So does anyone actually understand it?
probably not
Why is this place such a shit hole?
>>7454469
elaborate, friend
>>7454451
desu I'm not sure Wiggy himself understood. There are a fuckload of contradictions
however, when it's on-point, it's fucking brilliant. it's a text, I feel, you have to read VERY critically, and desu you can't dive into it without having first read Frege and Russell
>>7454469
it's /r9k/ with a book theme. It's got mediocre memes and occasional high level banter (but mostly autistic sperging)
if you expect anything else then I think you're part of the problem
>>7454497
> "I didn't understand the tractatus!"
>>7454497
explain some of its themes, why they don't work, and the contradictions inherent within the work.
>>7454451
I'd say most of it, but reading secondary material.
Be acquainted with Frege and Russell if you want to get into it.
>>7454545
learn to english you fucking autist
Only read from 7. onwards desu.
>>7454554
Read Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and his Begriffsschrift, and Russell's Philosophy of Logical Atomism. I haven't read much Russell, but that text helped me slightly. While I'm here, I'm also interested in good Analytic recs.
Rudolph Carnap is good, I hear
The world is made up of facts and our language is a logical construct to communicate those facts and if we try to talk about something that isn't logical it is worthless.How did I do?
How could you not understand this book? It's not even hard. I understand not being able to understand Hegel or something but Wittgenstein isn't incomprehensible.
>>7454573
Ignore this troll
>>7454563
thanks
>>7454451
I glanced through it for a college course, I couldn't make sense of it.
>>7454581
np anon
try to also read some philosophy of mathematics. mathematical understanding I feel is the single most crucial tool you need in your belt to be able to adequately understand analytic philosophy
>>7454527
>explain the tractatus on /lit/
There are books of hundreds of pages dedicated exclusively to those topics, and you are asking anon to explain them here, in an online board, in a few posts.
Smart move.
>>7454554
Frege's paper on Sense and Reference and On Concept and Object, also consider the Concept Script (Begriffsschrift).
For Russell, Principia Mathematica (basic knowledge, you don't really have to know the details that much) and On Denoting to be familiar with Russell's theory of Description.
Plus, consider reading Meinong theory of objects before Frege and Russell. It's not extremely necessary, but Russell theory of description was written in order to solve the problems that can be found in Meinong (although in On Denoting he pretty much dismiss Meinong) and Frege (logically acceptable, but the solutions are not very aesthetical).
Have in mind that many restriction in Wittgenstein's theory of meaning are set in order to avoid the paradoxes he and Russell found in Frege's theory of meaning (the concept horse problem for example). When you don't understand why Wittgenstein chose a particular way to formulate something, it's useful to look back to Frege and see the problems he run into, then seeing how Wittgenstein manages to avoid it.
Altogether, the many restrictions of his theory of meaning make his 'meaning' hard to accept, the best well-known example is the exclusion of colour in meaningful propositions due to the restrictions of the atomic propositions (again, concept horse problem does not arise, but the consequences are equally hard to accept).
>>7454610
> thinking that request was serious and totally not a means of outing someone who clearly doesn't understand it
>>7454610
Even though I just replied to you mockingly, I like you anon. Why do you think excluding color from a meaningful proposition is a problem, though? I always found predicting color to be slightly incorrect, since nothing actually bears a color in the sense predicting typically attributes to objects. I agree with Wiggy on that point, so I'm curious why you disagree
On my phone, but clearly I meant predicating
>The main propositions (aside from that one)
>hard to understand
>The world is everything that is the case.
>What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.
>A logical picture of facts is a thought.
>A thought is a proposition with a sense.
>A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
>The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: [\bar p,\bar\xi, N(\bar\xi)]. This is the general form of a proposition.
>Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
>>7454647
I think is a problem precisely because of the considerations of meaning that are to be found later, in the PI.
It is true that there is no colour by itself in objects, but that is no a problem because the point to discuss is not 'The slab over the table IS brown' is true, but 'The brown slab over the table' is meaningful.
In a way I see the exclusion of many propositions in the Tractatus very similar to what happened to Hume - claims of knowledge that we see in practice as legitimate, happen to have no real basis. Both are overcome seeing that although by the fact that practice itself should be our start-point (and not the abstract logical principles that fix restriction that do not need to be met), Hume's problems on emprical legitimacy is treated by Kant (we CAN make those statements, and here's why: {Follows CPR}). The second Wittgenstein (who read Kant after writing the Tractatus) takes a similar step towards the concept of meaning: we use them in practice and we effectively communicate with others when speaking of colours, then, in what sense they are not meaningful? Everyone without daltonism will understand us and agree with us - and the daltonism case doesn't work as an objection because the very meaning of the sentence wouldn't matter (it would be as claiming that spoken language is not meaningful because a person may be dead and not understand it, or the same for sign-language and a blind man).
