Theories of Semantics on theWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 92

4.3.1 Logical Atomism

Obviously, the use of some kind of formal logic to determine what could satisfy a
name was appealing, as it appeared that semantics could possibly become a science
on the same footing as, say, physics. The roots of the descriptivist theory of reference
lay with the confluence of philosophers inspired by this vision who are known as
logical positivists and logical atomists , whose most systematic proponents were
Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell respectively. Although logical positivism is
a vast school of thought that has proven tremendously influential, even in its current
discredited state, for our purposes we will only concern ourselves with one particular
doctrine common to both logical positivism and logical atomism, the problem of
how natural language terms relate to logical descriptions, and logical descriptions
to the world. The difference between the two schools is mainly one of focus, for
the logical positivists hoped to rid the world of metaphysical and epistemological
statements through the use of logic and empiricism, while logical atomists thought
that the basics of metaphysics and even our epistemology should be phrased in terms
of logic over elementary sense-data.
The logical positivists and Bertrand Russell were inspired by Wittgenstein's
early philosophical work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . In it, Wittgenstein
strongly argues for logical atomism ,that logic is the true language of the world;
“logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror image of the world” for “the facts
in logical space” are the world (1921). So logical statements are “laid against
reality like a measure” (1921). This is possible because the world is metaphysically
determinate at its base, being composed of “simple” and “unalterable” objects
that “make up the substance of the world” so that “the configuration of objects
produces states of affairs” where “the totality of existing states of affairs is the
world” (Wittgenstein 1921). In other words, there is no - as Brian Cantwell Smith
would put it - “flex” or “slop” in this picture, no underlying “metaphysical flux”
that somehow resists easily being constrained into these fully determinate “objects”
(1996). Although the nature of the world consists of true logical facts, humans, since
they “picture facts” to themselves, can nonetheless make false logical statements,
since these pictures merely “model reality” (Wittgenstein 1921). Contrary to his
own logical atomist teacher Russell, Wittgenstein thought that the primary job
of the logician is then to state true facts, and “what we cannot speak about” in
the form of true logical statements “we must pass over in silence,” a phrase he
believed was consistently misinterpreted by logical positivism (Wittgenstein 1921).
Note that unlike the more mature standpoint of Hayes, the early logical atomism
of Wittgenstein allowed logical statements to directly refer to single things in the
world, i.e. young Wittgenstein and the logical positivists reified the formal model to
be the world itself.
Carnap's ultimate goal was to use this logical empiricism to render any scientific
hypothesis either verifiable by sense experience or not. According to Carnap, in his
The Logical Structure of the World , all statements (at least, “scientific” statements
with “cognitive content”) can be reduced to logical statements, where the content
of this logical language is given by sensory experiences (1928). These “elementary