Proposition 4.1121 of the Tractatus states that epistemology
is the philosophy of psychology. What should we take
this to mean? Philosophy, on Tractarian terms, is an
activity by which thoughts are clarified. This activity ranges
from checking terms to see if they have meaning to
investigating a network for its regularity. Epistemology,
then, would be the philosophical analysis and clarification
of any possible psychology, although it is not clear what a
psychology on Tractarian terms would be. Understanding
what such a psychology might be is necessary if we are to
understand better what this epistemology would demand
of us; however, to approach such an understanding, we
will need to attend to the notion of subjectivity at work in
the Tractatus and to the way it is related to thought and
logic

Armstrong, Brian

English

Elektronisch archivierte Theorie - Sammelpunkt

  22
The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early 
Wittgenstein’s Epistemology 
Brian Armstrong, University Park / Pennsylvania 
Proposition 4.1121 of the Tractatus states that epistemol-
ogy is the philosophy of psychology. What should we take 
this to mean? Philosophy, on Tractarian terms, is an 
activity by which thoughts are clarified. This activity ranges 
from checking terms to see if they have meaning to 
investigating a network for its regularity. Epistemology, 
then, would be the philosophical analysis and clarification 
of any possible psychology, although it is not clear what a 
psychology on Tractarian terms would be. Understanding 
what such a psychology might be is necessary if we are to 
understand better what this epistemology would demand 
of us; however, to approach such an understanding, we 
will need to attend to the notion of subjectivity at work in 
the Tractatus and to the way it is related to thought and 
logic. 
According to the Tractatus, thought is able to picture a 
possible world because both world and thought always 
have something in common: they have a shared logical 
form. However, this logical form is not itself a thing in the 
world that can be pictured. Instead, it can only be shown. 
This simple metaphysics sets up two pressing questions, 
both of which have epistemological implications. The first 
question is: what insures the unidirectional nature of this 
logically grounded thought-world relation? Presumably, 
this insurance is not an empirical matter; however, it would 
nevertheless give us the parameters within which any 
possible psychology would have to be developed. It would 
put constraints on what an empirical agent could be. The 
second is: what, exactly, is the ontological status of 
something that can only be shown (such as logical form)? 
The epistemological implication would be found in the 
need for any possible psychology of the actual empirical 
agents in this world to deal with how we have ‘access’ (if 
that proves to be the right word) to something shown.  
With respect to the first question, the problem is that the 
picture that presents a state of affairs is a fact, while the 
state of affairs presented is also a fact. Thus, in picturing, 
we have a fact-fact relation. However, if left as it is, there is 
nothing in this relation to tell us which fact is the picture 
and which fact is the state of affairs. The absurd possibility 
of taking the world as a picture of the thought arises. This 
cannot be so, but how does the Tractatus avoid this ab-
surdity? Two responses are possible: one is that there is 
something in the thought itself that insures this unidirec-
tional relation; the other is that this is the function of the 
metaphysical subject. 
If thoughts were to have something in them that insured 
this unidirectional relation, it is not clear what it would be. 
The thought must have the same mathematical multiplicity 
as the state of affairs that it pictures, and so there could be 
nothing additional in the picture that provided or insured 
this relation. There is, of course, the logical form of the 
thought, which is not a part of the thought’s multiplicity, but 
