Sind Eindrücke Informationsträger? Was wir aus PU §§354-356 lernen können

Abstract

In P. I. 352 ff., Wittgenstein mentions the case “that our thinking plays us a queer trick”, viz. that we quote the law of excluded middle in order to argue: if we reject a sentence, then its negation is true and has therefore got a sense. We may, however, be overlooking a “grammatical sentence” like “[our] sense-impressions can deceive us” (P. I. 354). This sentence just means: if someone, on account of using his sense-organs, erroneously believes that it is raining, “he has the deceptive impression that it is raining”; this is why “the fact that the false appearance is precisely one of rain is founded on a definition” (P. I. 354). The temptation mentioned above will then result in the very important philosophical insight that it is precisely nondeceptive sense-impressions that convey true “information that it is raining” (P. I. 356). In this way, believing something is masqueraded as being confronted with informative entities (“mental representations”). It can be shown that Wittgenstein exposes this mistake in several contexts where nouns are introduced into the language of 31 the mental, nouns designed to designate mental objects of mental confrontations like “sense” or “entertain” or simply “have”.