houses, cars, people) in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a model or picture, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the structure of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs.

My initial question was now too tantalizing to ignore. Though I am a philosopher and not a historian, I decided to investigate whether there might be a connection between Buckingham's "On Physically Similar Systems" and Wittgenstein's insight. After all, Wittgenstein spoke of a proposition being a fact that pictures a fact—just as physical things model other physical things. Thus, the notion of physical similarity might be the notion he had drawn upon.

Historical studies that existed then looked for scientific and technological influences on Wittgenstein in his education and the intellectual surroundings in his youth. As I began to read up on the territory previously covered, I found that there was at that time an established list of suggestions around which the historical work regarding technological influences clustered:

Dynamic models in Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics

Descriptive geometry learned in the Technische Hochschule

Franz Reuleaux's models of machine components

Manchester Professor Horace Lamb's Hydrodynamics

Experimental work on jet spray through nozzles

Wittgenstein's own patented propeller design

These suggestions, however, were all elements in his milieu available during the years prior to his arrival in Cambridge. Hence, it occurred to me that these studies probably had not considered currents in scientific and technological thought that occurred only after he had arrived at Cambridge to study logic and philosophy—from late 1911 on. I was encouraged to pursue my project further when I found that, although Buckingham was a generation ahead of Wittgenstein, when I constructed a timeline laying out events of their lives side by side, it revealed that Buckingham's first paper on the subject of similar systems appeared just a few months before Wittgenstein had his insightful moment occasioned by thinking about scale models. Upon further reading, some other unexpected connections showed up, such as the fact that Wilhelm Ostwald played a role both in Buckingham's education and in the publication of the Tractatus: Buckingham had studied for his doctorate under Ostwald, and Ostwald was the philosopher-scientist who had taken an interest in publishing Wittgenstein's manuscript when so many others were uninterested. Then I noticed that there were a variety of publications on the topic of similarity in England around 1914. More and more elements of an unanticipated landscape began to come into view.

In this new conceptual landscape, the notions of "object," "fact," and "state of affairs" in Wittgenstein's Tractatus took on a wholly new meaning, and a somewhat coherent view clicked into place. In this new view, a number of previously perplexing statements in the Tractatus became clear. When I realized that what Wittgenstein called "the fundamental thought" of the Tractatus—that there are no logical constants—had a very close analogue in statements about "the most general form of an empirical equation" in Buckingham's paper, the idea for this book was born. I presented a sketch of the project in Vienna, Austria in the summer of 2000 at the History of Philosophy of Science meeting and, almost five years later, the manuscript that became the book you hold finally made it to my publisher.

The story in this book is thus about how a philosophical insight that led to one of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century came about in part due to technical work attendant upon the political consequences of a technological advance. The paper "On Physically Similar Systems" was written by an American physicist trained in Germany, but the direction of his attention to the question of physically similar situations was occasioned by political events that made national competence in flight technology a priority. The technological advance whose consequences occasioned this fusion of ideas was the use of heavier-than-air military aircraft, which in turn was a result of the success of the Wright Brothers' endeavors to build a flying machine that was capable of sustained, controlled, manned flight.

Looking back to when the Wright Brothers began their research takes us to a point in time almost 15 years prior to Wittgenstein's crucial moment of insight, to just before the turn of the century. It was around 1900, when Wittgenstein was about ten years old, that Wilbur Wright had the moment of insight in which he felt he had the solution to control of manned heavier-than-air flying machines. This was the now-legendary moment when he twisted a cardboard box in which bicycle inner tubes were shipped in his hands, and suddenly saw in it a means of controlling glider wings. He explained it to his brother Orville, and, after a sleepless night of contemplation, he too became convinced that it would make practical manned heavier-than-air powered flight possible. Whether or not anyone else had ever thought of wing warping, to them it was new, and they recognized its significance for their problem. It was the start of the path that would very rapidly lead to the invention of a practical flying machine.

The Wright Brothers had been interested in flight since their boyhoods, when their father had brought them a helicopter-style toy called a "bat" that was wildly popular in Europe. It was an amazing toy, able to stay aloft for appreciable periods. It was based on a design by Alphonse Pénaud, an aeronautical researcher in France who designed his flying machine models to be inherently stable. The Wrights had for years tried to make bigger versions of that helicopter toy, but bigger versions didn't fly, and their technological adventurousness was directed to other pursuits—first printing presses, and then optimizing the newer-style, high-precision "safety" bicycles. They never lost interest in the helicopter toy, though. Their nephews reported that they were still constructing different versions of it many years later, and Wilbur himself said they had spent many years constructing replicas of various sizes.

