Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein [top inspirational books .txt] 📗

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. Every correct symbolism must be translatable into every other according to such rules. It is this which all have in common.

3.344

What signifies in the symbol is what is common to all those symbols by which it can be replaced according to the rules of logical syntax.

3.3441

We can, for example, express what is common to all notations for the truth-functions as follows: It is common to them that they all, for example, can be replaced by the notations of “~p” (“not p”) and “p∨q” (“p or q”).

(Herewith is indicated the way in which a special possible notation can give us general information.)

3.3442

The sign of the complex is not arbitrarily resolved in the analysis, in such a way that its resolution would be different in every propositional structure.

3.4

The proposition determines a place in logical space: the existence of this logical place is guaranteed by the existence of the constituent parts alone, by the existence of the significant proposition.

3.41

The propositional sign and the logical coordinates: that is the logical place.

3.411

The geometrical and the logical place agree in that each is the possibility of an existence.

3.42

Although a proposition may only determine one place in logical space, the whole logical space must already be given by it.

(Otherwise denial, the logical sum, the logical product, etc., would always introduce new elements⁠—in coordination.)

(The logical scaffolding round the picture determines the logical space. The proposition reaches through the whole logical space.)

3.5

The applied, thought, propositional sign, is the thought.

4

The thought is the significant proposition.

4.001

The totality of propositions is the language.

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.

Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it.

From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

4.003

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

(They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)

And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.

4.0031

All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense). Russell’s merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form.

4.01

The proposition is a picture of reality.

The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.

4.011

At the first glance the proposition⁠—say as it stands printed on paper⁠—does not seem to be a picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our spoken language.

And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures⁠—even in the ordinary sense of the word⁠—of what they represent.

4.012

It is obvious that we perceive a proposition of the form aRb as a picture. Here the sign is obviously a likeness of the signified.

4.013

And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial nature we see that this is not disturbed by apparent irregularities (like the use of ♯ and ♭ in the score).

For these irregularities also picture what they are to express; only in another way.

4.014

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.

To all of them the logical structure is common.

(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)

4.0141

In the fact that there is a general rule by which the musician is able to read the symphony out of the score, and that there is a rule by which one could reconstruct the symphony from the line on a gramophone record and from this again⁠—by means of the first rule⁠—construct the score, herein lies the internal similarity between these things which at first sight seem to be entirely different. And the rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of the musical score. It is the rule of translation of this language into the language of the gramophone record.

4.015

The possibility of all similes, of all the images of our language, rests on the logic of representation.

4.016

In order to understand the essence of the proposition, consider hieroglyphic writing, which pictures the facts it describes.

And from it came the alphabet without the essence of the representation being lost.

4.02

This we see from the fact that we understand the sense of the propositional sign, without having had it explained to us.

4.021

The proposition is a picture of reality, for I know the state of affairs presented by it, if I understand the proposition. And I understand the proposition, without its sense having been explained to me.

4.022

The proposition shows its sense.

The proposition shows how things stand, if it is