Ideal Languages

Wittgenstein, Jamie Smith argues, “relativizes the claims of logic without simply rejecting them.” He rejects not logic but “logical foundationalism” that takes logic as an “ideal language” that functions as “the norm for all languages” (Who’s Afraid of Relativism?58).

It’s possible to see logic as such an ideal language, but Wittgenstein points out that “the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the world ‘ideal is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to show people at last what a proper sentence looked like” (59, Wittgenstein’s words).

Logic aims to be a “sublime,” a base at the “bottom of all the sciences” that could “see to the bottom of things.” In striving to be sublime, logic became a language that, in Smith’s terms, “is eviscerated of contingency and particularity.” Wittgenstein is happy to concede we can play the language-game of logic but he does not, as Smith says, think it’s a helpful “account of how we embodied, finite, contingent, dependent creatures make our way in the world” (59).