COSTOS DEL SISTEMA DE INFORMACIÓN

The account sketched above may be labelled “the subjectless theory of judgement”. However, many commentators are not satisfied with the rendering in which a judging subject seems utterly irrelevant, even to the extent that it can simply disappear or amount merely to a series of psychical processes, not to any substantial unity behind them.386 They thus set out – in various ways – to argue that there is indeed room for the significance of a subject in Wittgenstein’s account, so long as we reconsider its nature: it is not an empirical, but a transcendental subject, supplying the conditions for the meaningfulness of language. They conscript to this end the Tractarian concluding considerations about the transcendental, willing subject into Wittgenstein’s account of judgement presented in 5.541-5.542, arguing that on a deeper level, this transcendental subject has a crucial role to play in providing language with meaning.

One of the commentators who elaborates on this account is H.-J. Glock, whose A Wittgenstein Dictionary repeatedly recurs to the link between a judgment and a subject. His contention is that the transcendental subject confers the meaning on words and sentences: “[i]t is the mind which gives meaning to language by breathing life into sounds and inscriptions that would otherwise be ‘dead’”.387 _{Glock summarizes Wittgenstein’s account of judgement using}

386 This account resembles Humean account of judgment in that the thinking subject (distinguishable from the empirical subject) is considered a philosophical fiction. As Hume comments in his Treatise: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (Hume, D. (1738-1740). A Treatise of Human Nature. Reprinted in: 1975, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 252.

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Wittgenstein’s conception of the thought–fact coordination, proposing that their relation “depends on the metaphysical subject, a linguistic soul which breathes life into mere signs”.388 Even if Wittgenstein relegates the description of the constituents of our thoughts to empirical psychology, in the background of his theory of judgement, there still lingers, Glock is persuaded, a silent persuasion that a transcendental subject is responsible for conferring meaning both to thoughts (mental propositions) and linguistic propositions:

“Although, under the pretext of anti-psychologism, the Tractatus relegates to empirical psychology the question of what the constituents of thoughts are, it incorporates the mentalist idea that it is the mind which gives meaning to language.”389

The transcendental subject is portrayed as supplying language with meaning by means of “acts of meaning”. Correlations link names with objects through these acts of meaning which are effected by some kind of an ostensive definition: “the connection between words (names) and their meanings (referents) is established by ostensive definition, which establishes a mental association between word and object”.390 _{According to Glock, the correlations between names} and objects thus rest on our carrying out the act of ostensive definition, i.e. pointing at the objects with the intention to call them by particular names. This act of pointing gives meaning to the names and, subsequently, the whole of language. It, however, cannot be performed by an empirical subject which is “merely a complex of the psychic elements that are to be correlated with objects”.391 _{Therefore, it is “[a]rguably performed by the will of the metaphysical self”.}392

Glock quotes Wittgenstein’s assertion from the Notebooks to the effect that correlating words with their referents is something we do393: “By my correlating the components of the picture with objects, it [the picture] comes to represent a situation and to be right or wrong”.394 This means, according to Glock, that forging the correlations amounts to our thinking the sense of a proposition. This, in turn, implies that the use of a meaningful proposition produces a thought which must incessantly accompany speaking.395

Before commenting on this nontrivial claim, let’s consider one other author who draws 388 Ibid., p. 350. 389 Ibid., p. 249. 390 Ibid., p. 41. 391 Ibid., p. 250. 392 Ibid., p. 350. 393 Ibid., p. 278.

394 Wittgenstein, NB, 26. 11. 1914; emphasis in the original. 395 Glock, 1996, p. 358.

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a link between the account of a judgement and transcendental subject, namely Anthony Kenny. In his article Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Mind he, like Glock, highlights Wittgenstein’s emphasis on us conferring meaning to language. True, Wittgenstein also repeats that this meaning is a matter of mere convention.396 However, Kenny argues, there must be some “acts of will that confer the meaning, that set up the conventions”.397

These acts cannot, Kenny argues, be located in the empirical subject – because if they were, he claims, they would be susceptible to the study of natural science and therefore “incapable of the ineffable activity of conferring meaning”.398 _{Therefore, it must be the} metaphysical subject, whose activity is ineffable in a meaningful language, but whose proper functioning is presupposed by this language, and who is the ultimate source of the meaning- attribution within the domain of language. This argument which Kenny employs is, however, circular: the conclusion which Kenny draws (that the empirical subject, studiable by empirical psychology, is incapable of ineffable meaning-conferring activity) is presupposed already in the initial notion of the “empirical subject” – it is a subject studiable by empirical psychology in the notion of which it is already included that it cannot account for the explanation of meaning.

Kenny, in common with Glock, refers to Wittgenstein’s discussion regarding the subject of the will as providing further details about the transcendental subject which provides language with meaning – it amounts to the metaphysical subject and a “pure will of the extra-mundane solipsistic metaphysical self” which provides our thoughts with meaning.399 _{Pursuing the}

distinction between empirical and metaphysical (willing, transcendental) subject, Kenny reminds us that we need to pay particular attention to properly distinguishing psychological considerations which can merely describe thoughts as particular configurations of psychic elements and the transcendental inquiry into the sources of meaning of these thoughts:

“In the thought itself, perhaps, we can distinguish between the particular mental configuration, studiable by psychology, and the significance or

intentionality of that configuration, conferred by the metaphysical self.”400

While the considerations regarding the configuration of psychic elements relate merely

396 Wittgenstein emphasizes the arbitrariness of correlations in the Notebooks, e.g. 15. 10., 22. 10. and 3. 11. 1914.

397 Kenny, 1981, p. 146. 398 Ibid.

399 Ibid., p. 147. 400 Ibid., p. 146.

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to empirical, contingent facts about our thinking, Wittgenstein’s interest is, under Glock’s and Kenny’s interpretations, directed towards the sphere of the “logical and intentional” (as Kenny formulates it), represented by the meaning-conferring acts carried out by the transcendental subject.401 To summarize, both Glock and Kenny assert that behind Wittgenstein’s account of meaning, there is the presupposition of a metaphysical subject who supplies names with meanings, i.e. sets up meaningful correlations between names and objects and, by doing this, provides the language as a whole with meaning. We may call this subject “transcendental” in the sense that it represents a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of language – without the transcendental subject’s correlating names and objects, language would not be intentional and would not represent anything external to itself.