Otto Lilienthal's death in 1895 occasioned obituaries and news stories of his accomplishments, especially his manned gliding experiments. Reading of his feats in the newspaper renewed the Wright Brothers' interest. They experimented with kites and gliders, trying different materials and methods of control, yet still making little progress. It was not until that first moment of insight a few years later, when Wilbur twisted the cardboard bicycle tire inner-tube box, that they became convinced they could solve the problem of flight. By then, they had established a business sufficiently successful to support their research into flight. They had a specific vision to follow, and they had their own means of support. They set about experimenting to validate their vision.

The next step was to gather everything they could read on what others had learned so far. By that time, there was a great deal of information available, including the data that Lilienthal had collected from his experiments in Berlin, and a compendium of information titled "Progress in Flying Machines" collected by Octave Chanute, a retired Paris-born American engineer who had begun performing his own experiments in flight. Chanute had collected information on the different kinds of flying machines that had been designed, experiments done with them, and how they had performed. The Wrights used the data to design the shape and size of the wing, and then located a place that would provide sufficient winds in which to carry out their experiments.

Now, to test their ideas. They were aware that many had lost their lives in pursuit of the same entrancing goal; not only Lilienthal, but Percy Pilcher, too, had recently died in an attempt to fly in a machine of his own design. The Wright Brothers first flew the gliders only as kites, to make sure that their idea about control would work before designing and building man-carrying ones. But their gliders didn't get as much lift as their calculations had led them to expect. What was at fault—the machine or their expectations? Their experiments with a wind tunnel made of cardboard boxes and a fan, and a cleverly designed apparatus to hold the mini-wing surfaces, were decisive; it was their expectations that were at fault. They needed better experimental data about lift on wing surfaces. They decided to generate it themselves. They built a larger, better wind tunnel, and systematically generated their own data on a wide range of shapes and wind speeds, which they used to calculate lift forces and redesign the wings of their flying machine. They generated all over again the same data that had been collected by Lilienthal. They would later learn that they had not been properly informed about how to read Lilienthal's tables, but the important thing was that the data they produced with a wind tunnel of their own design was accurate and enabled them to properly design the wings of their gliders. Their initial conviction that they had a solution was validated. Their proof that their solution worked lay in the flights made by their flying machine.

The rest is history: after perfecting the design of a glider and controls for it, and developing an engine to power it, they did succeed, closed down their experiments for awhile, and waited for their patent to be approved. The story has twists and turns, but their success became fully recognized by the world at large in 1908, in heavily attended public exhibitions held in Europe and the U.S. Ironically, this final crowning moment occurred just after Wittgenstein left the Continent for England to begin a career in aeronautical research; he spent that summer in the North of England designing, building, and flying kites at an experimental kite-flying station.

Airplanes were soon considered necessary elements of a modern nation's arsenal. Wilbur Wright's public demonstrations in late 1908 were soon followed by Bleriot's flight across the channel separating England from continental Europe in 1909, which had swift and significant consequences as well as symbolic significance. England initiated an Advisory Committee on Aeronautics that same year to coordinate and support research related to progress in aeronautics, and it built wind tunnel research facilities. There was then no question that the problem of flight had been solved; the question was only how rapidly each country could progress in its aeronautical capability. In 1911, Wittgenstein rather hastily left his position as a research student in engineering at Manchester to study logic and philosophy with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. By then, several European countries had major aeronautical research facilities and state-sponsored agencies to support and direct them as well. The U.S., on the other hand, had no government agency devoted to aeronautical research when the prospect of war in Europe loomed in 1913.

The political situation in Europe created a sense of urgency in the U.S. Many within the U.S. administration were becoming increasingly concerned about the country's lack of initiative in developing aeronautical research capabilities, and they wanted facilities that at least kept up with those in Europe. Congress was urged to develop similar research facilities in the U.S. The importance of U.S. wind tunnel facilities was brought to the attention of a number of scientists in government agencies, among them Edgar Buckingham, who worked at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS). The NBS set standards for measurements used in research and so would be involved in instrumentation used in wind tunnels. Buckingham, though relatively unknown to the outside world, was distinguished in his profession. As did many New Englanders of his class and interests, he had traveled to Germany for advanced study—in his case, for a doctorate in physics. He had investigated fluorescence with Ostwald in Leipzig, then had written a book on the foundations of thermodynamics. After a few years spent in teaching and research at American colleges and universities, he settled into a government career as a physicist, investigating topics deemed relevant to the nation's needs. The special set of circumstances that led to a paper entitled "On Physically Similar Systems" arose sometime after 1911, when he first became involved in providing advice on something with which he had little previous involvement: laboratory research into heavier-than-air flight.

