Logical necessity is one of the perennial problems of philosophy. Statements like ‘g = 9.81 m/sec2’ or ‘Radioactivity causes cancer’ may be physically necessary, but they are contingent: they could be false, and be refuted by new experience. By contrast, it seems that statements like ‘∼(p & ∼p)’, ‘2 + 2 = 4’, and ‘All material objects are located in space’ are necessary in a stronger sense. They do not just happen to be true, since their being false is not merely extremely improbable, but inconceivable. By the same token, disciplines like logic, mathematics and metaphysics, which seek to discover such truths, seem to be a priori, completely independent of experience.

At the turn of the century there were three accounts of this special type of truth, in particular of the ‘laws of logic’. According to psychologistic logicians like Boole, the laws of logic describe how human beings (by and large) think, their basic mental operations, and are determined by the nature of the human mind. Against this Platonists like Frege protested that logical truths are strictly necessary and objective, and that this objectivity can only be secured by assuming that their subject matter – thoughts and their structures – are not private ideas in the minds of individuals, but abstract entities inhabiting a ‘third realm’ beyond space and time. Finally, according to Russell, logical propositions are completely general truths about the most pervasive traits of reality, a view that is in some ways reminiscent of Mill's claim that mathematical propositions are well-corroborated empirical generalizations.

The nature of logical necessity preoccupied Wittgenstein from the beginning of his career, partly because he followed Russell in holding that philosophical problems are logical in nature (TLP 4.003–4.031). The early Wittgenstein took over elements of Frege's and Russell's logical systems. But his ‘philosophy of logic’, his understanding of the character of logic, and hence of philosophy, departed radically from his predecessors (TLP 4.1121, 4.126). All of the positions mentioned so far assume that logic is a science that makes statements about entities of some kind, just as empirical sciences make statements about physical objects. The ‘fundamental thought’ of the Tractatus is that this assumption is false.

Note to the Reader

The articles cited represent a sampling of the articles analyzed in the construction of Chapter 2 of this book entitled “Fin de Siècle: The Beginnings of American Empire.” These articles were selected because of their presence within authoritative or otherwise mainstream news sources covering events connected to the Spanish-American War during the latter years of the nineteenth and the earliest years of the twenty-first centuries. These news products were selected using archive and database searches that selected keywords connected to the war such as “Manila + Soldiers” or “Cuba + Fighting,” applied in a series of distinct but related searches performed over the course of research conducted for this project. Many thousands of articles were hit during the aforementioned keyword searches, and as such they are not all represented in the list to follow here. Instead, what is presented within this Appendix and throughout the Appendices of this book are those articles that are representative examples of the kind of articles uncovered during this research process and then subsequently analyzed for the critical, discursive perspective contained therein. Major publications reaching a total audience of millions were included in this sampling, though, to include news articles from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post among other authoritative news sources.

A final note regarding the sample to follow here: it was common practice during the period of the Spanish-American War for news articles to be identified using an extended article title (sometimes dozens of words long) and a publication name, date, and location. But specific journalists, editors, or authors were rarely identified in the archival examples of the original publications reviewed for the creation of this chapter. As such, the citations to follow below do not typically identify the author but rather point only to the often extended title of the news item and its publication information only.

Print News Articles

“Action Close At Hand: Land and Naval Forces of the United States Engaged in Important Movements. Cube to Be Invaded Early Next Week. Report of a Battle at Manila between Dewey's Fleet and the Spanish Forces Hourly Expected. A Portion of the Cape Verde Fleet Sails and May Be on the Way to This Country.” (1898, April 30). New York Times, 1.

Names

We saw in the last lecture that the Philosophical Investigations begins by sketching out the widely accepted, but misguided, ideas that words are essentially names and sentences are essentially combinations of names. The function of names is to stand for things. Names have a meaning and their meaning is the thing they stand for. The function of sentences is to describe how things stand. We saw that many philosophers, both linguistic realists and linguistic idealists, have succumbed to the charms of this conception. I tried to show how very tempting these ideas are. But great though the temptation is, it must be resisted, for this syndrome of ideas is misconceived.

