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discussion and disagreement is
based on some fundamental errors
in how we go about thinking and
talking about the world.
Logical structure
For all of their apparent complexity,
Wittgenstein’s central ideas in
the Tractatus are essentially based
on a fairly simple principle, that
both language and the world are
formally structured, and that
these structures can be broken
down into their component parts.
Wittgenstein attempts to lay bare
the structures both of the world
and of language, and then to show
the way they relate to each other.
Having done this, he attempts to
draw a number of wide-reaching
philosophical conclusions.
If we are to understand what
Wittgenstein means when he says
that limits of my language are the
limits of my world, we need to ask
what he means by the words
“world” and “language”, because
he does not use these words in the
everyday sense we might expect.
When he talks about language,
the debt Wittgenstein owes to
the British philosopher Bertrand
Russell becomes apparent. For
Russell, who was an important
figure in the development of
philosophical logic, everyday
language was inadequate for
talking clearly and precisely about
the world. He believed that logic
was a “perfect language”, which
excluded all traces of ambiguity, so
he developed a way of translating
everyday language into what he
considered a logical form.
Logic is concerned with what are
known in philosophy as propositions.
We can think of propositions as
assertions that it is possible for us
to consider as being either true or
false. For example, the statement
“the elephant is very angry” is a
proposition, but the word “elephant”
is not. According to Wittgenstein’sTHE MODERN WORLD
The ancient Egyptians arranged
symbols and stylized images of objects
in the world, known as hieroglyphs,
into logically structured sequences
to create a form of written language.
See also: Aristotle 56–63 ■ Immanuel Kant 164–71 ■ Gottlob Frege 336 ■ Bertrand Russell 236–39 ■ Rudolf Carnap 257
The solution of
the problem of life is
seen in the vanishing
of the problem.
Ludwig WittgensteinTractatus, meaningful language
must consist solely of propositions.
“The totality of propositions,” he
writes, “is language.”
Knowing a little about what
Wittgenstein means by language,
we can now explore what he means
by “the world.” The Tractatus
begins with the claim that “the
world is all that is the case.” This
might appear to be straightforward
and robustly matter-of-fact, but
taken on its own, it is not entirely
clear what Wittgenstein means by
this statement. He goes on to write
that “the world is the totality of
facts, not of things.” Here we can
see a parallel between the way that
Wittgenstein treats language and
the way he is treating the world. It
may be a fact, for example, that the
elephant is angry, or that there is
an elephant in the room, but an
elephant just by itself is not a fact.
From this point, it begins to
become clear how the structure
of language and that of the world ❯❯