Thus, around 1912, Buckingham set out to identify the foundations of the methodology of using experimental models for aeronautical research. He wanted to know: what were the assumptions made in the process, and what followed as a matter of logic? The practical methods themselves were nothing new; the U.S. Navy rightfully claimed that it was already doing very similar work in its laboratories devoted to research on ships in canals and on performance of screw propellers, and that testing in a wind tunnel would not be a qualitatively different task. Buckingham, though, was a philosophically minded physicist, always scrutinizing foundations, and this meant first clarifying the foundations of the practice of engineering scale models, whether in water canals or wind tunnels. What he sought to do in "On Physically Similar Systems," which appeared first in July 1914 and then in a greatly expanded form in October 1914, went far beyond clarifying the current practice. He showed that the method could be made more general, so that it applied to anything that could be described in the language of physics, and, further, that the principle providing the foundation of the method was a principle of logic. In an unlikely mix of logic, engineering, and thought experiment of a physics paper, he applied the principle both to the theoretical question of whether we would be able to detect if the universe had shrunk in size overnight to a miniature of itself, and to the question of how to shrink a submerged screw propeller to a miniature situation such that it performed similarly to the original situation.

A number of other papers and lectures on similarity appeared all at once in the year before the war, some in engineering and some in thermodynamics. Buckingham's was unusual in its generality and in its emphasis on symbolism. Perhaps only someone with his particular experience could have conceived the sort of paper that Buckingham wrote. He brought the kinds of considerations discussed among philosophers and scientists in intellectual circles in Vienna and German-speaking Europe to questions that had arisen in quite a different kind of community—the community of advocates and researchers of flight. At that time, the parties gathered around the problems of flight formed a motley collection—industrialist-inventors and engineers, physicists and mathematicians, daredevils and mechanical geniuses. They had various degrees of knowledge and employed various degrees of rigor. What brought them into contact was a common, often consuming, desire to pin down the principles that could explain why kites and birds, though heavier than air, could stay aloft in it. It would be no accident that the philosopher who picked up on the import of the philosophical aspects of Buckingham's paper and worked out the implications of what he had said about scientific equations for the more general case of human language in general was also a rare sort of person who had spent time in both these worlds.

That philosopher was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He too was familiar with both these disparate worlds. His intimate acquaintance with the technical issues in heavier-than-air flight came in part from his time at an experimental research station in Glossop, in the north of England, designing, building, and flying kites. He was also familiar with the impassioned arguments in Europe about the role of pictures, models, and equations in the foundations of physics, especially the debates about the role of models and equations in scientific theories ignited by the birth of statistical thermodynamics—the same debates and debaters that Buckingham had encountered studying with Ostwald in Germany. We know that Wittgenstein was very interested in these debates as a young man, that he had read and admired Boltzmann's Popular Writings and Hertz's Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form, and that he said his thinking had been influenced by both of these physicists' works.

But Wittgenstein brought even more to this fusion of ideas. Wittgenstein had gone on to inhabit yet another world besides the two Edgar Buckingham had encountered prior to probing the foundations of experimental models and the theory of dimensions. He had hungrily sought to learn about logic and philosophy, and he learned the terrain of that world from the two people who were rearranging it to provide foundations for mathematics: the German mathematician Gottlob Frege and the renowned Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell, too, saw his own work as a matter of solving problems. Russell felt that in his major work on the foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica, he had solved the problems responsible for the existence of age-old paradoxes in previous logics. A crucial part of this solution was a set of rules about "types" of variables. This set of rules, encapsulated in what he called a "theory of types," added restrictions in logic that were meant to prevent vicious circles—and, in turn, the ability to formulate the logical paradoxes that had been the subject of controversy since ancient times. Russell considered Wittgenstein a uniquely gifted student and his intellectual colleague and heir, but Wittgenstein thought Russell's solution had problems of its own. He thought Russell's restrictions a desperate and unprincipled move. At first, Wittgenstein was not sure what a better solution might be; he was just certain that Russell's way out was not a principled means of avoiding the paradoxes. It was these sorts of problems—problems in the landscape of logic and foundations of mathematics limned by Frege and Russell—that were occupying Wittgenstein when, in 1914, Buckingham presented the striking characterization of the foundations of the methodology of scale modeling in "On Physically Similar Systems."