To show that it is misconceived, what needs to be done is to survey the concepts of name, description, sentence and utterance, definition and explanation, meaning and use. When these notions have been clarified, we shall turn to the psychological notions of meaning something by a word, knowing what a word or utterance means, understanding and interpreting sentences uttered. Today, I shall start by examining the concept of a name and the idea that words are essentially names, and that the essential function of words is to stand for the things they name.

The category of names is not sharply circumscribed. Grammarians distinguish among names, between proper names and common nouns. Proper names include names of people, pets, places, times, artefacts, names of books and other works of art. Common nouns include names of kinds of things, both natural like ‘dog’ and artefactual like ‘car’. These are all count nouns – what they name are countable. Hence, they admit of plural form and take such quantifiers as ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘a few’ – as in ‘many dogs’, ‘most trees’ and ‘a few cars’. Their plural form allows combination with plural indexicals, such as ‘these’ and ‘those’, and with cardinal numbers greater than one. In addition to count nouns, there is a further category of non-count nouns, which may be concrete or abstract. Concrete non-count nouns are names of stuffs.

The Great American Lie

America is a nation at war. Between 1776 and the most recently completed year at the time of this writing, the United States has been involved in either open or clandestine warfare for 225 out of the 243 years of its existence. Said another way, America can then be considered a nation of war, not just a nation at war, wherein a foundational part of the fabric of American society, American policy, and even American identity itself is inextricably bound up in warfare. Further, and as the full scope of this study intends to show, America might be more accurately described as a nation of war given the numerous, avoidable, and unnecessary wars of choice that this country has undertaken during its 243 years of existence. In spite of the fact that the United States consistently presents itself as a reluctant combatant both at home and on the global stage, this record of bellicosity indicates that war, and the myriad forms of death and destruction that come with it, is a deeply seeded aspect of America's political identity.

Indeed, it is plain to see that American foreign policy and its attendant military-industrial complex have been dependent upon and bound up within campaigns of warfare for the majority of the country's history. And over the course of the last 125 years, the majority of that warfare has been exported to distant points on the globe, ensuring that the American landscape and both its urban and rural infrastructure have stayed all but completely intact while foisting devastation upon the citizenry of other nations from Southwest Asia, East Asia, Latin America, and many points in between. Through this period of history, the United States has seen war as a preferable policy choice even when other, far less destructive avenues of conduct on the international stage have been readily available. In the words of a former participant in some of the most brutal aspects of this macabre historical period: “If the American military-industrial complex believes anything, it's that for any problem there exists a military remedy.”

Epistemic Privacy

You will often have heard someone on the radio say ‘Of course, it is impossible really to know what other people feel’. Neuroscientists, such as Colin Blakemore, observe that ‘Although I assume that other human beings think in much the same way as I do, I have no direct evidence about their conscious minds.’ Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate, wrote ‘Strictly speaking, each individual is certain only that he himself is conscious’ and cannot be completely certain about the consciousness of others. Benjamin Libet, another renowned neuroscientist, wrote: ‘Conscious experience, as an awareness of some thing or some event, is directly accessible only to the individual having that experience, not to an external observer.’ If you examine legal casebooks, you will find judges making remarks such as: ‘Neither you nor I can ever look into the mind of the accused person and say, with positive certainty, what his intention was at any particular time’ (R. v. Charlson [1955] I All E. R. 859, at 861). This very common conception, which I have called ‘epistemic privacy of experience’, is the doctrine that only I really know that I am having a given experience. Others can at best surmise but cannot really know that I am or cannot know it with the certainty with which I know it.

The doctrine of the epistemic privacy of experience is one of the legs of the three-legged stool of the idea of a private language – the others being private ownership of experience, which we discussed in the last lecture, and private ostensive definition, which I shall discuss in the next lecture. Today I will examine the widespread idea of epistemic privacy.