this form is a matter of the internal relation of the members 
of this multiplicity. This form gives the thought its sense, 
but this sense is “independent of the facts” (4.061). It is 
only put into relation with the facts through “the method of 
projection,” which is “the thinking of the sense of the 
proposition” (3.11). The thought then becomes, via the 
propositional sign through which it is expressed, the 
proposition, which is “the propositional sign in its projective 
relation to the world” (3.12). It is this projection, which is 
not itself part of the thought, that puts the thought into 
relation with reality. The thought itself is independent of the 
facts and cannot put itself into relation with them. 
So who, or what, engages in the activity of projection? 
Without this ‘who,’ thought will not be put into a relation 
with the world that is to be thought. This ‘who’ is thus 
necessary not just to insure the unidirectional relation of 
thought and world; it is necessary if there is to be any 
meaningful relation between them at all. It would seem that 
the only candidate for the ‘who’ is the metaphysical sub-
ject, since “there is no such thing as the soul – the subject, 
etc. – as it is conceived in contemporary superficial psy-
chology” (5.5421) and “there is no such thing as the think-
ing, presenting subject” (5.631). There is no such thing 
because there are no propositional attitudes, and so it 
makes no sense to speak in terms of someone who thinks 
that such and such is the case (5.541). 
But how do we make sense of the fact that Wittgenstein 
then seems to qualify this ‘there is no such thing’ by saying 
that “there is therefore really a sense in which in philoso-
phy we can talk of a non-psychological I” (5.641)? This 
philosophical I is the metaphysical subject, which “does not 
belong to the world but is a limit of the world” (5.632). We 
have here something that is, ontologically speaking, quite 
odd: we have something about which we can talk and yet 
which is not. The subject is, in this oddness, similar to 
logic, which also limits the world. It is here that the ques-
tion of how the unidirectional relation is insured dovetails 
with the question of the ontological status of logic: it would 
seem that the metaphysical subject is what must insure 
this relation, and this subject raises the same ontological 
perplexity raised by logic itself.  
However, before we deal with this ontological perplexity, 
I still need to address the way in which the metaphysical 
subject could be thought to insure the unidirectional rela-
tion. One common approach is to treat the metaphysical 
subject as an entity of some kind, such as a transcenden-
tal ego, and to attribute some kind of activity to it. Wittgen-
stein himself never attributes any activity to this subject, 
and it is difficult to think of a limit that does not belong to 
the world as engaging in an activity. The main reason for 
this attribution of activity to the metaphysical subject 
stems, I suggest, from the contiguity of the propositions in 
which he discusses these things. The idea is that, although 
there is no thinking, presenting subject in the world, there 
must be one that does not belong to the world. Thus, the 
subject that does not belong to the world – the metaphysi-
cal subject – is the very thinking, presenting subject that is 
not, with ‘is not’ being read as ‘is not something in the 
world.’  
This reading of the metaphysical subject as an active 
entity that does the thinking that we experience seems to 
raise the very problems that are supposed to vanish as a 
result of the Tractatus. For if the metaphysical subject 
does in fact do the thinking that we experience, we must 
explain how this metaphysical entity is related to the em-
pirical agents who are subject to this activity. It seems to 
raise the specter of Cartesian dualism: how is this thinking 
The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early Wittgenstein’s Epistemology - Brian Armstrong 
 