One of these problems in logic and philosophy is the problem at the heart of the story in this book: roughly, the problem of how a proposition or statement represents something in the world. The first private moment in the story of its solution is that crucial moment of insight already mentioned. It took place in September 1914. Wittgenstein was at an unusual point in his life. His father, an imposing figure in his country, his family, and Ludwig's own life, had passed away the previous year. After finishing the school year at Cambridge, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate, Wittgenstein left without completing the program in which he was enrolled. He spent a year in a small cottage in Norway. During that year, spent in (almost total) isolation, he produced a manuscript on logic. He emerged to find Europe in crisis. When war was declared in August 1914, he volunteered to serve in the Austrian Army.

According to his sister's memoirs, Wittgenstein at that time "had an intense desire to take on something difficult and demanding and to do something other than purely intellectual work." And so the first few months of World War I find him once again in isolation of a sort, away from people with whom he can converse about logic and philosophy. He is still tormented by problems in logic and the foundations of mathematics, though. Just a few days after entering the Army, he begins writing about philosophical problems again. He ponders them in relative solitude, laying out the puzzles and problems he's been thinking about and (less frequently) the progress he feels he has made, in dated notebook entries.

The moment he first glimpsed a solution was September 29, 1914. He suddenly felt that he had, as he recorded in his notebook entry that day, come upon something that contained "the solution to all my questions." He wrote:

The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the co-ordination of proposition and situation: the solution to all my questions must be extremely simple.

In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.)

This private moment of insight was later vindicated when, still serving in the Austrian Army, Wittgenstein produced a manuscript in which he lay out his solution to the philosophical problem. He was carrying the manuscript in his rucksack when he was captured by the enemy and taken to an Italian prison camp. Both he and the manuscript survived. He sent one copy to Frege, and then he sent another copy to Russell, along with a letter remarking on how much he yearned to see it published. So, five years after the initial glimpse of the path to a solution, the publishing world was offered a German-language manuscript in which this young man, Russell's protégé, stated that he believed he had solved the problems of philosophy. Russell had made a similar declaration in Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein had trouble finding a publisher, though, even with the help of prominent friends and Russell, who wrote an introduction to the book to induce publishers to take a chance on it. That introduction did spur some interest among publishers, but Wittgenstein failed to reach agreements with the few publishers who expressed interest.

Wittgenstein finally gave up trying to get his manuscript published and left it in Russell's hands. In turn, Russell, who had left Cambridge on a visit to China, asked mathematician and former student Dorothy Wrinch to try to get it published. She presented it to Cambridge University Press. They rejected it. So did many others. But when the manuscript reached the desk of the founder and editor of the Annalan der Naturphilosophie in Leipzig, Germany—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Wilhelm Ostwald, whose interests had turned more and more to philosophy—it piqued Ostwald's interest. Ostwald was interested in publishing it, and he wrote back to Wrinch, asking to include the introductory essay Russell had written for Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In his note to Wrinch, Ostwald remarked that his interest was in large part due to his respect for Russell. However, it should be remembered that the context of that statement was a note in which Ostwald was trying to persuade Wrinch to give him Russell's introduction along with Wittgenstein's manuscript. So, although it may at first appear that Ostwald's interest in Wittgenstein was due largely to Wittgenstein's connection with Russell, the interest in Russell is probably not the whole story, considering that Ostwald turned over an entire journal issue to Wittgenstein's book-length manuscript.

One clue as to why Wittgenstein's manuscript, which had been passed over by so many, engaged Ostwald's attention is that Ostwald was then a major figure in the same German-speaking world of debates about the foundations of physics in which Wittgenstein had spent his youth. Perhaps what interested Ostwald was the kind of approach Wittgenstein had taken. Ostwald was a friend and colleague of Boltzmann's and a leading proponent of energetics. Energetics (in the sense meant by Ostwald) was a philosophical view of physics in which the concept of energy, rather than force, is made central. Boltzmann, for whom Wittgenstein had such high regard, was one of the main discussants on the subject of energetics—though Boltzmann became better known for being skeptical of the sweeping claims then being made for energetics than for publicizing its virtues. Ostwald derided the use of models as unsound and emphasized the use of equations. According to Ostwald, Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics needed no supplementation by mechanical models that (in Ostwald's view) tended to mislead; hence, the kinetic theory of gases too should eschew models of molecules in motion. Boltzmann defended the use of models in science, making the interesting observation that manipulating equations, which the proponents of energetics emphasized, was, after all, somewhat like manipulating models. Were there themes in Wittgenstein's manuscript that resonated with Ostwald's interests in philosophy and physics? The familiarity he sensed in reading it may have been due to residues of themes from an article by a physicist who had trained under him as a graduate student long before—Edgar Buckingham.