Wittgenstein introduces the theme in this passage:

War Making in America

The enormity of World War II is difficult to overstate. Beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1937 and lasting roughly until the destruction of two Japanese cities by American nuclear bombs in August of 1945, the conflict embroiled dozens of nations and tens of millions of people and spread previously unimaginable horror throughout the globe. As many as 70 or 80 million people died in this war, the vast majority of them civilians who were starved, shot, stabbed, or burned to death in fires that consumed entire cities or in the barbaric ovens of Nazi death camps. Perhaps up to 20 or 25 million were soldiers who died in the fighting itself, making what many consider to be the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of intangible, even ephemeral political ideals such as fascism, communism, or democracy. Countless others were wounded physically or psychologically or were otherwise permanently affected as a result of the war by the loss of a loved one or the loss of livelihood. The war was widespread and all-encompassing; it was the defining political, cultural, economic, and martial event of the first half of the twentieth century. The consequences of World War II, however, would extend much farther into the future.

The United States entered the war on the side of the Allies via declarations of war against both Japan and Germany in December of 1941, just after the Japanese destruction of the American Naval Station at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. By the end of the war, more than 16 million Americans had been active in the military during the conflict, meaning that more than 10 percent of the overall population of the country had direct involvement in the war. The American war effort incorporated unprecedented industrial production, innovating new avenues for transportation and distribution among civilian and military personnel alike. Beyond logistics and production, capacities creating the nuts and bolts of warfare though, the culture of the United States was indelibly altered by the war.

Recapitulation

In the last lecture, we examined the Janus-faced character of certain psychological predicates. In the first-person present, they are used groundlessly – without reference to any outer criteria (that is, behaviour) and without reference to an inner criterion either. By contrast, ascribing such psychological predicates as being in pain, feeling frightened, wanting a drink to others involves reference to what they do and what they say in the circumstances – in other words, to behavioural criteria. These two aspects of psychological predicates are indissolubly welded together by the essential connection between a given mental attribute and its constitutive forms of behavioural manifestation. The criterionless first-person use is possible only because of a threefold connection with behaviour:

• ● First, the first-person utterance has to be congruent with the rest of the speaker's behaviour. Pain utterances, for example, mesh with groaning, crying out and assuaging the injury.

• ● Second, the roots of first-person utterances lie in expressions and manifestations of experiences, beliefs, intentions and so forth. So, pain utterances are rooted in natural behavioural manifestations of pain. Explicit expressions of believing and thinking are learnt as qualifying operations on empirical assertions. Expressions of intention are rooted in announcement of plans and projects. And so on.

• ● Third, a first-person utterance of an experience, belief or intention is itself a behavioural criterion for others to ascribe the predicate to the speaker.

In the previous lecture, I remarked that this account of the logico-grammatical character of such psychological predicates has multiple consequences. Here I shall start by indicating some of them. Then I shall move on to examine the correlative notions of behaviour and of the mental that are involved. For a widespread misconception about what counts as behaviour in such contexts feeds on and is fed by a further misconception of the mental as inner, that is, as hidden or concealed behind the observable. I shall then make some remarks about behaviourism.

Unfinished Business: The Argument from Analogy and ‘Theory-Theory’

First of all, let's pick up the threads of the two accounts of knowledge of other minds which I introduced in the last lecture: the traditional philosophical explanation known as ‘the argument from analogy for the existence of other minds’ and the contemporary psychological explanation known as ‘theory-theory’ – namely, the claim that our ability to ascribe psychological predicates to others rests on a theory that we developed when we were children about the behaviour of other people.