 
 23
thing related to the bodies that give us the very things 
about which we think? But, again, this seems to be the 
type of thing that Wittgenstein sees his logical atomism 
and picture theory of meaning as solving: it solves such 
problems by showing them to be nonsense. They are not 
problems at all.  
If this is the case – if the metaphysical subject under-
stood in this way leads to a troubling dualism – then what 
other way is there to understand the metaphysical subject? 
The answer seems to be that it is a condition for the possi-
bility of determinate meaning. One such condition must be 
that pictures are pictures of the world, and this is insured 
through the necessary orientation that takes place in any 
thinking: thinking thinks its world. Since neither world nor 
thought insures this relation, there must be something else 
that does, and this is the subject. And since this subject 
cannot be a part of the world, it must, like logic, be some-
thing transcendental. It does not do the thinking, but it 
somehow speaks to a necessity that takes place in think-
ing.  
But then who does the thinking, and how, exactly, does 
the metaphysical subject provide a condition for such 
thinking without being reified as an ego of some kind? The 
answer is, I think, that psychological agents do the think-
ing. However, they do not do it as subjects. In other words, 
there is thinking in the world, there is just no thinking sub-
ject. Wittgenstein is rejecting subjectivity as a philosophical 
problem in which philosophers try to get at the conditions 
for any possible thinking by speaking of an entity that is 
pure and that is beyond the world. On the terms of the 
Tractatus, there is no possibility of such an entity or of 
access to it. There is only the world that thought can give. 
The only condition for my thinking this world (my world) is 
that I must do so through some medium in which thoughts 
can be expressed. Thinking must take place in a language, 
and this will be the language of the one who thinks: it will 
be my language (and I cannot have a language that is not 
mine). Thought will then be limited by what it is possible to 
express within my language, and so the notion of the 
metaphysical subject seems to mark our subjection to 
expression as well as to the thinking of a world. 
This leads us to our second question: what is the onto-
logical status of these limits (the metaphysical subject and 
logic) that make thought possible? They are not features of 
the physical universe: although they are limits of it, they do 
not belong to it. Nor are they features of the internal ex-
perience of human agents; such internality does not in fact 
stand as a separate realm (from the physical universe) for 
the early Wittgenstein. Nor do they exist in some platonic 
‘third realm’ as timeless, non-mental, non-material entities. 
How, then, are we to think the nature of that which has no 
substance?  
As long as we think in terms of some kind of entity – a 
thing or substance that stands in relation to other things or 
substances – we will continuously fall prey to metaphysical 
temptations. Instead, we must attempt to think the notion 
of limit differently. For instance, if we strip away everything 
in the proposition that is its perceptible cloak, we would be 
left with nothing. Yet we cannot think without some me-
dium through which to express the thoughts, and we can-
not think without some possible world that is thought. This 
medium – language – will only enable me to say a limited 
number of things (I can only say what is possible within it), 
and so any possible world will be delimited by it. I simply 
will not be able to think a thought that I cannot somehow 
express. In this sense, the subject limits the world: it des-
ignates our subjection to what our language enables. 
Further, this limit can only be sensed, as it were, from the 
inside: only by actually putting propositions out before 
ourselves can we see if they’ll make sense, just as we 
must actually put them up against a world to see if they are 
true. The limit is thus encountered only in investigation.  
In our investigation of what we say, we are not dealing 
with the appearance of something hidden that exists apart 
from the appearances. There is, so to speak, nothing but 
appearances and nothing can be extracted from them 
except more appearances, i.e. more description. The 
notion of appearance thus ceases to be useful. Such a 
notion suggests that there might be some transcendental 
rails that we follow in our investigations and that make 
these investigations possible, but Wittgenstein rejects the 
notion of something noumenal that exists behind what is 
said. There aren’t tracks that we follow but limits that we 
come up against. These limits aren’t transcendental in the 
sense of being beyond the world. The point is that there is 
no world beyond the limits of thought.  
Whatever we gather up from this and set aside will not 
capture the essence of logic or the subject; it will only 
better enable us to describe the world. We could never 
think this logic or subject, but there would be no need. 
Instead, the Tractatus would require that the problem of 
the ontology of logic and subject vanish: it cannot make 
sense, and so there can be no answer to it. However, if we 
trust to the necessity of logic and to its assumption that 
“names have a meaning, and that elementary propositions 
have sense” (6.124), then we can get down to the impor-
tant business of exploring the world that happens to be the 
case. This exploration will depend on our physiological and 
psychological capacities, and one important task will be to 
have as accurate a sense of these capacities as possible. 
It is here that we begin to see the impact these consid-
erations have for epistemology. They are twofold. The first 
is that epistemology, which is the philosophy of psychol-
ogy, will have to deal with thinking and how it empirically 
takes place. How the psychological theory itself comes 
about is not important; it will most likely rest on inductive 
means that have no logical foundation (6.3631). But its 
task will be to account for the causal means by which we 
make pictures to ourselves and then test them against the 
actual world we picture. However, in doing so, such a 
theory will not be able – logically – to rely upon the notion 
of subjectivity. This would then be one of the tasks for 
philosophy (which, as Wittgenstein stresses, is an activity 
and not a matter of doctrine) with respect to psychology: it 
would have to correct any possible psychology when it 
attempted to speak of such a subject. Second, epistemol-
ogy will be in large part a matter of the investigation of 
language, since the world that I attempt to know is given to 
me as knowable in thought. This even points to a positive 
dimension for philosophy: by analyzing the language with 
which we think the world, we can come to see its inade-
quacies (if there are any, which at present there certainly 
are) and be moved to find better means of expression.
 


