The influence of Heinrich Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus has been studied for decades, but it has never become a mainstream topic in the Wittgensteinian literature. This paper focusses on Tractarian notions of objects, elementary facts and elementary sentences and discusses their similarities with Hertz's concepts of mass, its constituents and their mechanistic images. As the paper demonstrates, the Hertzian context provides some fruitful interpretational leads concerning several controversial ideas endorsed by early Wittgenstein, namely propositional (...) analysis, logical independence of elementary facts, logical independence of elementary sentences, and modalities. (shrink)

Recently a number of philosophers have maintained that the meanings of terms in a scientific language are “theory-laden” or determined by the theory in which they occur, and thus that if the same term occurs in different theories, it will take on different meanings in the different theories; so the theories are incommensurable. An often-stated corollary to this doctrine is the claim that possessors of different theories cannot express or possess the same facts since they attach different meanings to the (...) terms used to give expression to the facts. Various attacks against this extreme doctrine on the relativity of facts have been mounted. Some of them consist in showing defective the argument advanced in support of this doctrine; but such criticisms at best show that the defenses offered for the doctrine are defective, not that the doctrine itself is defective. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to characterize clearly the early Wittgenstein’s position in context of the contemporary discussions between the adherers of classical ontology, based on the notion of substance, and its detractors. The Aristotle’s ousiology is usually regarded as a locus classicus of substantial ontology. A noticeable tendency in the contemporary philosophy is the rejective stance towards the notion of substance and towards the vision of the reality as the ‘totality of things’ ( summa rerum ). This trend (...) goes through the 20th century (B. Russell, etc.) and is prominent in the philosophy of the 21th century. Wittgenstein, who calls the world the totality of facts, not of things, is sustainably regarded in the secondary literature as a herald of a non-classical way of thought, presented in his ontology of facts - a radical alternative to substantial ontology. However, how can this claim cohere with the active usage of the classical substantialism terms, going back to Aristotle, in the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”? In order to answer this question, it’s advisably to address, as the starting point of the analysis, the work of B. Wolniewicz comparing Wittgensteinian ontology to Aristotelian ontology and pointing out not only difference, but also parallelism between them. In the present paper, it’s shown that some of Wolniewicz’s remarks are valuable, but the overall view of the problem should be corrected and supplemented taking into account nuances of both Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian ontologies. Having in mind the results of this analysis, one can read the early Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a statement about the role of the classical forms of thought for a philosopher proposing a non-classical worldview, which helps to elucidate the structure of the contemporary ontological discussions. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a central aspect of the “picture theory” in the Tractatus – the “identity requirement” – namely the idea that a proposition represents elements in reality as combined in the same way as its elements are combined. After introducing the Tractatus' views on the nature of the proposition, I engage with a “nominalist” interpretation, according to which the Tractatus holds that relations are not named in propositions. I claim that the nominalist account can only be maintained by (...) rejecting the “identity requirement.” I then consider an opposite – “realist” – interpretation, according to which Tractarian names include names of properties and relations. I argue that, although it can accommodate the “identity requirement,” the realist interpretation falls short of providing a correct interpretation of the Tractatus' conception of a name. I conclude by presenting an alternative account (to both nominalism and realism) of the Tractatus' conception of a name. (shrink)

While operators for logical necessity and possibility represent "internal" conditions of propositions (or of their corresponding states of affairs), These conditions will be "formal", As is required by logical atomism, And not "material" in content if from the (pseudo) semantical point of view the modal operators range over "all the possible worlds" of a logical space rather than over arbitrary non-Empty sets of worlds (as is usually done in modal logic). Some of the implications of this requirement are noted and (...) though several variants of realist logical atomism are distinguished and discussed, The theory of logical form developed is nominalist. Many of nominalism's difficulties and inadequacies become transparent in the context of logical atomism and are so noted. (shrink)

Many commentators have attempted to say, more clearly than Wittgenstein did in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, what sort of things the ‘simple objects’ spoken of in that book are. A minority approach, but in my view the correct one, is to reject all such attempts as misplaced. The Tractarian notion of an object is categorially indeterminate: in contrast with both Frege's and Russell's practice, it is not the logician's task to give a specific categorial account of the internal structure of elementary (...) propositions or atomic facts, nor, correlatively, to give an account of the forms of simple objects. The few commentators who have hitherto maintained this view have mainly devoted themselves to establishing that this was Wittgenstein's intention, and do not much address the question why Wittgenstein held that it is not the logician's business to say what the objects are. The present paper means to fill this lacuna by placing this view in the context of the Tractatus's treatment of logic generally, and in particular by connecting it with Wittgenstein's treatment of generality and with his reaction to Russell's approach to logical form. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to discuss the logical form of exemplification. In order to achieve this goal, I analyze three views on the logical form of exemplification, namely, Gustav Bergmann's logical realism, Wilfrid Sellars's meta-linguistic expressivism, and Javier Cumpa's logical eliminativism. I start by examining the account advanced by Bergmann in his 1960 essay "Ineffability, Ontology, and Method," according to which the logical form of exemplification is represented by the juxtaposition of logical signs in a sentence. Then I (...) consider two alternatives to Bergmann's realism, namely, Sellars's meta-linguistic expressivism, according to which exemplification is a quasi-semantical relation that is accounted for at a meta-linguistic level; and Cumpa's molecular theory of exemplification—which I will call logical eliminativism—according to which exemplification is an eliminable constituent of facts. I conclude that neither the account advanced by Sellars nor the one provided by Cumpa is preferable to Bergmann's account of the logical form of exemplification, while offering a defense of the latter. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are three reasons why we should regard Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a forerunner of formal semantics: Wittgenstein is convinced that we can apply formal notions to natur...

