Colin Johnston

Tractarian objects and logical categories

It has been much debated whether Tractarian objects are what Russell would have called particulars or whether they include also properties and relations. This paper claims that the debate is misguided: there is no logical category such that Wittgenstein intended the reader of the Tractatus to understand his objects either as providing examples of or as not providing examples of that category. This is not to say that Wittgenstein set himself against the very idea of a logical category: quite the contrary. However, where Russell presents his logical variety of particulars and the various types of universal, and Frege presents his of objects and the various types of function, Wittgenstein denies the propriety of such a priori expositions. Wittgenstein envisages a variety of logical types of entity but insists that the nature of these types is something to be discovered only through analysis.

Wittgenstein on Representability and Possibility

It is a central commitment of the Tractatus that “it is impossible to judge a nonsense” (§5.5422). This essay seeks to understand the ground of this commitment in Wittgenstein’s thought. To this end, various interpretations of the Tractatus on ‘the relation between language and reality’ are considered, with each view assessed for the understanding it provides of the stance against nonsense. Having rejected as inadequate various realist readings, and then also an idealist reading, the essay recommends a view on which language and reality are internally bound together in the notion of truth. Where a fact is precisely a truth condition, and so something to be represented, a proposition (a judgment) is precisely the representation of such a fact, the representation of a truth condition.