Wittgenstein Propositional Meaning Of Certainty Study

The main purpose of the dissertation is to research the problem of the certainty ofthe propositional sense in Wittgenstein's philosophy, and to try, at the same time, toget an interpretation of the early and the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. The paperconsists of the preface, the introduction, the four-chapter text and the conclusion. In the preface, I explain the meaning of the problem of the propositional certainty,and also introduce the significance and some original ideas of the dissertation. In the introduction, I elucidate the origin and the form changing of the problem ofthe propositional certainty. This problem has its primitive form in the Socrates-Plato'sphilosophy. I interpret the form of this issue in the ancient Greek philosophy,according chiefly to the Plato's dialogue Cratylus, and introduce meanwhile theconcept of proposition in the Aristotle's Interpretation and its new form in the modernmathematical logic. The first part of the text discusses the issue of the certainty of picturing (ordescribing, depicting) the world by propositions. It expatiates on the relations betweenWittgenstein's four couples of concepts: name and object, elementary proposition andstate of affairs, proposition and fact, language and the world. It then shows thepicturing property of propositions, and interprets by a case how propositions describethe world. The second part of the text aims at explaining the problem of the certainty ofmirroring the world by logic. I want, on the one hand, to explain what the generalpropositional form is by analyzing "logical constants"; on the other hand, to reveal thetautological character of the logical proposition. What every picture must have incommon with reality in order to represent it is the logical form, that is, the form ofreality. So the logical form is not the content of the world but its form of the logicalproposition mirroring the world. The logical form is the method of the proposition'sprojecting reality. In the third part of the text, I want to explain, starting with the concept of themathematical infinity, the transition that happened in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Hisresearch on philosophy has the important relations with the mathematicaldevelopment and especially with the investigations of the logicists, formalists andintuitionists on the mathematical foundation. It is, in some sense, the loss of thecertainty of mathematics knowledge that make Wittgenstein abandon his idea ofrealism of Platonism which still existing in the philosophy of Russell. It is also, at the __________________________________ iii英文摘要same time, for the reason that he accepted the viewpoint of Brouwer about therelations between mathematics, logic and language; he gave up his constructing theoversimplifying model of language and turned to investigate concrete and actual useof the ordinary language. The forth part of the text discusses the concept of language game. It elaborates therelations between the context, the grammar and the meaning in the ordinary languagegame. By investigating the language-game of doubting, I explain the difference ofmethod of refuting the philosophical skepticism between Moore's and Wittgenstein's,and illustrate the relation of the certainty to a form of life or a picture of word. In the last part of the dissertation, I list the problems that I meet but can not solve inthe course of the writing.