Indications that foundational works on the methodology of engineering scale models might have figured in writing the Tractatus come from Wittgenstein himself, who, as we have seen, emphasized the significance of thinking about the use of scale models in conceiving the Tractatus. He had, of course, been around scale models of various sorts most of his life. We know that in his boyhood he built and played with models of planes and other machines, and scale modeling in hydraulics was a specialty in Manchester, where he did graduate engineering work prior to leaving for Cambridge in 1911. However, we also know that Wittgenstein told friends on several occasions that it was only in 1914 that he started working out ideas about a connection between how models represent reality and how propositions do, and his writings bear that memory out. Buckingham's treatment had a peculiar flavor, putting points in terms of principles that seem more about symbols and the language used to describe things in the world than about things in the world.

If Buckingham's very general presentation of the foundation of experimental scale modeling as a method more generally applicable to statements about relations between quantities was important in the formulation of the Tractatus, it was more than a coincidence that the editor who wanted to publish Wittgenstein's orphaned manuscript happened to be Buckingham's doctoral thesis advisor. A suggestion such as this contains some element of speculation, just because so many things go unrecorded and so many records have been destroyed. Wittgenstein himself ordered manuscripts and notes from this period destroyed. While he acknowledged that many of the ideas in the Tractatus were not new, he did not bother to credit the sources of those ideas. Hence, the absence of an explicit mention of Buckingham's work doesn't indicate much either way. At any rate, Wittgenstein's manuscript first appeared in 1921 in Annanlen der Naturphilosopie, a German-language journal, and it was selected for publication by Wilhelm Ostwald.

Wittgenstein was not personally involved in the publication process, however, and he was displeased with the editorial changes made to the manuscript under Ostwald's editorship. The search for an English publisher for the Tractatus continued. When finally the manuscript was to be published in a bilingual German-English edition, Wittgenstein made sure he was closely involved in the English translation. He had trouble choosing a title for the English translation; after considering various suggestions by friends and finding fault with most of them, he settled on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the English version of the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung.

What happened after the publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another story—a story in twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history. Wittgenstein's Tractatus not only went on to become carefully studied in Cambridge, but soon there were reverberations in Vienna with the establishment of the Vienna Circle, a regular meeting in Vienna that gave birth to something that had the zealous flavor of a major movement. The movement I mean, often known by the label "logical empiricism," eventually migrated along with many of the group's members and participants to the U.S. (notably, Rudolph Carnap (the University of Chicago, and then UCLA), Herbert Feigl (the University of Minnesota), Phillip Frank (Harvard), and Hans Reichenbach (UCLA)) and to England (A. J. Ayer (Oxford) and Frederich Waismann (to Cambridge, and then Oxford)). The story in this book, however, is concerned with what led up to the publication of the Tractatus—in particular, that crucial moment in autumn 1914 when, as a soldier in the early months of war, Wittgenstein said he had the idea for the fundamental thought of the Tractatus.

§§§§

The story of Wittgenstein tackling the problems of logic and philosophy and the story of the Wright Brothers tackling the problem of heavier-than-air flight have usually been told as two unconnected stories—one taking place mainly in Wittgenstein's Vienna and Russell's Cambridge, and the other in the American Midwest of the Wright Brothers and on the desolate, windblown sands of Kitty Hawk. But there were connections. One such connection was the community of physicists, which included Edgar Buckingham and Ludwig Boltzmann.

In 1894, when Wittgenstein was about five years old, Boltzmann gave a talk in Vienna, in which he urged research into heavier-than-air flight. The lecture (included as an appendix to this book) was included in the collection of his popular scientific writings that was published in 1905, just when Wittgenstein was so full of admiration for Boltzmann that he hoped to study physics with him. Boltzmann was concerned that Germany was falling behind England in research into heavier-than-air flight. Solving the age-old problem of heavier-than-air flight, Boltzmann said in that lecture, would be like Gauss's solving an age-old question in algebra, the "Kreisteilung Problem." Just as the Kreisteilung Problem had been considered insoluble because it had resisted solution for so long, so had the problem of flight been considered insoluble, because so many had tried and failed. However, the situation had changed of late, he said. It was now clear that the solution was close, and his audience was in the position Gauss was in when he realized the Kreisteilung Problem could be solved. The most important research needed, he said, could be conducted with a simple child's toy—a kite.

