Negation and indications: Parmenides and Wittgenstein

Abstract

Choosing two thinkers from two entirely different periods of the history of philosophy, one can fruitfully illustrate the issue of the most general conditions of truthful speech, which take effect on the crossroad of the narrowly conceived semantics and a broadly construed concept of the world as a concept that implies the posting of neat limits of the meaningful linguistic articulation of what there is. From this very general issue, the article turns to the narrower question of negation, and thus of the rules of the use of the correct and sometimes true speech that, nevertheless, lacks its specific referent in the full structure of reality. The texts under scrutiny are the fragments of Parmenides’ poem On Being and its modern exegeses ranging from Russell to the modal interpretation that emphasizes the necessary being and the impossible not-being, plus passages from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and also his Philosophical Investigation (§ 50). A more detailed comparison of the attitude of both thinkers towards negation helps to both deepen and expand the earlier suggested parallel between Parmenides’ argument about the impossibility to speak about what is not and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the necessary existence of simple objects.