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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein writes:
2.022 It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something – a form – in common with it.
2.023 Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form.
As F.P. Ramsey pointed out, in his insightful review of the Tractatus, it is evident:
[i] that Wittgenstein is here envisaging a multitude of possible worlds other than the real one;
[ii] that Wittgenstein is claiming that, notwithstanding their diversity, all such worlds have a common form; and
[iii] that Wittgenstein believes this form to be somehow 'constituted' by the simple objects that exist in these worlds.
This paper was written during my tenure of a Sabbatical Leave Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was read, in one form or another, to Philosophy departments at the University of Auckland, the University of Queensland, and LaTrobe University. I am grateful to members of these departments for the helpful discussions that ensued, and grateful also to a referee of this Journal who pressed for needed clarification of a couple of important points.
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears, D.F. and McGuinness, B.F. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1961)Google Scholar
2 Ramsey, Frank P. ‘Review of Tractatus,’ originally published in Mind (October, 1923); reprinted in Copi, I.M. and Beard, R.W. eds., Essays on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, (New York: Macmillan 1966), 22Google Scholar
3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Notebooks 1914-1916, ed. von Wright, G.H. and Anscombe, G.E.M. trans. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1961Google Scholar). References to passages in the Notebooks are hereafter given in the form: ‘NB’ followed by page number then the number of the paragraph in brackets (where the first entry, even if incomplete, on a page counts as paragraph 1).
4 Wright, G.H. von Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1982)Google Scholar. See, especially, 200.
5 Ramsey, 22. Strictly speaking, the ‘unusual’ view which Ramsey ascribes to Wittgenstein is only that other possible worlds are never object-impoverished. But I suspect Ramsey also thought that Wittgenstein held, as well, that they are never object-enriched.
6 That Wittgenstein takes the limits of the possible to be coextensive with the limits of the expressible and of the thinkable, is also evident from his Preface to the Tractatus.