The Logical Must is an examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic, early and late, undertaken from an austere naturalistic perspective Penelope Maddy has called "Second Philosophy." The Second Philosopher is a humble but tireless inquirer who begins her investigation of the world with ordinary perceptual beliefs, moves from there to empirical generalizations, then to deliberate experimentation, and eventually to theory formation and confirmation. She takes this same approach to logical truth, locating its ground in simple worldly structures and our knowledge of it in our basic cognitive machinery, tuned by evolutionary pressures to detect those structures where they occur.
In his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein also links the logical structure of representation with the structure of the world, but he includes one key unnaturalistic assumption: that the sense of our representations must be given prior to-independently of-facts about how the world is. When that assumption is removed, the general outlines of the resulting position come surprisingly close to the Second Philosopher's roughly empirical account. In his later discussions of logic in Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein also rejects this earlier assumption in favor of a picture that arises in the wake of the famous rule-following considerations. Here Wittgenstein and the Second Philosopher operate in even closer harmony-locating the ground of our logical practices in our interests, our natural inclinations and abilities, and very general features of the world-until the Second Philosopher moves to fill in the account with
her empirical investigations of the world and cognition. At this point, Wittgenstein balks, but as a matter of personal animosity rather than philosophical principle.
Industry Reviews
"Most books and articles on Wittgenstein are written by Wittgenstein-philes or Wittgenstein-phobes. By steering clear of those complementary pitfalls, this book provides a remarkably clear and thought-provoking interpretation of Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic. It deserves the attention, not only of Wittgenstein interpreters, but also of anyone with an interest in the philosophy of logic or the history of twientieth century philosophy. ... In its succinct
ambitiousness, the book follows in the language of two other exemplary short books on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Kripke 1982) and Taking Wittgenstein at his Word (Fogelin
2009). ... It is precisely the strength of these short and focused books that they each, in their own way, hit the nail on the head, and so provide an opportunity for others to 'come and do it better', as Wittgenstein put it in the preface to the Tractatus." --David G. Stern, Analysis
"Maddy's project is as much an attempt to deepen our understanding of Second Philosophy as to sharpen our reading of Wittgenstein. The book is very enjoyable to read. The style is straightforward, the argumentation crystalline, and the discussion insightful. Furthermore, Maddy perfectly succeds in making The Logical Must a self-contained work, saying just as much about the previous episodes as is necessary to let us follow the new story." --Sébastien
Gandon, History and Philosophy of Logic
