Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

“We make to ourselves pictures of facts.”

Every philosophical proposition is bad grammar, and the best that we can hope to achieve by philosophical discussion is to lead people to see that philosophical discussion is a mistake.

is not contended by Wittgenstein that we can actually isolate the simple or have empirical knowledge of it.

The world is fully described if all atomic facts are known, together with the fact that these are all of them.

The fact that nothing can be deduced from an atomic proposition has interesting applications, for example, to causality.

the conception of identity is subjected by Wittgenstein to a destructive criticism from which there seems no escape.

But when we attempt to say “there are more than three objects,” this substitution of the variable for the word “object” becomes impossible, and the proposition is therefore seen to be meaningless.

Notational irregularities are often the first sign of philosophical errors, and a perfect notation would be a substitute for thought.

Our world may be bounded for some superior being who can survey it from above, but for us, however finite it may be, it cannot have a boundary, since it has nothing outside it. Wittgenstein uses, as an analogy, the field of vision. Our field of vision does not, for us, have a visual boundary, just because there is nothing outside it, and in like manner our logical world has no logical boundary because our logic knows of nothing outside it. These considerations lead him to a somewhat curious discussion of Solipsism. Logic, he says, fills the world. The boundaries of the world are also its boundaries. In logic, therefore, we cannot say, there is this and this in the world, but not that, for to say so would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the boundaries of the world as if it could contemplate these boundaries from the other side also. What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

The metaphysical subject does not belong to the world but is a boundary of the world.

A proposition, considered as a fact on its own account, may be a set of words which a man says over to himself, or a complex image, or train of images passing through his mind, or a set of incipient bodily movements. It may be any one of innumerable different things. The proposition as a fact on its own account, for example the actual set of words the man pronounces to himself, is not relevant to logic.

Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit.

“the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical”;

These difficulties suggest to my mind some such possibility as this: that every language has, as Mr Wittgenstein says, a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit. Mr Wittgenstein would of course reply that his whole theory is applicable unchanged to the totality of such languages. The only retort would be to deny that there is any such totality.

So the subject of grammar is a different language? Don't all share some commonalty, which make them really one language? No one language s a monad,yet maybe all languages are a monad?