Tractatus-Seminar Paper

Tractatus

Tractatus was written by Ludwig Wittgenstein whilst he was a soldier and a prisoner of during the First World War.
The central theme of Tractatus is the relationship between language, thought and reality. Wittgenstein insisted that language is the perceptible form of thought, bound to reality by a common logical form. It was also concerned with defining the limits of science.


Unlike most of the philosophical literature we have studied this year, Tractatus doesn’t really contain any arguments, rather statements which Wittgenstein deems to be self-evident. This is largely because of the ‘Verification Principle’ which it employs. The Verification Principle forwards that if a proposition cannot be verified-it is pointless, and therefore, the Tractatus doesn’t waste time on things which can’t be verified. Consequently it is a very analytical philosophy, and assumes that ‘language is everything’, and ‘everything is language’.
So while many of the literature we’ve looked at encourage us to think ‘outside the box’, Tractatus attempts to limit thinking altogether. My use of a cliché already would have angered Wittgenstein!
Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by the works of Bertrand Russell, whose ideas were largely aimed at trying to overcome philosophical scepticism which is the idea that we don’t know anything. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein tries to create a way in which language and thoughts can be brought together flawlessly.
The Tractatus is written in numbered paragraphs which often contain one short sentence, and is mainly concerned with the relationship between the nature of language and the world as a whole.

Within the Tactatus there are seven main propositions:
1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.

The first few pages look at ontology which is effectively what the world is made up of. The Tractatus reads that reality is made up of simple objects combined to form the state of affairs. They can either be something, or not something, regardless of anything else, and the state of affairs combine together to create complex facts.
He then moves onto discuss how the world has the potential to be described accurately because of the way language works. According to Wittgenstein, language consists of propositions that are built from simpler propositions which are made up of names. Language can mirror reality by sharing its logical form, so names mirror objects, basic propositions mirror states of affairs, and propositions mirror the facts. A proposition is essentially a logical picture of reality. They are bound together in a way of which they resemble the reality. For example a painting of a landscape is arranged in a way, which resembles the landscape itself.
A picture can represent a fact by sharing its logical form, but the form cannot be depicted. It isn’t possible to say what the logical form of a proposition or fact is, but the form is visible through the way in which the fact is held together. The coinnections between names and states of affairs show themselves so there is no need for them to be held together by words such as ‘and’. Wittgenstein calls this his ‘fundamental idea’.

In the 4th proposition Wittgenstein touches on how much of philosophy is a product of peoples mis-understanding of language, and he describes many philosophical questions as nonsense, and argues that many deep philosophical problems are not actual problems. To me this seems like a rather existentialist idea, because it critisises the practice of pondering things from the past and thinking of the future. This type of thinking brings no present bodily pleasure, and is essentially pointless. The links with existentialism is also evident in proposition 5, where one of them reads ‘We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present’. An existentialist would agree with this statement because predictions of the future are meaningless to them as well.
Truth Tables are also introduced in proposition 4. They make light of the idea that we can represent propositions and their truth-conditions without making use of connectives.
According to Wittgenstein there are 3 types of proposition. There are tautologies which are always fact. Contradictions which are always untrue, and propositions with a sense, which can be both true and false.
Wittgenstein assumed the idea that if an argument is valid, it is logically equivalent to the conclusion which can clearly be seen in the truth table.

The last line in the Tractatus, is one I found to be particularly interesting. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This reminds me of the saying ‘don’t speak unless you have something interesting and factual to say-something which I have struggled with throughout my life!
He concluded that the work wasn’t of philosophy to live by, but rather a ladder in place to aid in gaining an understanding of the idea that only statements of natural sciences are meaningful.