Note to the Reader

Included in this final Appendix within this study is a sampling of authoritative print news media articles reviewed and examined in connection with the discourse analysis performed in Chapter 7 of this book entitled “Iraq Part II: Invasion, Occupation, and Imperial Overreach.” As with appendices connected to the preceding case study chapters within this work, what follows is a small subset of the many hundreds of articles reviewed for frames of representation in the presentation of an authoritative discourse on the American war of choice in Iraq spanning from the spring of 2003 through until the substantial drawdown of military personnel in 2011. As with the examinations performed for long durée wars in the recent American past, the sample presented below in no way represents a complete collection of news materials that were produced and disseminated during that period of time. Instead, what is offered below constitutes some of the text documents that were reviewed and critiqued in the chapter within this work connected to this appendix as a point of reference for those readers interested in the guiding methodology that sustained this media study. In most cases, the articles mentioned here were deconstructed within the aforementioned chapter as examples of authoritative news media texts presenting both overt and subtle meaning through print language in the conveyance of presumption, narrative framing, and/or ideological positioning in discussions of individual and collective actors connected with America's second Iraq war. And, as with previous article samples, some of the media texts presented here were applied in the associated case study chapter for multiple occurrences of a given discursive frame, while others were examined for one prevalent intellectual position emphasized within their text.

Print News Articles

Abram, Ruth J. (2004, May 30). “Save Abu Ghraib; Iraq Needs the Prison to Recall Its Past.” The Washington Post, B02.

Allen, Mike, and Michael D. Shear. (2004, June 1). “Bush, Kerry Pay Tribute to Veterans at Events in Virginia: Saluting U.S. Veterans.” The Washington Post, A1.

“Beyond Those Sick Images.” (2004, May 4). Los Angeles Times, B12.

We have surveyed Wittgenstein's reflections on the nature of language and linguistic representation, and we have looked at the destructive consequences of his conception for metaphysics. Now it is time to move on to what has rightly been said to be the most important philosophical argument of the twentieth century. It is known as ‘the private language argument’, and it occurs in Investigations §§243–315. It might better have been dubbed ‘the private language arguments’ – in the plural – since there is not one argument but a whole battery of bewilderingly interwoven ones. It links Wittgenstein's philosophy of language with his philosophy of psychology.

Wittgenstein had an uncanny ability to dig down deeper into the presuppositions of our thought than any other philosopher. It is a common philosophical failing, he said, not to put the question marks deep enough down. In the case of the Private Language Arguments, Wittgenstein himself put the question mark so deep down that at first glance it is exceedingly difficult to see why the question he raises matters in the slightest. Here is how he begins:

So, the question Wittgenstein addresses is whether there could be a radically private language. A private language, as he uses the phrase, is not a language which, as it happens, others cannot understand (such as Esperanto, before its inventor Zamenhof, went public).

Destination Imperium: Iraq 2003

By any standard of military measure, the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein after his ill-fated invasion of Kuwait was a massive success. The U.S. military, along with their coalition partners, acting at the behest of international opinion as rendered by the United Nations, destroyed a substantial amount of the dictator's military capability and forced his hasty retreat to Baghdad. There, though still in power, Saddam became increasingly isolated as he and his regime were the targets of a series of UN sanctions intended to further restrict his martial reach while also potentially fomenting domestic rebellion against his autocratic regime. This rebellion was meant to explode from the heartland of Kurdistan, an ethnically distinct region of northern Iraq frequently mentioned by U.S. president George H. W. Bush throughout the Gulf War period as being prepared for and worthy of independence. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1991 war, the Kurds were encouraged by Bush and other U.S. officials to rise up against Saddam and wrest control of the northern Kurdish regions of Iraq away from Baghdad. Commitments of funding and general support were offered by American officials to political and military leadership in Kurdistan, encouraging this action. Kurdish leadership kept their part of the bargain and, in the aftermath of the U.S. military defeat of Iraq, took up arms against the central government of Iraq in an attempt to create an independent Kurdistan in its region of ethnic dominance within Iraq. But the H. W. Bush administration reneged on their promise. The resulting fight between lightly armed Kurdish nationalists and heavily equipped Iraqi Army regulars was a slaughter:

