Rod Bertolet

Wittgenstein initially endorsed but then abandoned, by the time of “Some Remarks on Logical Form”, the view that elementary propositions are logically independent. In this paper it is argued that the doctrine of logical independence is in fact inconsistent with the intuitions and examples that motivated the picture theory of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This leaves the question of whether the logical independence of elementary propositions can be reconciled with the theory itself; the paper explores some interpretations of the early Wittgenstein with which this is, and others with which it is not, consistent.

As interest in the study of natural languages has increased, philosophers of language and logicians have, along with linguists, begun to pay more attention to sentences whose truth value varies from context to context. Alternatively, to sentences which are such that, if different speakers utter them, those speakers may say different things. For example, it is well-known that two different people who utter ‘I am hot’ will be saying different things, that two different people who utter ‘Billy is a lush’ may be saying different things, and that different speakers who utter ‘The book on the table is boring’ may say different things. The same sort of familiar point could be made by examples concerning other pronouns, demonstratives, the utterance of ambiguous sentences, and so on.

In Frege’s Puzzle, Nathan Salmon takes it to be obvious that the fact that names such as ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are coreferential is purely a matter of arbitrary linguistic convention, while the fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus is by no means a conventional matter. Salmon also takes these points to be ones to which Frege appeals in the opening paragraph of “On Sense and Reference,” and hence finds it ironic that these points undercut the theory of sense that Frege develops in that paper. It is argued that the thesis that the coreferentiality of a pair of proper names is purely a matter of arbitrary linguistic convention is inconsistent with any plausible theory of reference. Salmon’s reading of Frege’s argument is also called into question.

A popular answer to the question of what, In addition to what a sentence means, Determines what a speaker who utters that sentence says, Is the context in which it is uttered. While this answer is often not developed in any detail, Paul ziff in "what is said" attempts to specify just what contextual features are relevant and how they operate. This paper argues that the factors ziff offers are in fact irrelevant to the determination of what is said. The general outline of an alternative approach is briefly sketched.