Wittgenstein & Moon Travel
In his posthumous work On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein made a number of statements regarding the possibility/impossibility of travelling to the moon. There is no small amount of confusion about his comments amongst philosophers, due in part to Wittgenstein making more than one reference to the issue. For example:
What we believe depends upon what we learn. We all believe that it isn’t possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that it is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief—they are wrong and we know it.1
This section poses no real problems. Wittgenstein is clearly referring to what the members of his social world believed, and it is undoubtedly true that the majority of people at the time believed it was impossible to get to the moon. (The aphorisms that were collected as On Certainty were written in the period immediately prior to his death in 1951, though not published until 1969).
An earlier section poses a different problem:
“But is there then no objective truth? Isn’t it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?” If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered. But suppose that instead of all these answers we met the reply: “We don’t know how one gets to the moon, but those who get there know at once that they are there; and even you can’t explain everything.” We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.2
This section requires a little more attention. Again, Wittgenstein is largely concerned with people’s beliefs, but he is also referring to facts about the world. If Wittgenstein is simply claiming that, at the time of writing, it was practically impossible to get to the moon given the technological demands, then there is nothing wrong with this passage. It was undoubtedly true that at that point no one had been to the moon, and it probably wasn’t a feasible proposition—technologically—at the time.
However, the comment that “our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it” implies that Wittgenstein is making a far stronger claim, i.e. that it is logically impossible to get to the moon—not just technologically but objectively impossible to get to the moon. As there was no great rupture in the understanding of physics between the early 1950s, when Wittgenstein composed the notes that became On Certainty, and 1969, when Neil Armstrong took a promenade on the Sea of Tranquillity, Wittgenstein seems to have seriously put his foot in his mouth.
On Certainty was compiled from Wittgenstein’s notebooks and, ironically enough, published in 1969. Neil Armstrong’s reaction is unknown.
CITATIONS:
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Dennis Paul and G.E.M Anscombe, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969, §286.
2. ibid. §108.
Comments
10 Comments so far
To be a little more charitable to Wittgenstein, he may have been thinking more of the sort of fairytale Munchausen-style moon travel where people go to the moon in a balloon or riding a hippogriff and then walk around on the surface in their normal clothes – the sort of thing that would be clearly incompatible with physics.
I’m also not sure that in 1950 it was known that it is physically possible to get there in a rocket – Verne’s giant cannon would have squished his astronauts, Wells’s antigravity device is impossible, and it would be interesting to know whether physicists at the time thought that moon travel for human beings was theoretically possible (not to mention the deadly Van Allen belts, and the possibility that humans couldn’t live in conditions of zero gravity).
Here is a piece on the Van Allen belt:
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/whtrap1.html
It seems that Wittgenstein could not have knowned it.
Perhaps he is alluding to or employing a slippage of language. The destination of the ‘Moon’ could be a philosophical one. I read an anecdote about Wittgenstein wherein a friend witnessed him climb a latter to a roof. Upon arriving at his destination he questioned the further necessity of the latter.
I had not knowned previously that one could climb latters. But it any case, the discussion turns on whether it would have been a sane judgement for Wittgenstein or a contemporary, when he wrote the remarks about moon travel, to believe that one had been to the moon. And the relevant concern throughout On Certainty is – isn’t it? – to describe how the meaningfulness of our holding to this or that belief is not simply a function of whether that belief could or could not, physically, be true. It might have been perfectly possible for Wittgenstein to go to the moon, but perfectly unclear what he would have meant by saying that he had been there. And this is because the conditions for intelligible belief ascription are diverse, holistic, and grounded in the non-reflective certainties of our encultured behavioural lives.
To contribute to your empty discussion:
He did not say it was not possible – only doubtful – that we cannot bring ourselves to BELIEVE this kind of thing HAD happened.
Cheetos, you make a point that’s already covered in the post above. And, as noted there, the questionable part of what Wittgenstein says is the comment “our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it” . Perhaps you should try reading the post before commenting on it?
As for it being an empty discussion, it’s nothing of the sort. It is quite widely believed that Wittgenstein bluntly said “moon travel is impossible”. This post serves to show that’s not exactly the case.
Well, W would have seen this as a waste of time. If you idolise him and every word he’s ever said, then you automatically become a sinner.
1) I imagine Wittgenstein would be the first to see the value in discussing a contentious statement made by a prominent philosopher.
2) Nobody’s ‘idolizing’ anyone.
3) ’sinner’??? This is a philosophical discussion, kindly take your theological assumptions elsewhere…
It seems the discussion has been over for a while now but let me take a hit at it. Giving grounds for (or against) anything only makes sense within a language game. Why would it be intelligible to speak of the possibility of moon travel at a time when “our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it.” What would it mean to offer some disclaimer just in case later events showed otherwise? What would the “practical consequences” be for doing this? Questioning a proposition everybody takes for granted also,
“…demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered.”
I think Wittgenstein used the moon example in the non-metaphorical sense, and this only strengthens what he’s describing. He did not turn out to be wrong on any account. Empirical true/false judgments only have meaning when there is evidence to back them up. And you can’t decide true/false by using evidence from one framework and then applying it to another.
Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is extremely helpful in clarifying all of this. It uses the concept of ‘paradigm shifts’ in the same way Wittgenstein talks about frameworks and ‘foundations.’
It is not so much that the laws of physics forbid *ordinary* travel to the moon. Indeed, the author of this post points out that LW was acutely aware of the kind of questions that would have to be answered if a person were to claim they traveled to the moon. But if a person *still* claimed they traveled to the moon, but didn’t have any answer to these questions, then we *would* be on the shaky ground of questioning physics. (E.g., teleportation.)
Seems really straightforward to me.