The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early
Wittgenstein"s Epistemology

Name not available

  22The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early Wittgenstein’s Epistemology Brian Armstrong, University Park / Pennsylvania Proposition 4.1121 of the Tractatus states that epistemol-ogy is the philosophy of psychology. What should we take this to mean? Philosophy, on Tractarian terms, is an activity by which thoughts are clarified. This activity ranges from checking terms to see if they have meaning to investigating a network for its regularity. Epistemology, then, would be the philosophical analysis and clarification of any possible psychology, although it is not clear what a psychology on Tractarian terms would be. Understanding what such a psychology might be is necessary if we are to understand better what this epistemology would demand of us; however, to approach such an understanding, we will need to attend to the notion of subjectivity at work in the Tractatus and to the way it is related to thought and logic. According to the Tractatus, thought is able to picture a possible world because both world and thought always have something in common: they have a shared logical form. However, this logical form is not itself a thing in the world that can be pictured. Instead, it can only be shown. This simple metaphysics sets up two pressing questions, both of which have epistemological implications. The first question is: what insures the unidirectional nature of this logically grounded thought-world relation? Presumably, this insurance is not an empirical matter; however, it would nevertheless give us the parameters within which any possible psychology would have to be developed. It would put constraints on what an empirical agent could be. The second is: what, exactly, is the ontological status of something that can only be shown (such as logical form)? The epistemological implication would be found in the need for any possible psychology of the actual empirical agents in this world to deal with how we have ‘access’ (if that proves to be the right word) to something shown.  With respect to the first question, the problem is that the picture that presents a state of affairs is a fact, while the state of affairs presented is also a fact. Thus, in picturing, we have a fact-fact relation. However, if left as it is, there is nothing in this relation to tell us which fact is the picture and which fact is the state of affairs. The absurd possibility of taking the world as a picture of the thought arises. This cannot be so, but how does the Tractatus avoid this ab-surdity? Two responses are possible: one is that there is something in the thought itself that insures this unidirec-tional relation; the other is that this is the function of the metaphysical subject. If thoughts were to have something in them that insured this unidirectional relation, it is not clear what it would be. The thought must have the same mathematical multiplicity as the state of affairs that it pictures, and so there could be nothing additional in the picture that provided or insured this relation. There is, of course, the logical form of the thought, which is not a part of the thought’s multiplicity, but this form is a matter of the internal relation of the members of this multiplicity. This form gives the thought its sense, but this sense is “independent of the facts” (4.061). It is only put into relation with the facts through “the method of projection,” which is “the thinking of the sense of the proposition” (3.11). The thought then becomes, via the propositional sign through which it is expressed, the proposition, which is “the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world” (3.12). It is this projection, which is not itself part of the thought, that puts the thought into relation with reality. The thought itself is independent of the facts and cannot put itself into relation with them. So who, or what, engages in the activity of projection? Without this ‘who,’ thought will not be put into a relation with the world that is to be thought. This ‘who’ is thus necessary not just to insure the unidirectional relation of thought and world; it is necessary if there is to be any meaningful relation between them at all. It would seem that the only candidate for the ‘who’ is the metaphysical sub-ject, since “there is no such thing as the soul – the subject, etc. – as it is conceived in contemporary superficial psy-chology” (5.5421) and “there is no such thing as the think-ing, presenting subject” (5.631). There is no such thing because there are no propositional attitudes, and so it makes no sense to speak in terms of someone who thinks that such and such is the case (5.541). But how do we make sense of the fact that Wittgenstein then seems to qualify this ‘there is no such thing’ by saying that “there is therefore really a sense in which in philoso-phy we can talk of a non-psychological I” (5.641)? This philosophical I is the metaphysical subject, which “does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world” (5.632). We have here something that is, ontologically speaking, quite odd: we have something about which we can talk and yet which is not. The subject is, in this oddness, similar to logic, which also limits the world. It is here that the ques-tion of how the unidirectional relation is insured dovetails with the question of the ontological status of logic: it would seem that the metaphysical subject is what must insure this relation, and this subject raises the same ontological perplexity raised by logic itself.  However, before we deal with this ontological perplexity, I still need to address the way in which the metaphysical subject could be thought to insure the unidirectional rela-tion. One common approach is to treat the metaphysical subject as an entity of some kind, such as a transcenden-tal ego, and to attribute some kind of activity to it. Wittgen-stein himself never attributes any activity to this subject, and it is difficult to think of a limit that does not belong to the world as engaging in an activity. The main reason for this attribution of activity to the metaphysical subject stems, I suggest, from the contiguity of the propositions in which he discusses these things. The idea is that, although there is no thinking, presenting subject in the world, there must be one that does not belong to the world. Thus, the subject that does not belong to the world – the metaphysi-cal subject – is the very thinking, presenting subject that is not, with ‘is not’ being read as ‘is not something in the world.’  This reading of the metaphysical subject as an active entity that does the thinking that we experience seems to raise the very problems that are supposed to vanish as a result of the Tractatus. For if the metaphysical subject does in fact do the thinking that we experience, we must explain how this metaphysical entity is related to the em-pirical agents who are subject to this activity. It seems to raise the specter of Cartesian dualism: how is this thinking The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early Wittgenstein’s Epistemology - Brian Armstrong    23thing related to the bodies that give us the very things about which we think? But, again, this seems to be the type of thing that Wittgenstein sees his logical atomism and picture theory of meaning as solving: it solves such problems by showing them to be nonsense. They are not problems at all.  