'Meaning is use' in the tractatus

Philosophical Investigations 27 (1):34–67 (2004)
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Abstract

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege’s idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs. But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. (Blue Book, p.

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Paul Livingston
University of New Mexico

Citations of this work

Semiosic translation.Sergio Torres-Martínez - 2018 - Semiotica 2018 (225):353-382.
Holism and Atomism in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.Krystian Bogucki - 2021 - Analiza I Egzystencja 55 (3):24 - 48.
Wittgenstein, Kant and the critique of totality.Paul Livingston - 2007 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (6):691-715.
Tractatus, Application and Use.Martin Stokhof & Jaap van der Does - 2020 - Open Philosophy 3 (1):770-797.

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References found in this work

Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
Tractatus logico-philosophicus.Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. C. M. Colombo & Bertrand Russell - 1933 - New York,: Harcourt, Brace. Edited by C. K. Ogden.

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