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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.
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.
And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.
2.03 In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, like the members of a chain.
2.04 The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.
2.06 The existence and non-existence of atomic facts is the reality.
2.063 The total reality is the world.
2.12 The picture is a model of reality.
2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true.
3.143 That the propositional sign is a fact is concealed by the ordinary form of expression, written or printed.
In propositions thoughts can be so expressed that to the objects of the thoughts correspond the elements of the propositional sign. 3.201 These elements I call “simple signs” and the proposition “completely analysed”.
3.203 The name means the object. The object is its meaning. (“A” is the same sign as “A”.)
3.221 Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.
Names cannot be taken to pieces by definition (nor any sign which alone and independently has a meaning).
call such a variable a “propositional variable”.
fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full).
A symbolism, that is to say, which obeys the rules of logical grammar—of logical syntax.
3.33 In logical syntax the meaning of a sign ought never to play a rôle; it must admit of being established without mention being thereby made of the meaning of a sign; it ought to presuppose only the description of the expressions. 3.331 From this observation we get a further view—into Russell’s Theory of Types. Russell’s error is shown by the fact that in drawing up his symbolic rules he has to speak of the meaning of the signs.
No proposition can say anything about itself, because the prop-ositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the “whole theory of types”).
This is at once clear, if instead of “F(F(u))” we write “(3φ) : F(φu) . φu = Fu”. Herewith Russell’s paradox vanishes.
The applied, thought, propositional sign is the thought. 4 The thought is the significant proposition. 4.001 The totality of propositions is the language.
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless.
All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauth-ner’s sense). Russell’s merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form.
The proposition is a picture of reality.
The proposition determines reality to this extent, that one only needs to say “Yes” or “No” to it to make it agree with reality.
4.026 The meanings of the simple signs (the words) must be explained to us, if we are to understand them.
4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs. My fundamental thought is that the “logical constants” do not represent. That the logic of the facts cannot be represented.
Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear.
Does not my study of sign-language correspond to the study of thought processes which philosophers held to be so essential to the philosophy of logic?
4.114 It should limit the thinkable and thereby the unthinkable. It should limit the unthinkable from within through the thinkable. 4.115 It will mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.
4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said.
(I introduce this expression in order to make clear the confusion of formal concepts with proper concepts which runs through the whole of the old logic.)
They all signify formal concepts and are presented in logical symbolism by variables, not by functions or classes (as Frege and Russell thought).
Therefore there are in logic no pre-eminent numbers, and therefore there is no philosophical monism or dualism, etc.
The names are the simple symbols, I indicate them by single letters (x, y, z). The elementary proposition I write as function of the names, in the form “fx”, “φ(x, y)”, etc.
(If I introduce by an equation a new sign “b”, by determining that it shall replace a previously known sign “a”, I write the equation—definition—(like Russell) in the form “a = b Def.”. A definition is a symbolic rule.)
It is possible for all combinations of atomic facts to exist, and the others not to exist.
Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality. They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none.
Those truth-possibilities of its truth-arguments, which verify the proposition, I shall call its truth-grounds.
The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.
The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now.
Propositions which have no truth-arguments in common with one another we call independent. Independent propositions (e.g. any two elementary propositions) give to one another the probability ½.
5.156 Probability is a generalization.
Only in this way is the progress from term to term in a formal series possible (from type to type in the hierarchy of Russell and Whitehead). (Russell and Whitehead have not admitted the possibility of this progress but have made use of it all the same.)
