Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism, while now seen as mainly being of historical interest, was in the earliest years of the 20th Century, seen as an important philosophical movement, propounded mainly by a group that became known as the first Vienna Circle.  The Vienna Circle met at a cafe called Cafe Central.  The circle was interrupted by the First World War, but resumed afterwards.  Logical Positivism rejected all forms of metaphysics and a priori propositions, instead advocating a single, rational language of science that would evolve to become more precise as uncertainties and idiosyncrasies emerged.

This Circle was heavily influenced by the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or the Tractatus for short.

The Tractatus consisted of seven main statements, each of which is supposed to be self-evident.  Each of these seven propositions have a number of sub-statements that relate to the 'parent' statement.

The main seven statements are:

1. The world is everything that is the case. *
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
6. The general form of truth-function is: [, , N()].  This is the general form of proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

There were many criticisms of Logical Positivism, one of the earliest came from Karl Popper, who argued that the Logical Positivist's requirement that a statement be scientifically verifiable was too strong.  Popper argued that instead, it should be possible to use a criterion of falsifiability.  

As an example of falsifiability, the statement 'All pigeons are grey.' can be proven as false by observing one brown pigeon.  However, the statement 'Grey pigeons do exist.' is not falsifiable, therefore stands as a valid statement.

Wittgenstein himself heavily criticised the Tractatus in his later work, and even some of its staunchest defenders later admitted that Logical Positivism was flawed.  Nevertheless, the movement was considered influential between the late 1920s and early 1930s and deserves to be remembered, albeit for historical reasons, rather than as a current branch of philosophy.

The New Journalism

The New Journalism is the name of a book by Tom Wolfe.  It also describes the changes that took place in journalistic style from the early 1960s onward.

Journalistic writing pre the early 1960s had always been deliberately dry, attempting to give the facts of a case in a manner that was scientific and accurate, but was devoid of personality.  The reasons for this were many, not least due to the belief that by allowing personality into news reports, they could not be impartial.

In the 1960's some brave new journalists began experimenting with the tools used by novelists to inject personality into their writing, in an attempt to increase reader engagement.

Several masterpieces were created.  Not least Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and later Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In The New Journalism, Wolfe argues that the four key devices that New Journalism took from fiction writers were:

1. Scene by scene construction - tell the story in a filmic, scene by scene progression.
2. Full and faithful recording of the dialog - include each character's hesitations, retractions and repetitions.
3. Third-person point of view - present each scene through the eyes of a particular character
4. Record a person's mannerisms, gestures, clothing and furniture - in doing so you show a great deal of how a person interacts with the world around them.

New Journalism continues to be popular today.  Indeed, some modern feature writers use the techniques of New Journalism without knowing or thinking about where those techniques originated from.