Zachary Hall

This article clarifies the status of nonsense in the Tractatus through a case study of recognizing some of the remarks comprising its “picture theory” as nonsensical. Such recognition, we show, demonstrates that thinking, for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, is distinct from any thinkable determination of the world. Accordingly, the Tractatus treats thinking as an indeterminate limit of the determinately thinkable. We thereby show that the text’s therapeutic demonstration of its remarks’ nonsensicality is meant to impart a metaphysical insight into the nature of thinking also advanced in Kant’s first Critique. The article thereby begins to develop a new “middle way” reading of the Tractatus as a text that is both austerely nonsensical and of metaphysical import.

Here I sketch and suggest a reading of Kant's main argument in the Second Analogy—call it the “nomologically determined object” view—that avoids shortcomings both of the "looseness of fit" view and Friedman's Newtonian view while extracting a conception of particular empirical laws of nature untouched by the famous non sequitur objection. Causality is a necessary principle of nature as such and particular empirical laws of nature are necessary for one and the same reason: “changing in such and such manner” is the form of the only possible mark by means of which we individuate any possible object of cognition and hence discover further determinations that constitute (the state of) any possible object that changes in such and such manner. In short: objects necessarily obey particular causal laws because a distinctive manner of changing determines what states of what sensible objects change in that distinctive way—in other words, empirical causal laws and their objects are coindividuated. As I show in closing, such laws need not be deterministic, and the non sequitur objection, recast in light of this result, further helps identify how Kant mistakenly though understandably thought that they must be.

The famous EPR article of 1935 challenged the completeness of quantum mechanics and spurred decades of theoretical and experimental research into the foundations of quantum theory. A crowning achievement of this research is the demonstration that nature cannot in general consist in noncontextual pre-measurement properties that uniquely determine possible measurement outcomes, through experimental violations of Bell inequalities and Kochen-Specker theorems. In this article, I reconstruct an argument from Niels Bohr’s writings that the reality of the Einstein-Planck-de Broglie relations alone implies that no such properties can exist for momentum and position measurements, show how this argument responds to the challenge of EPR on general physical grounds, and advance that this reconstruction shows that and how Bohr’s “complementarity” is a view of the objective content and logic of quantum theory.