A continuation of the article "Explaining Wittgenstein"
The thinking behind the thinking
The thinking behind the Tractatus had a twofold importance to Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. First it limited him to very austere metaphysics, in which everything that a sentence means, must be found only in the sentence, without leaving anything to be presupposed. In short, a perfect statement about reality would be made true simply by looking at its words, without having to explain or assume anything. A kind of extreme form of Occam’s Razor (the name given to a rule which urges that philosophers must not invent facts to support their statements, but seek only the most truth-efficient explanation). He came to very strongly reject this idea in his later works.
The second important feature was that a sentence was elementary if and only if it was logically independent of any other sentences which used similar ideas to back up their assertions. So a sentence ascribing colour to objects is not elementary, and an incompatibility between two such sentences would be attributed to the internal structure of the colours, which would have to be analysed. This, he also came to reject, noticing that sentences can indeed make sense, even if they referred to a range of incompatible predicates.
A picture is worth a thousand words
The theory that sentences are essentially pictorial, which is the other main claim made in the Tractatus, was designed to make good a deficiency in Russell’s semantics. Russell had tried to explain our understanding of senses of sentences by appealing to our acquaintance with the things they pick out, rather than by sharing a world view for categorizing things. In other words, you didn’t need to share a way of assigning relevance to things first, before being able to understand what a sentence was about; you only needed to know the things it referred to.
The Picture Theory, on the other hand, starts from the way in which an array of coloured points on a surface e.g. land and sea on the surface of the earth, can be mapped onto a piece of paper and the message can be immediately understood. It is true that in this case the immediate intelligibility is partly the result of the fact that you can recognise a certain physical correspondence between the two things e.g. colour. But the immediacy of understanding is striking. On a simplistic level, in Tractatus, Wittgenstein essentially compares the function of language to that of a map. Once the correlation of names with objects has been grasped, there is the same immediate intelligibility of any new sentence in which the names have been put together in a way that reflects the possibilities open to the named objects.
This brings us to the central point of his theory: anything we can say in words or pictures will depend on other things that cannot be said, only shown and cannot as such be “proved”, so much as exemplified. Wittgenstein’s later work would pick up this idea and raise it to a profound level, solving the largely unresolved problem of how name and object “attach”. The essential nature of language and its atomic foundations are dealt with early on in the Tractatus, and from this, Wittgenstein goes on to do a philosophically daring thing by attempting to fix the limits of language.
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