Wittgenstein on Vaihinger and Frazer

Carlos Alves Pereira

doi:10.15845/nwr.v4i1.3274

Abstract

In this paper I demonstrate the connection between the single remark Wittgenstein made explicitly on Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des als ob and the remarks he made on Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. After a critical-genetic exposition of the relevant material, I offer an interpretation of that connection, which will require that I interpret the remark on the philosophy of “as if” relative to how Wittgenstein seems to regard Vaihinger’s fictionalism and relative to how Wittgenstein reads Frazer.

Highlights

TS 233a: 54 shows that the remark is typed along with two others on one out of a number of fragments attached to the page
A comparison between both items (TS 233a: 54 and TS 211: 281) shows how the context of the remarks quoted above differs in terms of their neighbouring text, notably the immediately following remark in TS 211: 281, which reads: In den alten Riten haben wir den Gebrauch einer äusserst ausgebildeten Gebärdensprache
For the sake of precision I should mention that, in his editions of the remarks on The Golden Bough, Rush Rhees quotes Drury as saying that they had read Frazer in 1930, while in his own “Conversations with Wittgenstein” Drury places their reading of Frazer in 1931, as Klagge and Nordmann point out (PO: 115)

Summary

Vaihinger’s fictionalism

Apart from the remark on which the current paper focuses, there is to my knowledge no other evidence that Wittgenstein had read Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des als ob. This time, instead of saying that all discourse is fictional (except that very proclamation), Vaihinger recognizes that there are, many true propositions Having established this point, he goes on to distinguish between useless and useful false propositions, as an attempt to defend the idea that falsehood can very often be methodologically (scientifically) desirable. While Vaihinger’s idea of fiction, under the present terms, is entirely dependent on the conception of language as corresponding to the world, the fact that he claims that fictions are of practical use makes him a pragmatist of sorts, for he is saying that what matters most is not so much truth but, whatever is working, his is “a view of pragmatism differing from that of James and Peirce” and “closer to capturing Poincaré’s philosophy” (Bouriau 2009: 223) – which is just another way of saying that his notion of usefulness is always considered in relation to falsehood. Trapped between the claim that we can get at Truth and the idea that science uses fictions (and not considering his sweeping sceptical proclamations), Vaihinger’s view would require a robust argument (which he does not have) explaining how we can make the simple distinction between true and false propositions (useful or not), other than his repeated appeal to the reader according to which it is “obvious” that such-and-such is a fiction or that so-andso is not (Vaihinger 1935: 61, 110, 117, 144, 176, 240)

The remark on Vaihinger in Zettel

The Golden Bough and Die Philosophie des Als Ob