About not denying a grain of salt

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to resume and requalify the distinction between concepts and objects, as proposed by Frege, in the famous On Concept and Object (1892), reinforcing its importance for understanding the distinction between saying and showing, proposed by Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. The text also establish the influence of the aforementioned distinction on the treatment by the first Wittgenstein of paradoxes by impredicativeness. We then resume the analysis of Charles Travis, in: Where Words Fail (2020) on the subject, taking into account the point of view of the philosophy of the second Wittgenstein. For Travis, the obstacle involved in the difference between concepts and objects would be nothing more than a philosophical confusion, and should be dissolved. The arguments proposed by Travis are also briefly reviewed here, but our focus is mainly on concluding that the importance of the distinction must be traced within the limits of what can be described or defined additionally, and is configured as the end of explanations on the basis of what constitutes the semantic determination. In this sense, the importance of this distinction would even go beyond the scope of influence on the first Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and would appear to concern the approach of linguistic generality itself.