#concept-pamphlet #todo: finish reading, and make cards
According to the Tractatus, “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and…” ? “…what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”
Notes
Summary of the 7 propositions
- The world is everything that is the case
- The world divides into atomic facts
- The logical picture of the facts is the thought
- A thought is a proposition with a sense
- Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions
- The general form of truth function is [p, x, N(X)]. This is the general form of a proposition
- Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent [1]
my questions
- true/false, binary. logic is based on this.
- so what problem spaces does this not cover? anything that is not binary at its core…
- think of: yes, no, and neither
- isn’t this guy just talking about one level
- from retreat “logical reasoning is working in a medium (language) that has its limitations”
westerners seem so pressed all the time, like all these sad western philosophers and mathematicians.
interesting statements
- 6.234 Mathematics is a method of logic
- 6.3 Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident
Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language- not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfills this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate. … The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples - russell
The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. - russell
We make to ourselves pictures of facts.
The world consists of facts: facts cannot strictly speaking be de ned, but we can explain what we mean by saying that facts are what make propositions true, or false. - russell
It is not necessarily assumed that the complexity of facts is finite; even if every fact consisted of an infinite number of atomic facts and if every atomic fact consisted of an infinite number of objects there would still be objects and atomic facts (4.2211). - russell
(on “object” being a meaningless word) We here touch one instance of Wittgenstein’s fundamental thesis, that 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…According to this view we could only say things about the world as a whole if we could get outside the world, if, that is to say, it ceased to be for us the whole world. - Russell Our world may be bounded for some superior being who can survey it from above, but for us, however finite it may be, it cannot have a boundary, since it has nothing outside it. Wittgenstein uses, as an analogy, the field of vision. Our field of vision does not, for us, have a visual boundary, just because there is nothing outside it, and in like manner our logical world has no logical boundary because our logic knows of nothing outside it. These considerations lead him to a somewhat curious discussion of Solipsism. Logic, he says, fills the world. The boundaries of the world are also its boundaries. In logic, therefore, we cannot say, there is this and this in the world, but not that, for to say so would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the boundaries of the world as if it could contemplate these boundaries from the other side also. What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think. - Russell … (on self) This, he says, gives the key to Solipsism. What Solipsism intends is quite correct, but this cannot be said, it can only be shown. 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. The metaphysical subject does not belong to the world but is a boundary of the world. - R
the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical; hence the totality of the values of x is mystical (6.45). The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said.
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tractatus itself is written with natural language…
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there is something here about the “naming” of certain constants
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“The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples ” —> this is actually done, with machine learning algorithms