Abstract
Wittgenstein’s project in the Tractatus was to replace Frege-Russell propositions with a new conception capturing the essence of representational thought and language. This, he believed, was philosophy’s only real task. I argue that his account of atomic propositions was an incomplete realization of valuable insights, which, had they been slightly revised, could have been extended to all tractarian propositions. Had Wittgenstein followed this path, he would have made discoveries in the study of language and mind that are only beginning to emerge today. However, doing so would have meant stripping the Tractatus of its pretensions of fundamentally remaking philosophy.
Highlights
What are these remaining items? They must be whatever elements are responsible for determining what the names and the syntactic relation R project; they are the conventions governing the names plus the convention governing R. They are needed to determine what fact would have to exist if the proposition were true. These conventions, which aren’t included in the propositional sign, are somehow included in the proposition as what one must know in order to understand its representational content
Insights and Errors in the Tractatus. In doing this we remain true to his idea in the Tractatus that propositions aren’t sentences, talk of propositions is talk about sentences
Once we identify propositions as representational cognitive acts or operations, we must individuate propositions in the same way we individuate other act types
Summary
The problem of negation, of conjunction, of true and false, are only reflections of the one great problem in the variously placed great and small mirrors of philosophy.. It is tempting to think that the bearer of truth is the sentence, or propositional sign, in which the two names are united by relation R After all, this linguistic structure is governed by the conventions I mentioned. They must be whatever elements are responsible for determining what the names and the syntactic relation R project; they are the conventions governing the names plus the convention governing R They are needed to determine what fact would have to exist if the proposition were true. These conventions, which aren’t included in the propositional sign, are somehow included in the proposition as what one must know in order to understand its representational content. The remedy is to reject these pseudo entities and to slightly amend the Tractatus by taking propositions to be uses of sentences
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