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An Incoherence in the Tractatus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Carl Ginet
Carl Ginet*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

After he had rejected much of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein, upon at least one occasion, still “thought that in the Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work”—a perfected account: that is to say (at least) a well-knit, coherent one. It seems to me that this merit must be denied the whole account presented in the Tractatus and I would like to explain why.

The Tractatus holds that every true or false proposition is analyzable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions. It further holds that elementary propositions are completely independent of one another. “The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence of a state of affairs” (4.21).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1973 , pp. 143 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1973

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References

1 Malcolm, Noman Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London, 1958), p. 69.Google Scholar

2 Quotations from the Tractatus are from the Pears-McGuinness translation (London, 1961).

3 In “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. IX (1929), and in Philosophische Bemerkungen (Oxford, 1964) written in 1929-30.

4 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, transl. by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford, 1961), p. 7Google Scholar(2). According to von Wright, “Biographical Sketch,” Philosophical Review, 1955, pp. 532–533; reprinted in Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New York, 1958)Google Scholar, it was this sort of example that suggested the picture theory to Wittgenstein.

5 Cf. Notebooks, p. 19: “sign and method of symbolizing together must be logically identical with what is signified”; and p. 21: “what represents is not merely the sign or picture but also the method of representation.”

6 Cf. Black’s, Max comment in A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Ithaca, New York, 1964) p. 111Google Scholar: “The sense on which a general proposition is a ‘logical picture’ can hardly be exactly the same as the sense in which an elementary proposition is one.”

7 In 5.101 molecular propositional forms are listed in order of increasing determinacy. The proportion of F’s in the final column of the truth-table representation of a molecular proposition containing two or more elementary propositions is a measure of its determinacy. This is because to put an F beside a possible combination of truth-values for the elementary propositions is to deny that that pattern of existence and non-existence for the atomic possibilities does obtain; whereas to put a T besides a combination of truth values is not to affirm that pattern does obtain but is merely not to deny it.

8 Malcolm, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Bemerkungen,” Philosophical Review, 1967, p. 111.

9 I am grateful to Norman Malcolm for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.