John Preston

Natural-scientific Laws in the Tractatus and Schlick

In early December 1914, while still serving aboard the Goplana, Wittgenstein entered into his notebooks certain remarks on mechanics. These remarks eventually became propositions 6.341-6.343 of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I begin by discussing the probability that the core of these ideas pre-dates everything else in his Tractatus.

My paper then traces the impact of the ideas on science from the Tractatus on Moritz Schlick. I show firstly that, prior to his contact with Wittgenstein, Schlick endorsed a general perspective on science which I characterise as ‘descriptivist’, and which can be traced back to Ernst Mach. But I then show how, and when, Schlick introduced into his thinking about science a version of instrumentalism about natural-scientific laws and theories, which had its origin in these ideas from the Tractatus.

John Preston is the author of Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society, (Polity Press, 1997), and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: A Reader’s Guide, (Continuum, 2008). He has recently edited a volume of thirteen new papers on Ernst Mach, Interpreting Mach: Critical Essays, (Cambridge University Press 2021). He is now working on a monograph, Wittgenstein and the Great Philosopher-Physicists, covering the influence of Helmholtz, Mach, Hertz, Boltzmann, and Einstein on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s remarks on science, and the impact Wittgenstein’s philosophy had on the philosophy of science. He is also the constructor of www.wittgensteinchronology.com and the popular Facebook page ‘Wittgenstein Day-by-Day’.