If this is the case – if the metaphysical subject under-stood in this way leads to a troubling dualism – then what other way is there to understand the metaphysical subject? The answer seems to be that it is a condition for the possi-bility of determinate meaning. One such condition must be that pictures are pictures of the world, and this is insured through the necessary orientation that takes place in any thinking: thinking thinks its world. Since neither world nor thought insures this relation, there must be something else that does, and this is the subject. And since this subject cannot be a part of the world, it must, like logic, be some-thing transcendental. It does not do the thinking, but it somehow speaks to a necessity that takes place in think-ing.  But then who does the thinking, and how, exactly, does the metaphysical subject provide a condition for such thinking without being reified as an ego of some kind? The answer is, I think, that psychological agents do the think-ing. However, they do not do it as subjects. In other words, there is thinking in the world, there is just no thinking sub-ject. Wittgenstein is rejecting subjectivity as a philosophical problem in which philosophers try to get at the conditions for any possible thinking by speaking of an entity that is pure and that is beyond the world. On the terms of the Tractatus, there is no possibility of such an entity or of access to it. There is only the world that thought can give. The only condition for my thinking this world (my world) is that I must do so through some medium in which thoughts can be expressed. Thinking must take place in a language, and this will be the language of the one who thinks: it will be my language (and I cannot have a language that is not mine). Thought will then be limited by what it is possible to express within my language, and so the notion of the metaphysical subject seems to mark our subjection to expression as well as to the thinking of a world. This leads us to our second question: what is the onto-logical status of these limits (the metaphysical subject and logic) that make thought possible? They are not features of the physical universe: although they are limits of it, they do not belong to it. Nor are they features of the internal ex-perience of human agents; such internality does not in fact stand as a separate realm (from the physical universe) for the early Wittgenstein. Nor do they exist in some platonic ‘third realm’ as timeless, non-mental, non-material entities. How, then, are we to think the nature of that which has no substance?  As long as we think in terms of some kind of entity – a thing or substance that stands in relation to other things or substances – we will continuously fall prey to metaphysical temptations. Instead, we must attempt to think the notion of limit differently. For instance, if we strip away everything in the proposition that is its perceptible cloak, we would be left with nothing. Yet we cannot think without some me-dium through which to express the thoughts, and we can-not think without some possible world that is thought. This medium – language – will only enable me to say a limited number of things (I can only say what is possible within it), and so any possible world will be delimited by it. I simply will not be able to think a thought that I cannot somehow express. In this sense, the subject limits the world: it des-ignates our subjection to what our language enables. Further, this limit can only be sensed, as it were, from the inside: only by actually putting propositions out before ourselves can we see if they’ll make sense, just as we must actually put them up against a world to see if they are true. The limit is thus encountered only in investigation.  In our investigation of what we say, we are not dealing with the appearance of something hidden that exists apart from the appearances. There is, so to speak, nothing but appearances and nothing can be extracted from them except more appearances, i.e. more description. The notion of appearance thus ceases to be useful. Such a notion suggests that there might be some transcendental rails that we follow in our investigations and that make these investigations possible, but Wittgenstein rejects the notion of something noumenal that exists behind what is said. There aren’t tracks that we follow but limits that we come up against. These limits aren’t transcendental in the sense of being beyond the world. The point is that there is no world beyond the limits of thought.  Whatever we gather up from this and set aside will not capture the essence of logic or the subject; it will only better enable us to describe the world. We could never think this logic or subject, but there would be no need. Instead, the Tractatus would require that the problem of the ontology of logic and subject vanish: it cannot make sense, and so there can be no answer to it. However, if we trust to the necessity of logic and to its assumption that “names have a meaning, and that elementary propositions have sense” (6.124), then we can get down to the impor-tant business of exploring the world that happens to be the case. This exploration will depend on our physiological and psychological capacities, and one important task will be to have as accurate a sense of these capacities as possible. It is here that we begin to see the impact these consid-erations have for epistemology. They are twofold. The first is that epistemology, which is the philosophy of psychol-ogy, will have to deal with thinking and how it empirically takes place. How the psychological theory itself comes about is not important; it will most likely rest on inductive means that have no logical foundation (6.3631). But its task will be to account for the causal means by which we make pictures to ourselves and then test them against the actual world we picture. However, in doing so, such a theory will not be able – logically – to rely upon the notion of subjectivity. This would then be one of the tasks for philosophy (which, as Wittgenstein stresses, is an activity and not a matter of doctrine) with respect to psychology: it would have to correct any possible psychology when it attempted to speak of such a subject. Second, epistemol-ogy will be in large part a matter of the investigation of language, since the world that I attempt to know is given to me as knowable in thought. This even points to a positive dimension for philosophy: by analyzing the language with which we think the world, we can come to see its inade-quacies (if there are any, which at present there certainly are) and be moved to find better means of expression. 

The Metaphysical Subject as Background to the Early Wittgenstein"s Epistemology

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