This thesis discusses some central aspects of Wittgenstein's conception of language and logic in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and brings them into relation with the philosophies of Frege and Russell. The main contention is that a fruitful way of understanding the Tractatus is to see it as responding to tensions in Frege's conception of logic and Russell's theory of judgement. In the thesis the philosophy of the Tractatus is presented as developing from these two strands of criticism and thus as the (...) culmination of the philosophy of logic and language developed in the early analytic period. Part one examines relevant features of Frege's philosophy of logic. Besides shedding light on Frege's philosophy in its own right, it aims at preparing the ground for a discussion of those aspects of the Tractatus' conception of logic which derive from Wittgenstein's critical response to Frege. Part two first presents Russell's early view on truth and judgement, before considering several variants of the multiple relation theory of judgement, devised in opposition to it. Part three discusses the development of Wittgenstein's conception of language and logic, beginning with Wittgenstein's criticism of the multiple relation theory and his early theory of sense, seen as containing the seeds of the picture theory of propositions presented in the Tractatus. I then consider the relation between Wittgenstein's pictorial conception of language and his conception of logic, arguing that Wittgenstein's understanding of sense in terms of bipolarity grounds his view of logical complexity and of the essence of logic as a whole. This view, I show, is free from the internal tensions that affect Frege's understanding of the nature of logic. (shrink)

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object . Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be logically independent of one (...) another. ;Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with a "phenomenological language" in which experiential propositions about various "spaces" would form systems. The system described by a phenomenological language would be independent of the one described by ordinary "physicalistic" language; the physical "world" was known only by inference from the phenomenological. But he soon realized there was a fundamental error in this conception: phenomenology has to describe the same world as physics or it fails to provide a foundation for it. This suggests that there is only one world, and one language with two different modes of expression. Wittgenstein's now comes to his fundamental insight: ordinary language is biased towards the description of physical objects and their relations, but it is our only method of expressing phenomenological or abstract concepts. Failure to recognize this difficulty leads to the misapplication of physicalistic concepts, i.e., to grammatical errors. ;This insight had the following impact: the task of philosophy is not to invent logical or phenomenological languages, but to understand the grammar of ordinary language; the notion of a language of pure experience was itself connected with a false, physicalistic idea of the soul as an observer of a private world; the conception of analysis that had guided philosophy since Frege was based on a misused metaphor taken from the grammar of physics: the analysis of an object into its parts or chemical constituents. These ideas reach their ultimate expression in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Thus his "later" work actually begins with these 1929--30 manuscripts. (shrink)

This thesis undertakes a systematic, tripartite analysis of the interactions between the fiction and essays of Thomas Pynchon and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a solid set of original reference-material for those undertaking work on Pynchon and philosophy, or more generally on philosophico-literary intersections. Premised upon the notion that Pynchon's literature harbours a fundamental hostility to much systematizing philosophical thought, this work avoids a dominating imposition of philosophy, or an application of philosophical (...) thought as a validating Other, by examining those aspects of Pynchon's work that seem ill at ease with, or aggressive towards, aspects of each philosopher's thought. This is explored through the concept of an intra-textual polyvocality and relational situation of philosophical intersection; when Wittgenstein is cited, for instance, who is speaking and what are the connotations of that placement? I do not propose, therefore, a Wittgensteinian / Foucauldian / Adornian Pynchon, but rather explicitly highlight excluded aspects of thought to instead develop a complementary reading; a form of intersubjective triangulation. This polyvocality is examined from a univocal perspective. The specific conclusions of this work re-situate Pynchon, in many cases against forty years of critical consensus, as a quasi-materialist or at least anti-idealist, a regulative utopist and a practitioner of an anti-synthetic style akin to Adorno's model of negative dialectics. In a broader sense, it answers the questions regarding hostility towards philosophical thought in Pynchon's work by demonstrating that no single philosophical standpoint has yet to totally resonate with even one of his novels. Simultaneously, it also shows that a profitable approach can be found in the spaces of philosophical overlap and divergence. (shrink)

The paper deals with the conception of languange Early Ludwig Wittgenstein presented in work Tractatus logico-philosophicus. It discusses also a very important relation between natural language and ideal one – for this purpose, the category „Zeichen“ and the relation between „Zeichen“ and „Symbol“ is analyzed.

The aim of the paper is to argue that the ontological setting of objects in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a version of structural realism. According to our plan, one of the opening statements of the Tractatus – The world is the totality of facts, not of things – introduces structuralist perspective: structures are superior to their constituents. However, structuralists use the notion ‘superior’ in various senses, but this paper argues that the Tractatus places its objects within the framework of ontic structural (...) realism in its moderate form. That form puts structures and individuals on the same ontological footing. Such thesis contradicts traditional object-ontology that dominates Tractarian literature. (shrink)