Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

How Metaphors Alter the World-Picture – One Theme in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty — Joose Järvenkylä
phy. This is exactly why Wittgenstein introduces concept
“world-picture”.
If I read him correctly, in his book Moore and
Wittgenstein on Certainty Stroll seems to identify Worldpicture
with community. (Stroll 1994, 170) This is strange
and somewhat inaccurate because world-picture itself is a
metaphor which cannot be reduced into such concepts.
Stroll admits that this is merely a hint of positive account of
what world-picture might be. (Ibid.) In his later writings he
seems to stay on negative accounts saying: “it is a deep
Wittgensteinian point that a philosophical model does not
give rise to new facts, but may change one’s ‘picture’ of
the world” (Stroll 2004, 20). Wittgenstein would have
accepted that world-picture can be altered with metaphors.
In this sense metaphor seems to have its original Greek
meaning “to carry over” or “to transfer”. Metaphor carries
us over the limits of our World-picture.
Wittgenstein’s first remark of world-picture in On
Certainty goes as follows:
Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the
conviction that no man has ever been very far from
the earth. Nothing in my world-picture speaks in favour
of the opposite. (OC 93, Paul and Anscombe
translates here picture of the world)
From this quote it seems that the world-picture is a context
where we decide whether some belief is true or false. Because
nothing in my world-picture speaks in favour of the
opposite, I believe that no man has ever been very far
from the earth. However, world-picture is not any system of
beliefs, as Wittgenstein is quick to point out, but rather “the
inherited background against which I distinguish between
true or false” (OC 94).
It does not follow from any conscious decisionmaking
that we end up supporting some world-picture, as
is the case with the scientific picture of the world.
Sentences that describe my world-picture are not
propositions in which we can say if they are true or false,
but they are like a rules of a game which “can be learned
purely practically, without learning any explicit rules” (OC
95, emphasize mine). In this sense when we choose
between two different pictures of the world, we already
must have some world-picture to lean on and this is what
Wittgenstein means by calling world-picture “the inherited
background”.
Nevertheless, though world-picture seems to be
adherent, it is not totally solid. Wittgenstein compares it to
the mythology that “may change back to the state of flux,
the river-bed of thoughts may shift” (OC 97). Later he
describes how this change can take place:
It is clear that our empirical propositions do not all
have the same status, since one can lay down such
a proposition and turn it from an empirical proposition
into a norm of description.
Think of chemical investigations. Lavoisier makes
experiments with substances in his laboratory and
now he concludes that this and that takes place
when there is burning. He does not say that it might
happen otherwise another time. He has got hold of
a definite world-picture – not of course one that he
invented: he learned it as a child. I say world-picture
and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-ofcourse
foundation for his research and as such also
goes unmentioned. (OC 167)
If it would happen that Lavoisier’s experiment does not
support his hypothesis, it would also mean that Lavoisier is
forced to correct his scientific picture of the world. Yet he
has a hold of the definite world-picture, which goes
unmentioned and thus is not disposed to such changes. In
contrast, world-picture can alter through a change in the
status of some propositions. By turning some empirical
proposition as a norm of description we are also changing
that background against which we distinguish between
true or false, and for Wittgenstein this background is the
world-picture. Therefore we can identify world-picture also
with the hinges we take for certain.
This is where metaphor enters the picture. As Stroll
points out, metaphors do not just conjoin two seemingly
diverse objects, but they also create a kind of mental
image. (Stroll 2004, 20) They trigger our imagination and
lure us to imagine in what respect two conjoined objects
are similar. The textbook example of a metaphor is “girl is
a rose”, and if we ask how this can be, the answer might
be that she is beautiful or her nature is spiky or she smells
good etc. In each of these cases we create a sort of
mental image, not actual picture of girl being a rose (what
this could mean?), but she being a rose in certain way, in
certain context. The metaphor grasps something essential
of girl’s nature and therefore it also enlarges our way of
understanding the world, understanding the girl as a rose.
It seems that it is quite arbitrary when some
sentence is used as a metaphor and when it is used as a
literal statement. For Wittgenstein it is the matter of context
whether the sentence “earth came into being 50 years
ago” is or is not a metaphor. Literal interpretation of this
sentence would say that it is true or untrue empirical
statement, whereas metaphorical interpretation would ask
in what sense world can be seen existing for just 50 years.
While talking of 50 years old fantasy book it is legitimate to
say that the fantasy-world it describes came into being 50
years ago. Also it could be that inside the fantasy universe
it has existed only 50 years.
But understanding the meaning of a metaphorical
sentence in a context also means sentence’s end as a
metaphor, because the mental stance towards the world
changes so that in the new context metaphor has only
literal meaning. So understanding the metaphor presumes
that we change context in which we interpret it, and within
this context metaphor has eligible meaning. But the
change of this context is somewhat peculiar process:
I can imagine a man who had grown in quite special
circumstances and been taught that the earth came
into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this.
We might instruct him: the earth has long… etc. –
We should be trying to give him our world-picture.
This would happen through a kind of persuasion.
(OC 262)
Wittgenstein uses expression “a kind of” because the persuasion
in question is not typical argumentation. If our
world-picture alters it must also mean that those hinges we
take for certain must change and if our certainties change
this cannot be due to rational process because there cannot
be any criterion they lean on. But metaphor creates a
picture which may replace the earlier picture. The alteration
of the world-picture does not interfere with the facts on
the world, but nevertheless our mental stance towards it
changes. In this sense philosophy can have some positive
content.
To summarize, Wittgenstein and Davidson would
have agreed that metaphor has only literal meaning, but
while Davidson is more interested in the content of
metaphor, Wittgenstein is interested in the context.
Wittgenstein uses world-picture as a metaphor of the
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