 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must

be silent.”

 What we cannot speak about we must pass

over in silence
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
 Austrian-British philosopher
 worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of
mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the
philosophy of language.
 Born: 1889: Vienna, Austria
 Died: 1951: Cambridge, United Kingdom
 Influenced by: Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege…
Wittgenstein: Meaning as Referring Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus

All languages are subject to

the same basic logical
considerations

 The Logic of Ordinary Language:

 -hidden behind the surface
 -logical structure-the same for all languages
….
 definitions: are rules for the translation of one language
to another

 every correct symbolism must be translatabled into every

other according to the rule

 Logic of Language – what

philosophers call ‘depth grammar’
Wittgenstein, Russell and Frege
 Wittgenstein agrees with Russell on:

 Logical form of proposition may not be its

real form
 The meaning of words and names are their
referents
 Frege:

 All names have sense independent of whether or not

they have a referent

 Declarative sentences=names
 have sense or express propositions and
 refer to TRUTH-VALUES, the TRUE or the FALSE
 Wittgenstein and Russell disagree with Frege

 Names do not have sense but only reference

 Wittgenstein differs from Russell and Frege

“Declarative sentences have only sense, they do not

refer”(?)
-they refer to ‘states of affairs’ not to objects
TRACTATUS

“ if we understand the structure

of language we can understand reality”

 the structure of reality is mirrored in language

 The world is the totality of facts but

its substance lies in the objects that
comprise facts

 Russell: ordinary proper names are disguised
descriptions which can be eliminated by
analysis

 ordinary proper name is not ‘logically proper

name’
 Wittgenstein
 Logically proper names mean or refer to simple
objects or particulars but they do so ‘only in the
nexus of a proposition”

 Ex: “Socrates was the teacher of Plato”

 Can be reduced to “Elementary
 propositions” which are just
 concatenations of names for simples

 given a,b,c, and d as names and concatenated

as bcda
 -the concatenation bcda mirrors reality
 -the name means the object they name
 What about propositional signs or
declarative sentences? They have
sense. They
 They refer to ‘states of affairs’ do not refer
 Ex: My coffee mug is on the table

 “A sentence “A is on B” refers
to the state of affairs “A is on B”
 Proposition does not mean thought

 it is an elementary proposition
 the state of affairs or the situation that the
sentence concatenates in terms of names

 “what the picture represents is its sense”

 “proposition represents states of affairs”
 The sense of a sentence is a
fact or state of affairs

 Q:What about sentences describing ‘negative’

facts?

 “Bill Clinton is not the present president of

the US”
 A: The sense of this is the situation or
state of affairs that does obtain and
which renders the proposition...false.

 “Pres. Barack Obama is the

present president of the US”
 “The totality of states of affairs also determines which
states do not exist”

 “the sum-total of positive

facts suffices to determine
what is not the case”
Sentence Type vs Sentence Token

 Sentence type is a picture of state of affairs

 a propositional sign =in its ‘projective’ relation

to the world

 Q: What is the method of this projection?

 A: the method of projection is the thinking of the
sense of the proposition

 We use the sensibly perceptible sign

(sound/written) of the proposition as the
projection of the possible states of affairs
 Sentence token=written/oral, use of sentence type
with particular intention

 Ex: The cat is on the chair

 It is sentence token that I use to depict or describe an

actual state of affairs
 Sentence type projects
a possible state of
affair

the standard meaning

 Sentence token
used to depict/ describe
an actual state of affairs
 Distinction: Contextual vs sentential meaning

 Contextual =meaning by some sentence on

 a particular occasion of use
 Sentential meaning=what it means
Wittgenstein’s Tripartite Theory of Meaning

 Symbolical representation is a
tripartite arrangement among:

 1.a symbol, ex: ‘horse’

 2. an object. Ex: horse
 3. cognitive process of intending

 (3) allows us to see Wittgenstein’s position

regarding negative facts
 For a picture or proposition to mean, for example, ‘P’
rather than ‘not p’ which involves the same picture, a
person must intend it one way or another

If you tried to make a

picture of a situation
NOT existing, you would
only make a picture of
what did exist instead of
it (Elizabeth Anscombe)
No negative facts
 Another Argument of Wittgenstein to show that there are
no negative facts

 In logic: the denial of the denial of a proposition takes us

back to the original(p and --p are logically equivalent)

 Wittgenstein: If there was an object called ‘-‘ , then --p

would have to say something other than ‘p’ for the
former would treat ‘-‘ , the other would not
Tautology and contradiction
 Propositions of logic are tautologies or necessary truths

 Ex: nothing is both circle and square
 Triangles are three-sided figures
 Brown is a color

 Traditional philosophy: denials of tautologies are

contradictions=necessarily false
 Tautologies are ‘limiting’ or degenerate cases and the
same is true of contradictions

 Tautology has the largest number of independent truth-

conditions in that it has all of them.

 Contradiction has the smallest number of truth-

conditions in that it has none
 All truth-functions can be arranged as a series of
propositions with steadily increasing ranges...
tautology is the limit or upper bound of the series

 Unlike significant propositions, tautology says nothing

, has no truth-conditions, and is senseless..i.e. it is
not a picture of reality
Tautology and contradiction are
senseless

 does not mean they are meaningless

 simply means:
they do not describe any existing state of
Affairs don’t depend on anything external
to them not like empirical propositions
 (Odell, J. S. 2006)

 end