Can we reduce Wittgenstein's claims of human language being limited by some actual propositions about the limits of language?

Question

Wittgenstein argued that there are limits to what language can do, and that our attempts to use language to describe the world can sometimes lead us into confusion and error. He believed that many philosophical problems arise from our attempts to use language to express things that are beyond its capacity to represent.

But one thing is I don't think he was able to exactly point out what these limits are and come up with a list of propositions on what language can do and language cannot do. Is this true or not?

Answer 1

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

5.61 Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also its limits

So we cannot say in logic "the world has this in it, and this, but not this"... we cannot think what we cannot say

He seems to claim that we can "show" and "mean" things that we cannot "think" or "say", such as solipsism and the limits of language in general. The preface says

in order to draw a limit to Thinking [Denken], we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)

Answer 2

All I know is Wittgenstein's claim that meaning is use; phrased differently, words lack an essence.
Since philosophy is predicated on extracting the form/essence of words, Wittgenstein "essentially" scuppers the project. Has a Kurt Gödelian vibe to it.

Answer 3

Can we reduce Wittgenstein's claims of human language being limited by some actual propositions about the limits of language?

I'm not sure what you mean by reduce, but we can exemplify:

1. Language can never describe reality fully. We can build more and more sophisticated models of reality, but we can never build models as complex as physical reality itself. Consider the Uncertainty Principle. Some things are unknowable, and if they cannot be known, they cannot be expressed with language.

2. Language cannot be treated as identical to physical reality. That is, if we expect language to behave like physical objects we represent with it, we will run into problems. Consider the map-territory relation. If you think you can physically manipulate a square, then you are wrong. You can at best manipulate an approximation of a square.

3. One cannot use language to decide if some problem can be solved algorithmically. Consider the Entscheidungsproblem. It is logically certain that one cannot determine if a problem in logic expressed in the axioms of logic are provably logically certain.

4. Language cannot alone determine if something physical exists. Consider Russell's teapot. You can argue until your blue in the face from a priori principles that a tea pot exists in orbit, but no measure of language use actually is sufficient for determining if the tea pot is there, since it is an a posteriori fact.

5. Language does not allow you to transfer complete meaning by invoking itself. Consider a fully circular definition. Hoden in German means Hoden. If you have no understanding of a word, you cannot transfer the meaning of the word itself. If all words are defined by other words alone, there would be the problem of where meaning comes from.

There are many limits to language, and many suprising uses of it too. Consider that an imaginary number is something which exists as a first-class number with the definition predicated upon a contradiction of existence, or dialethia are meaningful contradictions.

Answer 4

Wittgenstein speaks of "hinge propositions" in this connection:

That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn […] But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put (OC 341–343).

Neither knowable nor doubtable, for Wittgenstein, Moore’s “obvious truisms of the commonsense” are “hinges” (OC 341–343): apparently empirical contingent beliefs which perform a different, basic role in our epistemic practices.

Now consider Chomskian doctrines about language acquisition: we need linguistic schemata as much as, or even more than, we need individual cases (or, we have some schema ready at hand in our minds and we are prompted, by evolved neural wiring, to apply these schema to cases). Or this can be granted regardless of whether one traces this insight to Chomsky specifically. Anyway, the point would be that "the limits of language," as a phrase (in a language!), can have a schematic value, and then we will find not so much a "canonical" list of the same hinges upon which everyone's doors swing, but common types of hinges for the many and varied such doors (as can be peculiar to particular people).

It is difficult, for example, to argue, even with oneself, about the "existence" or non-hallucinatory status of the physical world, since one will tend to voice doubts aloud, either by literally speaking them aloud, or by writing them in public. There is a pragmatic catch in trying to prove, to someone else, that that someone else has no proof that the person they are speaking with (you!) is "real" as opposed to a philosophical zombie. And there is one contributor to this site who has emphasized that denying the existence of language, while using language, seems self-defeating enough such as to prove that language exists (which we might hyperbolically doubt, after all).

But so unfortunately or not, hinge propositions might be construed as "incorrigible," or as close to incorrigible (one might neither substantively agree, nor actively disagree, with a hinge; but one might also be reliably disposed to reason from some possible hinges but not others; whether this disposition is even an internal justifier for the higher-order claim that some or another first-order claim is a hinge, I will not argue here except to point out that we might argue about/on the level of such metaclaims, too; and the ability to imagine extending our reflection to indefinitely higher and higher orders either indicates an order-based limit in one linguistic direction but not in all directions (one limit out of however many, that is, then)).

Answer 5

Clearly it is possible to define some of the limitations of language.

It might be possible to define in a complete way what falls within the scope of language.

It is not possible to define in a complete way what lies outside the scope of language, since that would require what is outside the scope to be expressed in terms of what is inside the scope.