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  • Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World
  • Jan Zwicky
Susan G. Sterrett . Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. New York: Pi Press, 2006. Pp. xxii + 329. Cloth, $26.95.

Wittgenstein Flies a Kite focuses on intellectual developments in philosophy, physics, aeronautics, and engineering in the years just prior to the First World War. Sterrett points out that certain thinkers were involved simultaneously in more than one of these fields, and argues for conceptual cross-pollination among them. In particular, she wishes to make a case for connections between the modeling of heavier-than-air flight and Wittgenstein's views in the Tractatus. Those views famously involve the idea that language is a collection of articulated propositions which mirrors the world, conceived of as a collection of articulated facts. In other words, on Wittgenstein's view, language models the world, and is enabled to do so owing to fundamental structural similarities between the two. We might, I suggest, think of these structural similarities as meaning-preserving.

Although she does not say so in as many words, Wittgenstein's idea that structural similarities between language and world preserve meaning must be at the heart of Sterrett's argument. For one of the key problems in heavier-than-air flight involved figuring out how to use results with small-scale models to predict the behavior of full-sized machines (110). Notoriously, toy airplanes perform differently than larger-sized versions of exactly the same design.

It is relatively well-known that Wittgenstein was involved in aeronautical research between 1908 and 1911, when he left Manchester for Cambridge to study with Russell. It is also relatively well-known that he was interested in scale models from early childhood, and that Boltzmann and Hertz, who worked on problems in physics and philosophy concerned with models, were influences. What is not so well-known is that a physicist named Edgar Buckingham published a paper in 1914 that stated in very general terms how to construct "miniature situations" that would perform similarly to life-size ones (xv). This paper, Sterrett shows, can be used to shed light on Wittgenstein's views, especially for those who find the abstract metaphysical claims of the opening propositions of the Tractatus baffling.

This is not a strong thesis, as there is neither hard nor circumstantial evidence that Wittgenstein read Buckingham's paper. In its absence, I found myself keen to see the coincidence used as a basis for discussion of issues in evolutionary epistemology; but Sterrett does not broach these, nor does she probe the epistemological foundations of analogical reasoning.

It is difficult to excerpt briefly from Sterrett's treatment to indicate how she uses Buckingham to read Wittgenstein. Her interpretation builds, and, in its initial stages relies on a sequence of full-page quasi-diagrams that cannot be reproduced here. But let me try to [End Page 670] give readers a sense of how she proceeds. In her general remarks prefacing her discussion of individual propositions from the Tractatus she says:

[T]he facts shown in Figure 4 [re: the Tractatus] are analogous to the dimensionless parameters that are shown in Figure 3 [re: Buckingham's paper] having certain values. Then, in Figure 3, having those same values by certain dimensionless parameters in the system S' as in system S might be put as saying that the facts in system S' "picture" the facts in system S.

This conception of facts within the scheme shown in Figure 4 also fits well with another point made in the Tractatus: that objects join together in determinate ways to form facts, and that they do not need any "connectors" (logical constants) to do so. Recall that the quantities Q combine only in certain ways to form dimensionless parameters, and that dimensionless parameters are combinations of such quantities in ways so as to yield a product that has no dimension. So, in the analogy I am drawing, just as in Figure 3, the possibilities that a quantity such as mass has to combine with other quantities so as to generate a dimensionless product is determined both...

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