Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Penguin, 2017)
Starting from the principles of Symbolism and the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language, it applies the result of this inquiry to various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism and out of misuse of language.
Page 7.
He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence “means” something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.
Page 8.
The whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.
Page 8.
The possibility of a proposition representing a fact rests upon the fact that in it objects are represented by signs.
Page 11.
Nothing correct can be said in philosophy. Every philosophical proposition is bad grammar, and the best that we can hope to achieve by philosophical discussions to lead people to see that philosophical discussion is a mistake.
Page 11.
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
Page 11.
The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions,’ but to make propositions clear.
Page 11.
The world consists of facts: facts cannot strictly speaking be defined, by we can explained what we mean by saying that facts are what make propositions true, or false.
Page 11.
The world is not described by merely naming all the objects in it.
Page 12.
There cannot, in Wittgenstein’s logic, be any such thing as a causal nexus. “The events of the future,” he said, “cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.” That the sun will rise to-morrow is a hypothesis. We do not in fact know whether it will rise, since there is no compulsion according to which one thing must happen because another happens.
Page 16.
Objects can only be mentioned in connexion with some definite property.
Page 17.
It is impossible to say anything about the world as a whole, and that whatever can be said has to be about bounded portions of the world.
Page 17.
What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.
Page 18.
That the world is my world appears in the fact that the boundaries of language (the only language I understand) indicate the boundaries of my world.
Pages 18-19.
Persons are fictions and so are propositions, except int eh sense in which they are facts on their own account.
Page 19.
A symbol does not mean what it symbolizes in virtue of a logical relation alone, but in virtue also of a psychological relation of intention, or association.
Page 20.
The meaning of a proposition results from the meaning of its constituent words.
Page 20.
The proposition as a whole does not really enter into what has to be explained in explaining the meaning of a proposition.
Page 20.
No logic can be considered adequate until it has been shown to be capable of dealing with transfinite numbers.
Page 21.
Everything … which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in the language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense.
Page 21.
As one with a long experience of the difficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.
Page 23.
The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
Page 27.
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought begore me by another.
Page 27.
The value of this work … consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.
Page 28.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
2.012 In logic nothing is accidental.
2.0121 We cannot think of any object apart form the possibility of its connexion with other things.
2.01231 In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.
2.022 It is clear that however different form the real one an imagined world may be it must have something - a form - in common with the real world.
2.04 The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.
2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts.
2.12 The picture is a model of reality.
2.16 In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures.
2.22 The picture represents what it represents, independently of its truth or falsehood, through the form of representation.
3.01 The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.
3.02 What is thinkable is also possible.
3.031 The truth is, we could not say of an “unlogical” world how it would look.
3.221 Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.
3.32 The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible by the sense.
3.323 In the proposition “Green is green” - where the first word is a proper name and the last an adjective - these words have not merely different meanings but they are different symbols.
3.332 No proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself.
3.333 A function cannot be its own argument, because the functional sign already contains the prototype of its own argument and it cannot contain itself.
3.3421 This happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.
3.343 Definitions are rules for the translation of one language into another.
4.002 Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means - just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced.
4.003 Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. … Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.
4.0031 All philosophy is “Critique of language.”
4.01 The proposition is a picture of reality.
The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.
4.024 To understand a proposition means to know what is the case, if it is true. (One can therefore understand it without knowing whether it is true or not.)
One understands it if one understands its constituent parts.
4.026 By means of propositions we explain ourselves.
4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs.
4.06 Propositions can be true or false only by being pictures of the reality.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).
4.112 The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear.
Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
4.12 Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it.
4.121 That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent.
That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language.
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said.
4.442 A proposition cannot possibly assert of itself that it is true.
4.5 There cannot be a proposition whose form could not have been foreseen.
5.124 A proposition asserts every proposition which follows from it.
5.131 If the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others this expresses itself in relations in which the forms of these propositions stand to one another.
5.135 In no way can an inference be made from the existence of one state of affairs to the existence of another entirely different from it.
5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present.
Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.
5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now.
5.156 Only in default of certainty do we need probability.
5.44 The possibility of denial is already prejudged in affirmation.
5.4541 The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.
5.4733 Every possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and if it has no sense this can only be because we have given no meaning to some of its constituent parts.
5.5151 The positive proposition must presuppose the existence of the negative proposition.
5.5303 Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
5.5561 Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects.
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. ... We cannot … say what we cannot think.
5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
5.634 Everything we see could also be otherwise.
Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise.
There is no order of things a priori.
6.113 It is the characteristic mark of logical propositions that one can perceive in the symbol alone that they are true; and this fact contains in itself the whole philosophy of logic. And so also it is one of the most important facts that the truth or falsehood of non-logical propositions can not be recognized from the propositions alone.
6.1222 Not only must a proposition of logic be incapable of being contradicted by any possible experience, but it must also be incapable of being confirmed by any such.
6.124 The logical propositions describe he scaffolding of the world, or rather they present it. They “treat” of nothing. The presuppose that names have meaning, and that elementary propositions have sense. And this is their connexion with the world.
6.1264 In logic every proposition is the form of a proof.
6.1265 Logic can always be conceived to be such that every proposition is its own proof.
6.13 Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.
Logic is transcendental.
6.2 Mathematics is a logical method.
6.2321 That the propositions of mathematics can be proved means nothing else than that their correctness can be seen without our having to compare what they express with the facts as regards correctness.
6.2322 In order to be able to assert anything about their meaning, I must know their meaning.
6.2331 Calculation is not an experiment.
6.234 Mathematics is a method of logic.
6.3 Outside logic all is accident.
6.342 The fact that it can be described my Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as a matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can e described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another say something about the world.
6.362 What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the law of causality cannot be described.
6.36311 That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.
6.37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.
6.374 Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
6.423 The will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.
6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
6.4312 The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
6.432 How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
6.5 If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
6.51 Doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.
6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method.
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.