Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Ding-Ontology of Aristotle vs. Sachverhalt–Ontology of Wittgenstein — Serguei L. Katrechko
set — {a hammer, a stone, a roll of paper, a vase…}
consisting of objects that potentially can be involved into
the act (fact) of hammering something in 5 . But after we’ve
tried to hammer a ‘nail’ into a wall with our hammer 6 , i.e.
check whether the fact is true, it will occur that the roll of
paper is torn out and the crystal vase is broken. That’s
why, at the second stage, the roll of paper and the vase
are excluded, and the hammer corresponds to a narrower
set — {a hammer, a stone}. And if we try to hammer a nail
into a concrete wall the stone as one of possible
candidates to become a hammer will not be able to
execute the hammer–function — as a result, it must be
excluded from the initial set. Hence, in the process of
accumulating facts quasi–hammer will be gradually
redefined which means its ‘turning’ into an ordinary tool – a
thing – an individual hammer.
At a language level the described procedure
corresponds to accumulation of facts, as is «А1–х–В»,
«А2–y–C», «А3–z–D»…, and developing on the quasi-thing
А will, at first, correspond to А1, then to the ‘intersection’
А1 ∩ А2, then to (А1 ∩ А2) ∩ А3, etc. So, the indefinite
character of the quasi-thing in the functional ontology of
the Tractatus indicates the possibility for further
specification while Aristotelian things predetermined by its
essences logically stay all the same.
Specificity of the ontology of the Tractatus can be
expressed clearly enough by the metaphor which belongs
to John Wheeler, a prominent physicist and theorist of the
5 Within the ontology of things we can, in a general case, randomly give the
name of hammer to any of those objects; in the ontology of facts, a thing is
given primarily through its function.
6 It’s clear that the nail is also a quasi-thing (to accent that we use quotation
marks) since it’s also defined through its function as something–that–is–
being–hammered–in, but we just omit it here to make the story easier.
XX century. He suggests two variants of a game in ‘20
questions’. The first variant corresponding to standard
ontology, gives the thing in advance and we, by answering
20 questions in the mode of constructing an appropriate
classification tree, have to guess what the given thing was.
In the second variant corresponding to the world of the
Tractatus, no thing is given but, since the answers (resp.
physical experiments) to consequently asked questions
must coordinate with each other, the ‘totality’ of answers
(resp. Sachverhalt) gives the required thing so, the inquirer
can also ‘guess’ and, to be more exact, constitute the
initially indefinite thing (though, if the sequence of
questions changes the required thing might also change).
In this sense, the ontology of the Tractatus corresponds
not only to the logic but also to the quantum mechanic
picture of the world with its postulate on the importance of
the observer in cognition.
Literature
Katrechko, Serguei 1999 Wave Ontology as the Forth Type of
Ontology /Proceedings of the 2 nd Russian Philosoph. Congres,
Еkaterinbourg.
Кatrechko, Serguei 2002 Functional Ontology of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophical /Proceedings of the 3 rd Russian Philosoph.
Congress, Rostov/Don.
Кozlova, Мaria 1995 On the Translation of Philosophical Works of
Wittgenstein /Journal Publ., «Put'» No.8, 1995.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1994 Tractatus Logico-Philosophical (trans.
by M. Kozlova) //Ibid. Philosophical Works P. 1, Moscow, Gnozis.
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