Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus by Frascolla Pasquale;

Author:Frascolla, Pasquale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 292765
Publisher: Routledge

The sayable and its boundaries: natural science and logical truth

According to the view outlined in the Tractatus, all meaningful language consists in elementary propositions, which are pictures in a primary sense, and in all those propositions which can be constructed out of elementary propositions by means of truth-operations (the propositions thus generated are themselves pictures, but only in the derived sense explained above). It is a schema which puts notoriously strong constraints on the sphere of what can be sensibly said. As a result of these constraints, Wittgenstein is forced, in the best cases, to give a special reinterpretation of certain classes of propositions in order to ensure the fulfilment of the canons of the picture theory, and thus their meaningfulness, or, in the more frequent and worst cases, to rule that certain classes of propositions are outside the domain of sense. For the time being, however, we will leave this theme aside, and turn our attention to an examination of the positive content of the Thesis of Extensionality and to clarifying what that thesis allows the speaker to say meaningfully.

Until now we have focused on the way in which, in the Tractatus, the validity of the fundamental semantic principle which identifies the sense of a proposition with its truth-conditions, and accordingly, the understanding of a proposition with the knowledge of its truth-conditions, is extended beyond the narrow field of elementary propositions. Nonetheless, by restricting the mechanism for generating new propositions to the expression of either agreement or disagreement with the truth-possibilities of given sets of elementary propositions, and by deriving the inevitable corollary that every proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions, Wittgenstein attains much more than that end only: he rules out, at the same time, the possibility that the sense of a complex proposition can depend on the sense of another one (or of several others) in any way which differs from that which the Thesis of Extensionality authorizes as legitimate. According to the Tractatus, to formulate the truth-conditions of a proposition amounts to specifying its truth-value for each one of the truth-possibilities of certain relevant elementary propositions, or in equivalent terms, to specifying its truth-value for each one of the combinations of the obtaining and non-obtaining of the states of affairs those elementary propositions depict. If some propositions exist whose sense seems to functionally depend on the sense of given elementary propositions, but whose truth-conditions cannot be formulated exclusively in terms of combinations of the obtaining and non-obtaining of the corresponding states of affairs, then either it will be proven that a mere grammatical appearance is cheating us by hiding their logical form, or so much the worse for those alleged propositions.

We will dwell on this topic in the next paragraph of the chapter. But it is not only extensionality that is responsible for the drastic restriction of the domain of the sayable which the Tractatus entails: a further, though largely implicit assumption, plays an equally vital role in determining that restriction. It is not the

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