Thought and Privacy

In an unpublished manuscript, written in 1913, Russell states that 'I think it may be shown that acquaintance with logical form is involved before explicit thought about logic begins, in fact as soon as we can understand a sentence'. ¹ Wittgenstein had seen the manuscript and was well acquainted with it. We also know from the available literary sources that Wittgenstein was hostile towards this view - that logical form is somehow distinguished (logically independent) from language (which we, for example, meet in certain interpretations in the modern topic of Cognitive Science) - and that he therefore did reject Russell's thesis. He maintained the insight that logic cannot depend on the experiencing of a fact, whether logical or empirical [NB 3], Furthermore, in 1914, Wittgenstein explicitly criticized Russell's theory which asserted the existence of an abstract formal structure [NB 2-3] where the logical experience of the structure would precede understanding of any proposition whatsoever. Russell assigned the conditions of the meanings to the elements inherent in the very constituents of the propositions. Therefore, according to Wittgenstein, it is a fact that Russell in his text was '... trying to express something that cannot be expressed'[NB 31].