Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Introduction

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only philosophical book Ludwig Wittgenstein published in his lifetime and one of the most influential single texts of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Composed primarily in the Austrian army on the Italian front during the First World War (Wittgenstein continued writing in the small notebooks he carried with him until he was captured at Trento in November 1918) and published in 1921 in Wilhelm Ostwald's Annalen der Naturphilosophie, the book is organized as a series of numbered propositions whose decimal numbering indicates their logical relations.

The central project is the articulation of the conditions under which language can meaningfully represent the world. The conditions, on Wittgenstein's analysis, are stringent: meaningful propositions are pictures of states of affairs that share their logical form with what they represent; the apparent propositions of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics fail this test and are therefore senseless. The conclusion is the famous proposition 7: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Composition and publication

Wittgenstein had been working on the materials of the Tractatus before the war (the Notes on Logic dictated to Russell in 1913, the Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway of 1914), but the substantive composition took place during his military service from 1914 to 1918. The wartime notebooks survive (the Notebooks 1914–1916 edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe were published in 1961) and document the gradual emergence of the Tractatus doctrines from the more discursive early material.

The book was rejected by several publishers (including Jahoda in Vienna, Braumuller, Reclam, and Insel) before Bertrand Russell's introduction secured publication in Ostwald's journal in 1921. The first separate German edition (1922) and the parallel German-English edition (with C. K. Ogden and Frank Ramsey's translation, 1922) gave the book the form in which it has been continuously read. The Pears-McGuinness retranslation (1961) is now the more widely used English text, though the Ogden-Ramsey translation retains scholarly authority.

Central doctrines

The book has seven main propositions, each elaborated through nested commentary:

1. The world is everything that is the case (proposition 1). The world consists not of things but of facts — of states of affairs that obtain. The book begins from this distinction rather than from a more conventional ontology of substances.
2. What is the case is the existence of states of affairs (proposition 2). States of affairs are configurations of objects; objects are simple, ultimate constituents that cannot be further analyzed. The objects combine to form atomic facts; atomic facts combine to form complex facts; the totality of facts is the world.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought (proposition 3). Thoughts are pictures of states of affairs; meaningful propositions express such thoughts. The picture theory of meaning is the most-discussed Tractarian doctrine: a proposition is meaningful by virtue of sharing a logical form with the state of affairs it represents.
4. A thought is a proposition with sense (proposition 4). The book develops the truth-functional account of complex propositions: every complex proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions; the truth-values of complex propositions depend systematically on the truth-values of their elementary constituents.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions (proposition 5). The truth-functional analysis is developed in technical detail, including the discussion of how all logical operations can be reduced to a single primitive operation (the N-operator).
6. The general form of a truth-function is... (proposition 6). The general logical form of any proposition is given; the propositions of logic and mathematics are tautologies that say nothing about the world; ethical and aesthetic propositions are not propositions at all and cannot be uttered meaningfully.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (proposition 7). The famous concluding sentence. The propositions of the Tractatus itself are, on its own terms, senseless; anyone who has understood the book must throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it (6.54).

The picture theory

The central doctrine of the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning. A proposition is meaningful because it pictures a possible state of affairs. The picturing works because the proposition and the state of affairs share a logical form: the same internal relations among their constituents. A propositional sign aRb (the proposition that a stands in relation R to b) shares logical form with the state of affairs in which the object referred to by a stands in the relation referred to by R to the object referred to by b.

The theory has consequences. Propositions can be true or false depending on whether the pictured state of affairs obtains. The truth-conditions of complex propositions are functions of the truth-conditions of their elementary constituents. And, crucially, only propositions that picture possible states of affairs are meaningful; propositions that purport to picture impossible or necessary states of affairs (logical truths, mathematical truths) are tautologies that say nothing, and propositions that purport to picture what lies outside the world (the subject matter of traditional metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and theology) fail to picture anything and are senseless.

Saying and showing

The distinction between what can be said and what can be shown is one of the most discussed Tractarian doctrines. What can be said are propositions that picture possible states of affairs; what is shown is the logical form that propositions share with what they picture, which itself cannot be the subject of a meaningful proposition (any such proposition would already presuppose the logical form it tried to assert).

The distinction is applied broadly. The propositions of logic show their tautological character rather than asserting any substantive logical truth; the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, insofar as they touch on anything important, show rather than say their content; the mystical (the experience of the world as a limited whole) shows itself but cannot be said. The Tractarian distinction between saying and showing has been continuously consequential in subsequent analytic and continental philosophy.

Reception

The Tractatus was immediately recognized as important by Russell (whose introduction Wittgenstein himself considered mistaken) and by the Vienna Circle (which took the book as a manifesto for logical positivism, against Wittgenstein's protests). Through the 1920s and early 1930s the book was one of the dominant texts of analytic philosophy; Carnap's Logical Construction of the World (1928) and the broader positivist program operated within a Tractarian framework.

Wittgenstein himself distanced from the positivist appropriation. His return to Cambridge in 1929 and the work of the following two decades that culminated in the Philosophical Investigations criticized aspects of the Tractatus — the picture theory, the doctrine that meaning is a function of correspondence with states of affairs, the conception of a fully analyzable elementary proposition. The relationship between the early and late Wittgenstein — the question of how much continuity there is between the Tractatus and the Investigations — has been one of the central questions of Wittgenstein scholarship for sixty years.

The contemporary engagement is substantial. Cora Diamond's resolute reading of the Tractatus (especially the essays gathered in The Realistic Spirit, 1991, and the work continued by James Conant) argues that the book is more deeply self-undermining than the standard reading allowed: the Tractatus does not present a substantive metaphysics that is then declared senseless but rather presents the appearance of such a metaphysics in order to show its impossibility. The dispute between resolute readings and standard readings is one of the most active areas of contemporary Wittgenstein scholarship.

Place in the wiki

The Tractatus is the foundational text of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy, the canonical statement of the picture theory of meaning, and one of the most-discussed single philosophical books of the modern period. It is the principal source for doctrines that shaped logical positivism, that informed the later Wittgenstein's self-criticism, and that continue to anchor contemporary debates about meaning, logical form, and the limits of philosophy.

Further reading

• Wittgenstein — the author
• Analytic Philosophy — the tradition the book shaped
• Russell — the Cambridge teacher whose introduction Wittgenstein considered mistaken
• Frege — the predecessor whose logical work the Tractatus engages
• Philosophical Investigations — the later work that criticized the Tractatus

Wittgenstein's 1921 numbered-proposition treatise. The canonical statement of the picture theory of meaning and one of the most-discussed single philosophical books of the modern period.