en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tractatus … losophicus
Is this literally the Tractatus?
yep
-Imp
I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking.
“He’s famous for that?”
Go figure.
Hi gib,
Imp is correct: this is the Tractatus, for which Wittgenstein was awarded a DPhil, incidentally, after being interviewed by Russell and Moore at Cambridge (England).
Most scholars are advised to read only part of the work nowadays, and the Good Old Wittgenstinians of yesteryear are rapidly becoming extinct in most universities.
Surprising? Language has had its day (thank goodness) as we see a return to analytic philosophy, which is what most unis are doing.
Regards,
R
Thanks for everyone’s comments.
If anyone is at all knowledgeable on the Tractatus, can you tell me what this means:
-
Why does he say that states of affairs are independent of each other. Nothing could be further from the truth to me (unless I’m misinterpreting him). If an atomic bomb has just been dropped from a plane, then I can infer that a few seconds later, there will be mass devastation within a few miles radius. Is he arguing along Humean lines in that such inferences are not deducible?
-
What do 2.061 and 2.062 have to do with 2.063 (or 2.06 for that matter)?
2.06 means absolutely nothing.
2.061 means something if we want it to, and nothing if we don’t. 2.06 doesn’t define states of affairs, even if it looks like it does, so the meaning of 2.061 is an open question.
2.062 I honestly don’t know if it mean anything or not. Never have. i suspect it means nothing.
2.063 is a truism, assuming a common definition of “world”. So nothing has much of anything to do with this.
Think of Wittgy as Spinoza, only stupid.
Thanks for trying Faust… although it seems absurd that Witty meant to put down meaningless sentences. He was obviously trying to say something… but I take it your guess would be as good as mine, huh?
It’s funny - in the introduction, he claims “what can be said at all can be said clearly”.
You didn’t ask what he was attempting.
He was attempting to reduce philosophy to a small list of mathematical-ish principles. You have to look at the Tractatus as a whole, more or less. Or at least sections as a whole.
2.06 seeks to establish what facts are, but not by itself. You have to follow along a bit. I can’t look it up right now. But he’s defining facts as states of affairs, a term he subsequently uses. He’s laying out this stuff like propositions. So it looks like a coherent argument. One with stunning elegance and the power of economy. paff. Just replace "state of affair’ with “fact” and you see why he takes the trouble.
Taken together, this little passage you quote is supposed to establish his version of Logical Atomism.
See it now?
What are the ‘atoms’ of logical atomism? Facts, right? Propositions.
I can see, then, how one proposition can’t be inferred from another. In formal logic, A can’t be inferred from B alone. One needs to assume B → A (unless B → A is itself a proposition - in which case it still requires B and B → A in combination). That’s the best I can do to justify Witty, in any case.
If that’s not what he’s talking about, then I guess I just disagree with him.
Certain very simple facts, yes. Single-predicate propositions containing only particulars, or one particular.
The idea is athat facts can be broken down only so far - to these atomic facts.
But the notion is arbitrary, and doesn’t actually yield any useful fruit. A fact is still pretty much a fact.
Remember that Wittgenstein was trying to show two things: that meaning is inextricably linked to language; and that what we are entitled to speak of the world is, therefore, limited to meaning. His tenet was, of what we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.
Part of his intention was to eliminate from philosophical enquiry that of which we cannot speak – chiefly metaphysics – because we have no empirical language to express meaning about it. Indeed, we could not have such a language, outside the province of language games that are played by groups of individuals only for whom did the language of the game have any meaning at all.
The world is the totality of facts; and facts are propositions asserting both what is, and what is not, the case. Moreover, facts are both known and spoken about using language, and language is the vehicle of meaning.
What is not the case is just as much a part of the world as what is the case. Wittgenstein attended a court in Paris where someone was being tried for causing a road accident. The accident was replayed using models, and this inspired Wittgenstein to believe that elements of the model showed not only what had actually happened in the accident, but also what had not. Items in the model represented facts (both positive and negative) and were the focus of meaning of the language employed to speak about the model which, in turn, represented reality.
The model also represented various states of affairs and coincidences involving them. This is where the independence of states of affairs emerges in his thinking. They are independent as are particular lines of causally related events, that ‘coincide’ purely by chance, misfortune, or whatever. There is nothing other than this blind randomness that ties individual causally related events, or states of affairs, together. One set of states of affairs is not causally connected to any other, and so it is illegitimate to make inferences from one set to any other.
Thus, the whole of reality – or the aggregate of states of affairs which, in turn, is the collection of all facts both positive and negative – constitutes the world, and nothing beyond this whole of reality is part of the world. Exit metaphysics.
Regards,
R
And we all see the big fat contradiction there, right?
Just a long-shot guess. Read at your own risk.
The (non)-existence of [things] is “reality”. Yes = (+), No = (-).
Things are independent, in-and-of-themselves.
Whether a thing exists or not, you still cannot assume the existence of another thing.
When you add up all the (+) and (-) existences of “reality”, then you shall witness the “world”.
That’s more or less Hume’s argument.
That he has to mention the unspeakable in order to say of it that it cannot be spoken? Kind of like Kant’s conceiving of the unconceivable.
Ooooh. I hadn’t thought of that one. Or if I have, I have forgotten it.
I like that one!
I’m dying of curiosity here. What was the contradiction you saw?
"What is not the case is just as much a part of the world as what is the case. "
In truth, I am not so sure that this is truly a contradiction. Let’s just say that it is in a very generous reading.
More accurate is to say that it is idiotic.
Wittgy is outsmarting himself, which, of course, both extremely easy and extremely difficult to do.
Ah, yes. On a certain reading, that is contradictory.
However, I think what is meant here is that what’s not the case defines reality just as much as what is the case. For example, if it is not the case that the Tooth Fairy exists, that defines the world just as much as any statement about what does exist. In the case of the Tooth Fairy, her existence being not the case tells us that the world does not contain her and that a proper description of the world should not make reference to her existing.
Yeah, okay. But that’s rather, er, um, well…obvious.
Yup… hurray for Witty =D>