Tuesday, October 23, 2007

5.1362 Freedom of the will consists in the fact that it impossible now to know future actions. We could only know them if causality were an inner necessity, like that of logical inference. – The connection between knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity.

(“A knows that p is the case” is senseless [sinnlos] if p is a tautology.)

Marie McGinn (pp. 218-9) says that Black and Anscombe read the last sentence of the first paragraph here as noting the logical connection between “A knows that p” and “p”. However, in the context McGinn reads it instead as follows: “The point of the final sentence of the first paragraph is that our knowledge extends only so far as what is logically entailed by what we know, and no further.” (p. 219)

My comment: So the connection between knowledge and what is known is logical. And freedom of the will consists in the lack of such a connection between our possible knowledge and future events. So it is logical, not metaphysical. Presumably Wittgenstein says this odd thing because he thinks metaphysical statements are all senseless or nonsensical. So the only meaning a proposition about the freedom of the will could have would be logical, and not metaphysical. But then it is/becomes a tautology to say that we cannot know future events. So to say the will is free is to speak tautologically, and so senselessly. Is this right?

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