Note to the Reader

The sample of articles here represents a subset of hundreds of articles reviewed for lexical choice and discursive positioning in the construction of the media analysis section of a chapter of this book entitled “Iraq Part I: Sanitized War, Ubiquitous Patriotism.” Certainly, as compared with previous case study chapters examining wars of long durée like World War II and Vietnam, the print news media sample for this particular inves-tigation was smaller and much more focused given the relatively quick buildup and prosecution of this specific American war. Still, like with all other case studies in this work, the sample size was still fairly large, numbering well into the hundreds, given the attention paid to the American military and its prosecution of the Gulf War in late 1990 and early 1991. Likewise, and as with previous case study chapters and those to come, news articles analyzed were sourced from Main or World sections of nationally distributed newspapers published in large American cities and published contemporary to the events that occurred during the First Gulf War. Editorials or other opinion articles were not considered for this specific study, given that they may not constitute a standard, institutional, or otherwise authoritative news perspective. What is given here, though, is a small sampling of all of those articles reviewed and assessed for discourse construction in the form of print media framing, story selection, emotive narration, and other forms of discernible print news discourse in news coverage of the First Gulf War. As discussed in some detail in the pages of this chapter itself, these discursive strategies are considered to be foundational in the creation of public knowledge and collective information regarding the U.S. military, its actions through the course of the war, and its place within the American state and society in the early part of the 1990s.

Print News Articles

Armstrong, Jenice. (1990, September 11). “Neighbors Remember Their Soldier in Mideast; Yellow Ribbons Bedeck Swann Street NW.” The Washington Post, (D04).

Bailey, Eric. (1991, May 19). “200,000 Cheer Troops in O.C. Victory Parade Celebration: Gulf Veterans Get a Warm Welcome Home. Spectators View Military Might on Land and in Air.” Los Angeles Times, 1.

Note to the Reader

As with other case study chapters in this work, the articles cited here represent a sample set of news articles examined in this work's Chapter 4, entitled “World War II: The Good War.” The articles mentioned below were examined for the presence of discursive frames to do with the American military during World War II, along with those cited in the main text of the chapter itself. Whenever possible, the full citation is provided along with the author's first and last name. For a number of news pieces reviewed for this study, however, articles were provided only with titles and publication information but were appended with no byline crediting a specific author with the work. In those cases below, all available publication data is provided beginning with the article title first. The news items listed here and those used in the text of this case study chapter, represent publications sampled from across the country and taken from reputable and otherwise authoritative voices in the distribution of printed news in the United States. The overall assessment in this chapter as in other case study chapters in this work, then, is of a given discourse formed by a series of narrative frames, which then contributed to the structuring of public knowledge about the role of the U.S. military in World War II and about the centrality of the U.S. military in the structuring of conceptions of the American self during the time period reviewed and into future decades.

Print News Articles

“5 Million Casualties Listed By Japanese.” (1945, September 7). New York Times, 3.

“25 Ships Sunk or Set Afire off Luzon; Carriers Strike Formosa and Okinawa: MacArthur's Fliers Cause Much Luzon Damage—New Landings Made on Mindoro—Leyte Casualties Go Up to 121,064 25 Ships Are Sunk Or Fired Off Luzon. Japanese Report on Luzon.” (1945, January 4). New York Times, 1.

“46 Jap Ships Smashed Off San Fernando: Port Is Shelled; Yanks 12 Miles Inland on Luzon; Drive Unchecked.” (1945, January 13). The Washington Post, 1.

“Americans 4 Miles Into Luzon on Solid Front; Win 4 Towns, Airfield; Japanese Moving Up; Nazis Quitting Western Tip of Belgian Bulge: MacArthur's Troops Reach Central Plain 100,000 Start Drive on Manila, 100 Miles Off; Meet Little Resistance Foe Rushes Tanks To Agno River Line.” (1945, January 11). New York Herald Tribune, 1.