As it turned out, the problem of flight was solved by the time Wittgenstein was ready to conduct serious research in the field. But his first step into aeronautical research—going to England to design, build, and fly kites—did eventually bring him to the problem he felt it was his destiny to solve. He was directed to read works by, and then go to study with, Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, England, and, eventually, to answering one of the related questions in the logic of science that Boltzmann had contemplated: the relationship between models and equations, or, put another way, between models and statements. It took another step, beyond collaborating with Russell, before he came to think that a proposition was "a picture," or "a model of reality," and that understanding how would solve the problem. The next step would be his own. He would break away from the presumption almost everyone else had made that it is the form of our sentences or equations that mirrors the world, and see that instead it is our language itself that mirrors the world.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover

A Story of Ideas at the Heart of Our Modern Fascination with Language—and Airplanes

"Stories about thinkers who have solved problems once thought insoluble string together three key moments: First, there is the private moment in which the thinker glimpses the possibility of a solution. Later, a moment in which the solution is actually worked out, validating that first glimpse. And, finally, a crowning moment, in which the wider world recognizes that the problem once thought insoluble has really been solved. The story of a great accomplishment then turns to its subsequent consequences, and so fans out into numerous threads, the strands of each thread eventually tapering into the fabric of history somewhere, becoming part of the background against which later moments in other people's lives are lived.

This book traces threads in the background of the first private moment of just such a story: the moment of insight in which a young aeronautical researcher-turned-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein glimpsed the "main thought" (or Grundgedanke, in his native German) of his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. At the time he completed the manuscript for his book, he was confident it contained the solution to all the problems of philosophy. It would become one of the most well-known philosophical works of the twentieth century."

—from the Preface

In this elegant historical narrative of ideas, Duke professor of philosophy Susan Sterrett reveals a story at the beginning of our modern fascination with the nature of language.

The philosophy of language and experimental research in aeronautics made great leaps at about the same time in the early twentieth century. Strange as it may sound, this was no coincidence. Sterrett shows what Wittgenstein's glimpse of a solution to the problem of language in 1914 had to do with experimental models—which had been so crucial to the Wright brothers' solving the problem of flight.

On the eve of World War I in Europe, Wittgenstein, after having left aeronautical research to study philosophy, was deeply dissatisfied with Bertrand Russell's solution to the paradoxes of logic: the theory of types. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, a physicist called upon to help set up U.S. aeronautical research capability was pondering how the logic of empirical equations held the key to identifying physically similar situations, which in turn explained the success of the Wright brothers' research on their apparatus constructed of cardboard cartons and bicycle parts. His conclusion had a twist: what mattered was the mere existence of an equation that would work for any units one chose to use. This highly abstract explanation held an answer to Wittgenstein's problems about the logic of propositions. In a moment of insight, he became convinced that thinking about a proposition as a model or picture would solve the problems of philosophy. The result was the strikingly different view of language presented in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that has commanded attention ever since.

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Customer Reviews

History of Ideas of Models and Physically Similar Systems
As author, I'd like to provide the synopsis/abstract of my book "Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World" as it appears on my own webpage:

"Abstract: Wittgenstein told friends on many occasions that he came to see how things in the world can be represented in language by thinking about scale models, and that it occurred while he was a soldier, in the autumn of 1914. This book is the result of investigating the idea that perhaps he meant experimental engineering scale models. It is well known that Wittgenstein had been an aeronautical engineer before going to Cambridge to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911. Why only in 1914, then, did this insight occur? It so happens that 1914 was the year that the basis of the method of experimental engineering scale models was formally set out and presented, by a philosophically-minded physicist, as a matter of a purely logical principle about any symbolic system that is used to represent physical relationships. In fact, a whole array of discussions about similarity arose in 1913-1914, in physics, biology, and chemistry. The book lays out this previously untold story in the history of ideas, presents a new reading of Wittgenstein's philosophical work (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and explains how many heretofore puzzling claims in it click into a coherent account on this new reading. "

However, I don't think you need to have any interest in Wittgenstein to appreciate the history of ideas in the book. I am not aware of another book that gives an account of the historical background to, and a critical-historical review of, the idea of physically similar systems ranging from Galileo to Rayleigh and beyond, including physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry.

The book also contains an English translation of Boltzmann's 1894 lecture on Aeronautics as an appendix.