Can confusion arise in a sentence that involves colour and because of colour? Yes, but in that case it is not a problem of the sentence being meaningless - the language game would be different and the meaning of the sentence, although meaningless for us can be recovered determining what are the rules a person followed in order to say 'The slab is brown'.
Rule-following is a need and it need to met the possibility of public communication, otherwise it leads to the private language problem.
just read phil investigations instead
witty knew he'd fucked up a lot on the tractacus
>>7454572
Autism: the theory
>>7454743
Common sense
>>7454718
Ahh see I've yet to read PI or Kant :^(
Any analytic readings you'd recommend?
>>7455105
No. Any non-autistic person using common sense probably understands why the Tractatus presents an absurdly inaccurate account of how language actually works.
let me guess, he's another nominalist philosopher who thinks that universal concepts are just words
![[Clio Team] 1964 Magritte Le Soir qui tombe, 162x130 cm.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/fxX5rjk.jpg "[Clio Team] 1964 Magritte Le Soir qui tombe, 162x130 cm.jpg")
>>7454451
Judging by this board's lack of euphoria, not really.
LE STEM MASTER RACE
>>7455205
He does excludes the possibility of words referring to colours as meaningful in sentences. See that this follows from the fact that Wittgenstein's set of atomic propositions needs to satisfy the condition of being a set such that no other atomic proposition, or the negation of an atomic proposition, can be deduced from a subset of atomic proposition. The possibility of colour-words being meaningful cannot be met, because we do use them as a negation of what they are not in terms of colour - say, in practice we admit that 'blue' is not 'red', but to deduce that from atomic proposition not-blue needs to be a consequence from 'red'.
>>7455301
'Universal concept' is two words.
good topic, definitely makes me want to dig more into it.
reading Vienna circle manifesto got me curious, really easy to read and might be a friendly way to read wittgenstein later on
>>7455407
Make sure you read Quine so that you know how the Vienna Circle got btfo too.
>>7455344
But that's a criticism of the Tractatus and not Witty's actual views. He didn't think that propositions of colour were atomic propositions. He thought they were reducible to constituent atomic propositions about the velocity of particles. (He didn't know colour is actually based on wave frequencies.) Frank Ramsey pointed out to him that this was wrong, and he got back to work immediately. That's not Witty "excluding" colour; it's him trying and failing to account for it, making the theory inconsistent.
>>7455533
>but that's a criticism of A Treatise of Human Nature, not Hume's actual views
>but that's a criticism of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, not Popper's actual views
>but that's a criticism of The Minimalist Program, not Chomsky's actual views
>but that's a shiggy dig of shiggy, not a diggy shiggy dig
>>7455566
Read the rest of the post
>>7455571
Consider the possibility that you don't know what the fuck Ralphwig Wiggumstein's actual views were.
>>7455578
You should really read the rest of the post
>>7454451
Isn't it just a precursor to linguistics? "Looking at language". It seemed so pragmatic when I read it, I never understood why people attributed it with being "difficult" to read. It's not like he's using ornate logic to explain himself.
Am I wrong?
>>7454725
I fucking wish people on here would stop overlooking Tractatus entirely.
It's important to read both, not only to see where Wittgenstein is coming from in P.I., but also that Tractatus has important philosophy within it, as well.
It can't just be glossed over because Witty kicked the ladder out. And what he DID try and fix with P.I. doesn't invalidate all of Tractatus.
I understand the words, but I don't think it has any greater meaning.
>>7455610
Linguistics existed for a long time before Wittgenstein wrote. His thought can be thought of as investigating language from a certain perspective, but you're doing an injustice to linguistics as a whole if you pretend that the Tractatus was a 'precursor' to it.
Certain modern versions of linguistics, such as Chomskyanism, can be seen as being similar to Wittgenstein's work in that Chomsky also makes substantial use of formal logic, but even there the impetus comes from Cartesian psychology, not from Wittgensteinian philosophy.
Tl;dr no, the Tractatus wasn't 'just a precursor to linguistics'. Fuck off with that uninformed horseshit.
>>7455625
>proposition proposition proposition
>Slab! Slab! Slab!
>>7455676
>His thought can be thought of as investigating language from a certain perspective, but you're doing an injustice to linguistics as a whole if you pretend that the Tractatus was a 'precursor' to it.
I think you set a high score for being vague and pretentious. I asked you if it was or wasn't, I didn't assert or pretend that it was. If you're so fucking intelligent you should be able to distinguish between interrogative and declarative statements.
>Certain modern versions of linguistics, such as Chomskyanism
I could feel the skin melting off my face while I read that. Chomskyanism? Are you fucking kidding me?
>but even there the impetus comes from Cartesian psychology, not from Wittgensteinian philosophy
The impetus to model language generation within the assumptions of symbolic logic came from Cartesian psychology? What the fuck are you smoking?
