The Tractatus…is it so intractable?
Carlos Muñoz-Suárez guides us on a trip down the linguistic rabbit hole.
Okay, picture something. Picture whatever facts you can imagine about it. Describe it abstractly. Then if challenged connect the dots between your words and the world that whatever you are picturing contains it. How close do you get to a “structure of the world itself” such that almost no one will challenge you?
Isn’t that basically the bottom line when connecting/communicating the dots between words and worlds? And isn’t that more or less where I draw the line between descriptions in the either/or world and prescriptions/proscriptions in the is ought world.
Now all we need is a context. What can our words describe such that no rational human being is likely to challenge us? And what will our prescriptive and proscriptive words very likely precipitate but all manner of challenges?
The “evaluation” part:
Only it’s one thing for a doctor to picture an abortion as a medical procedure and another thing altogether for that same doctor to picture the exact moment from conception to birth when the unborn becomes an actual human being. Let alone the aggregation of words that pictures for us whether the abortion was either moral or immoral.
As for this, however…
“Wittgenstein doesn’t mean images in your mind, but rather a way of (metaphorically) seeing the world through language.”
…how on earth would our words [pictured or otherwise] go about seeing an abortion through language alone?
Instead, the language is always derived from the brain/mind of a particular individual out in a particular world reacting to this abortion in a particular manner. The part I root in dasein and others root in entirely different things.